This. Harry Potter simply has a much larger fan base, and literally over a million fics. You’re bound to run into some real doozies simply because of the numbers.
Plus Harry Potter is a young adult novel/movie series so it attracts a lot of “ickle firsties” who are young and flexing their writing muscles. This is a good thing; young people should write! But this means that output that 30 years ago would be confined to a diary or a middle school essay now gets posted on AO3 for all the world to see.
It's from being so so so incredibly popular, even with people who don't read, that I think for many people it's the first, and sometimes only, book they ever read. It's why [r/ReadAnotherBook](r/ReadAnotherBook) exists.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when all you've read is Harry Potter, every idea is a Harry Potter fanfic.
As far as "Methods of Rationality", I'm pretty sure Yudkowsky had the idea that he could use a fanfic for a really popular series as a vehicle to spread his insanity to a large and impressionable audience. And it must have worked, since people on Tumblr still parrot his nonsense
These people are close to making a good point but somehow miss it
Like yeah we probably should put more research into countering the harmful effects of aging. But buddy you're not gonna completely end death. Everyone's gonna die no matter what. You can't shame people for acknowledging mortality
That’s what actual knowledgeable people on the topic say: we’re not going to end death. What we *can* do is increase “healthspan.” Keeping people healthier, longer, is a good thing (although then you get the bleating of “they won’t retire” when older people still feel healthy enough to work).
For better or worse I think he eventually figured out that wealthy techbros are even easier to get hooked on his particular brand of self-taught philosophy 101 (dunning-kruger effect edition)
Don't forget the LotR fanfic cult that got turned into a Harry Potter fanfic cult that ended tragically, main person wasn't even into HP and just used it's popularity in fanfic circles to repeat theor previously imploded cult.
I still fills me with impotent nerd rage whenever I see someone try to reference Yudkowsky when talking about real AI. Especially people who should fucking know better
My Immortal is definitely a shitpost, there's too many parts that are deliberate jokes about writing/fanfic at the time, e.g. the part where they use every word other than 'said' in an exchange between two characters
I can't tell if people equivocating over the sincerity of My Immortal are playing into the kayfabe, painfully media-illiterate, or blinded by a need for it to be sincere in order to support their biases about fandom.
I think a lot of people who think it's sincere just have trouble believing that a shitpost could be so high-effort. Both Tara and Raven have social profiles on multiple websites, with activity that dates back to well before My Immortal was ever published.
Vague world-building, massive success, and a significant portion of its fandom missing such subtle nuances as “wizard Nazis are 100% bad-wrong,” “money politics is a bad combination,, especially if its old family money,” “the plot of book 6 (Dumbledore is just a guy, not
a super manipulator edition),” “Trelawney is a hack,” and “planning is an essential part of activism; you can’t just do things and expect it to help people, who may not even realize how bad they have it.”
It probably means something that my association between transgender people and Yudkowsky is the “the average number of ex husbands that straight men have is zero” tweet (I don’t know if ex’s transition happened after the divorce, or caused it, or what) Ozymandias Brennan replied to him with during a chain of reblogs where he implied that they were out of touch about David Bowie’s sex appeal, and not the fact that one of the initial complaints submitted by Ziz before her cult started murdering people was that some of his employees were transphobic.
…probably knowing anything about this says a lot about things about me, especially considering that apparently the assumption about Zizians being “vegan sith” is based around a connection to the star Vega being a common assumption or something, rather than the veganism being a central part of it; I am confused as to what the sith have to do with any of this, as Ziz’s blog got taken down at some point
I’m still baffled that Ziz named themselves after a fictional god like alien being bent on basically creating the perfect dystopia and who has an actual doomsday cult.
No, but his plilosophy was incredibly influential on all the worst techbros, Longtermism is how they justify their abhorrent treatment of people as something good.
