The Harry Potter Fanfic Behind Silicon Valley’s Weirdest Philosophical Movement
Let me share with you my most recent rabbit hole adventure. Ever heard of Rationality?
According to the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), the movement promotes “modern-cognitive-science-based principles for saner thinking”, overcoming cognitive bias, and optimising one’s lived experience of having a human brain. They are also concerned with AI alignment – the need to program human values and morals into large language models to ensure they won’t be a threat when they inevitably become smarter than us. Members spend time getting “mental upgrades” through group discussion, workshops and sometimes psychedelics, and rationalise themselves into bizarre thought experiments.
The best-known one is Roko’s basilisk, which states that, in the future, an artificial superintelligence will be compelled to imprison and torture everyone who knew about it but didn’t contribute to its creation. Simply learning about this means you’re obligated to carry it out or risk dooming all future humanity to eternal torture. The Rationalists call this kind of mental bind a “cognitive hazard”.
If all that went over your head, but left you curious in a fuzzy, esoteric kind of way, don’t worry. There’s a Harry Potter fanfiction series that explains it all.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMoR) might be the most influential work of fanfiction you’ve never heard of. It’s the brainchild of Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI researcher, decision theorist and founder of the Rationalist forum LessWrong.com. According to him, the story just “burped itself into existence” inside his brain, fully formed, and set in the Harry Potter universe. But it did help that Yudkowsky himself is a fan – and that the canon is well-known enough to already have a devout fanbase. A convenient case of two birds with one stone – or two fandoms, one nerd.
HPMoR, as it’s known by fans, features a version of Harry who is extremely rational-minded, befriends Draco Malfoy instead of Ron Weasley, gets sorted into Ravenclaw (due to being so brainy) and resolves to take over the world with science. Pretty heady stuff for an 11-year-old.
It also has space Horcruxes, Harry riding a rocket, gruesome wizard torture, transactional friendships and a lesson on every Rationalist tenet, from Bayesian probability to logical fallacies. Yudkowsky explains these in full in an eight-hour-long read known as the Sequences for anyone with that kind of patience. The rest of us mortals will have to rely on Harry to guide us through the beliefs shaping some of Silicon Valley’s biggest movers and shakers.
Because Yudkowsky isn’t just the author of one of Potterdom’s most debated fanfics. He also founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which received funding from billionaire VC Peter Thiel. And his concerns about smarter-than-human AI are shared by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and even US co-president Elon Musk. As one of MIRI’s earliest investors, Thiel got deeply involved with the institute’s goal of accelerating the creation of AGI. But by 2022, he’d started to distance himself, claiming Yudkowsky had stopped believing AGI can be made safe for humans and the focus at MIRI had shifted accordingly.
Yudkowsky’s work also played a part in OpenAI’s 2023 ousting of CEO Sam Altman. The surrounding drama was apparently founded on fears that AGI would pose an existential risk to humanity and no amount of alignment work could ever absolve its creators of that responsibility.
OpenAI’s interim-CEO, Emmett Shear, is an HPMoR superfan who presumably once donated enough to the fanfic to buy himself a cameo. (Yudkowsky apparently accepted donations in exchange for briefly writing fans into the story.)
What to Expect from HPMoR
The fanfic began in 2010 and clocked in at over 660,000 words (longer than War and Peace by a whole 80,000 words) when it finally wrapped in 2015. Initial reviews were mostly positive, and some credited it as their introduction to Rationality. The pull was strongest at the intersection of Potterdom and Rationality’s target audience – middle class, white young men and boys with high verbal intelligence and an interest in science and atheism.
Harry was someone they could identify with. Rather than growing up in a cupboard under the stairs, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres (HJPEV for short, but even that’s a mouthful) was raised by Aunt Petunia and her Oxford-professor husband, Michael Verres. His education focussed heavily on “science, math, history and everything else” – notice how a hierarchy of knowledge is established, which will show up throughout the series. Harry calls them Mum and Dad, and, when he learns what happened to his biological parents, he shrugs it off as an irrational thing to feel sad about.
HJPEV is homeschooled due to being a conscientious objector to “child conscription, on grounds that [he] should not have to suffer for a disintegrating school system's failure to provide teachers or study materials of even minimally adequate quality."
He also believes himself to be too intelligent to relate to other kids his age and too rational to look up to his parents “the way that children are designed to do”. Every few paragraphs, he jargon-drops physics and math concepts as if to purposely mystify the reader. Each chapter is named after a Rationalist principle it tries to teach, but the explanation often gets lost in the (brain) sauce.
A few times Harry gets his definitions mixed up, which adds to the intellectual confusion. This could be attributed to the fact that he’s a child prodigy and insufferable smartass, but it just comes across as bad pedagogy. The story doesn’t seem interested in correcting these mistakes – and maybe endearing Harry to us in the process – so much as brow-beating the reader with its smarts.