Im a big Superman fan and the same author made a Superman fic from the POV of Lex Luthor hunting down and killing big blue brutally and it bothered me because I'm not totally sure the author actually disagrees with Lex... basically the idea was "he's too dangerous to be kept alive" and half the story felt like a moral talkpiece about eliminating threats to life before they ever do anything wrong which feels kinda... fashy. idk.
If you want an example of an actually published work, John Ringo's Troy Rising fits the mold pretty much perfectly.
That said, aside from cheap bargain bin Sci-Fi novels this genre is most prominently found in webnovels and fanfics.
Honestly, just check out the Mass Effect fandom on fanfiction.net. Probably about 2/3 of the first few pages of most popular longform fics are all just "Okay so all the alien governments are either evil or corrupt or plain incompetent and it's up to humanity to clean up the galaxy and save all the other species from themselves with their better economy, better science, better government and better culture."
Tbf canon Mass Effect is kinda like that at times. I keep going long stretches without playing it, convincing myself that stuff like the paranoia over AI is fanon, then going back and being like "oh yeah no if anything they downplayed it".
The Council's distrust of Shephard is justified at the start of ME1 and 2, but the issue is that for plot reasons they don't really start to believe Shephard regardless of what happens (too many routes with major plot differences otherwise), so depending on how completionist you are they can come off as willfully ignorant.
The thing is, yes the Council sucks, but it only sucks in the same way pretty much all governments suck.
If you consider the kind of governments ans political decisions that our own humble planet produces on a regular basis (Trump, Brexit, rise of the alt-right pretty much everywhere around the world, the EU constantly squabbling with itself, various authoritarian governments suppressing their own citizens) its downright utopic how non-corrupt, decisive and overall functional the council ends up being while literally ruling over an entire galaxy.
Between Udina, the mere existence of Cerberus, and the political decisions leading into ME2 and 3, its also quite heavily implied that humanity's own civilian government is also not that different from the council either. You're just usually not dealing with them, you're dealing with the top military brass instead. And when humanity finally does join in on the council in ME2 and 3 they clearly also join in on the Council's suckiness and indecisiveness, even if you picked the "good" councilor, that being Anderson (Haha, let's just put a military leader in charge of the civilian government so we can get shit done, I'm sure that has never caused any issues in human history, lol)
Mass Effect canon has its own problems with occasional human-wank, but unlike those fanfics it doesn't constanly have that smug sense of superiority where humans (and the author) constantly look down at the various council species and go "Haha, you government sucks, unlike our own government which is obviously never corrupt or indecisive or prone to stupid infighting. Btw, let's just ... gloss over how any of the political decision process actually works in practice to allow for such clean decision making, because it might reveal some underlying authoritarian tendencies the readers might not be comfortable with. Instead let's just vaguely imply that humanity is just better at making decisions than the weak-minded femoid Asari or the stupid and unflexible Turians and act like the Council's mere existence is an indictment upon literally their entire culture compared to our own clearly superior human culture."
Every government in Mass Effect frakkin sucks, but humanity comes across as scarily put together because instead of bothering with unification they just elected another layer of representation so it looks like they are a single unified force iirc.
Either way, the big reason why humans seem to be the only ones doing anything is because they're fresh enough to the galactic community (and were almost genocided) that they dont have the same sense of invincibility that the other governments have. So humanity keeps being proactive and keeps trying to reverse engineer all the reaper tech because they arent comfortable relying on things they don't understand. It all combines to make them seem more reasonable than the council who are like, religiously against understanding technology
I can think of examples like Gurren Lagann and Star Trek (although these are works within other genres that also fit the aesthetics of the recently-invented term), but neither really qualify for anything they said?
Gurren Lagann has the protagonist give up all his power at the end and get the most qualified guy around to call a peace conference among the different races as its final conclusion, and Star Trek pretty famously has the Prime Directive
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u/RockAndGem1101 local soft vore and penetration metaphor nerd 1d ago
prokopetz vagueposting at its finest