Rather than love or justice or friendship, the biggest value animating this Harry is intelligence, but only insofar as it can be used to manipulate and influence those around him. As a consequence, Ron is dismissed out of hand as an idiot and Hagrid as a senseless oaf. The only worthwhile canon character is Hermione and even she can’t get a break from Harry’s condescension. A telling scene is on the Hogwarts Express, when Harry and Draco bond over their dislike of Ron:
“‘I just, just…’ Harry searched for words. ‘Don’t see any reason for him to exist?’”
A Deeply Unscientific Take on Science (and Magic)
This nerd elitism follows HJPEV throughout the series and prevents him from ever being curious about anything. The only worthwhile pursuit in this world seems to be knowledge as a means to power, as a means to getting everyone to agree with you. For a protagonist who’s all about applying the scientific method, Harry spends remarkably little time actually being interested in stuff. The story follows suit and insists that any gaps or grey areas in canon are a sign of lazy story-building on JK Rowling’s part rather than a space where a reader’s imagination can flourish. So the fanfic tries to hamfistedly fill in everything it thinks the original story is missing – with science.
But HPMoR spends remarkably little time on any actual science. We get a brief paragraph in chapter six, where Harry tries to figure out how his magical coin pouch works. It can respond to some verbal commands, as long as they’re formulated in a specific way, but doesn’t understand synonyms or math. Any Potterhead would say, “duh, it’s a spell” and any scientific-minded character might try to learn as much as possible about this particular kind of spell.
Harry, however, neither curious nor looking to learn, goes on a rant about how the pouch must be somehow dumb since it can’t add or subtract and doesn’t know German. He concludes the magic behind it must be irrational, adding that “the best Artificial Intelligence programmers can’t get the fastest supercomputers to do it after thirty-five years of hard work.”
What we do get, however, is a Wizarding World beset by incompetence, corruption and pointless cruelty. Witches and wizards seem to have only a cursory grasp of their own magic abilities, Hogwarts can barely teach the basics and good luck with the rest, and a child can get sent to Azkaban with only a summary trial. As soon as he sets foot on Diagon Alley, Harry starts pointing out flaws and inventing solutions. If only magic folk were as smart and rational as him, they’d see he’s right about everything!
After a few chapters, it gets hard not to see Harry as an author self-insert. Besides talking like a full-grown adult, Harry also goes on random tangents that read like Yudkowsky’s personal beef. Every now and then, we get entire paragraphs on things like the pseudoscience of repressed memories or what happens to washed-up child prodigies – things an 11-year-old wizard would have no business caring, or even knowing, about.
And Harry isn’t the only character who ends up as a mouthpiece for the author whenever Yudkowsky needs to vent. Professor Quirrell (who is being possessed by Voldemort) goes on a few random rants (e.g. against government-mandated school curricula). Even You Know Who is guilty of paying lip service later on in the series. If we assume this is how HPMoR delivers its lessons, then it’s confusing to have readers intellectually rooting for the bad guy.
HPMoR Is to Fanfiction what Huel Is to Eating
Although it’s clear he’s a fan of the original novels, Yudkowsky seems to have a poor grasp on why they’re so popular. The pleasure of reading about a secret parallel world that runs on magic is losing yourself in its implausibility. Magic is not explainable by the rules of physics or thermodynamics or Bayesian probability – and that’s exactly the point. So, a Wizarding Britain that does operate on these principles wouldn’t be better, it would be boring.
The point of fanfiction is getting to spend time in a universe you enjoy, reading about characters you’ve grown to love doing cool, new (and possibly NSFW) stuff more or less within canon. But Yudkowsky doesn’t seem to respect canon and it’s obvious he thinks he could have done better. The magic underpinning this world is portrayed as flawed and fans’ favourite characters are either dismissed as subhuman or dumbed down so they can serve as Harry’s foils.
And that rubbed Potterheads the wrong way. Despite enthusiastic reviews from a subset who probably enjoyed identifying with Hyper-Rational Harry, readers overall did not love HPMoR. Many dismissed the series as a poorly-written parody or a verbose, self-serious slog.
The mainstream reception was kinder. An ambivalent 2011 review by The Atlantic called out the fanfic "for its blasphemous—or brilliant—treatment of the canon" while VICE praised its “curiously mind-altering” effect. Others, however, said HPMoR was a marketing strategy for Yudkowsky’s beliefs and thought the Harry Potter setting was useful, but purely incidental.
Other critics point out that, while technically well-written and typo-free, HPMoR is not good fanfiction. It is “a slog to get through” with occasional good comedy moments, “a mess of different ideas” that doesn’t even function as “educational literature” and reads like an author’s first attempt at the genre. Can we get some ice for those burns?
In all seriousness, though, I read as much of HPMoR as I could stomach for this article. I even enjoyed the first two chapters, mostly for their comedy. But things quickly fell apart from there and I started to feel like I was trapped in an elementary-school lunchroom, listening to the precocious, condescending nerd no one wants to sit with explaining why he’s smarter than everyone.