Friday, June 4, 2010

The Sucks Project

I think I should start this blog with an intro post.

If you have reached this site, it's extremely likely you know what the title refers to. But assuming you came here through coincidence, I shall try to quickly sum up what this blog is about.

In the vast world of Harry Potter fanfiction, you can find the fic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (henceforth, 'Methods'). This is written by author 'Less Wrong', aka Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.

This fic is, pretty much Yudkowsky's way of "fixing" what he considers to be the Potter-verse's original sins while at the same time providing him with a soapbox to detail his warped take on the world.

Ordinarily, this would have gone unnoticed, but apparently Mr. Yudkowsy had a sizable online following prior to writing this tour de force, and I guess some of it must have overlapped with the Potter fandom, because this fic quickly skyrocketed in popularity and number of reviews. As of now, it even possess its own TV Tropes page.

Basically, Mr. Yudkowsky's ubiquitous yes-men like to claim (quietly encouraged by the man himself) that this fic somehow transcends its medium to become some sort of higher work through which we should absorb a superior worldview and, like Plato's cave-dwellers, break free of our chains to finally see reality for what it is. Eventually, this fic found its way into DLP, a Harry Potter fanfiction forum I inhabit.

The reaction to this work on DLP was initially good, and even I got carried away at first. However, it soon became apparent that whatever good features Methods possessed, they were fast being eclipsed by Mr. Yudkowsky's apparent irresistible urge to use it as a vehicle to spread his worldview, story be damned. The mood of the forum turned fast.

However, DLP was soon invaded by Mr. Yudkowsky's yes-men, who were personally outraged that someone on the internet might disagree with the glowing reviews and point out this work's unrealistic characterization, bipolar writing and stilted dialogue. We were but philistines on which Mr. Yudkowsky's brilliance was wasted.

Does any of this sound familiar? It may remind you of another product of the same technonerd milieu, the popular webcomic xkcd. Unlike Mr. Yudkowsky, xkcd manages to occasionally be funny, and it actually started off kind of good; with popularity, however, Randall Munroe, its author, has sort of let it degenerate to the kind of stagnation where it manages to produce a funny comic about once every two weeks, while the others are usually just sludge that should've never left his hard drive. To fight Munroe's hordes, who insist on proving to us the brilliance of his work, a heroic effort was founded: xkcdsucks.

That blog attempts to deconstruct every xkcd comic, while attempting to show that makes it so appealing to Munroe's cuttlefish. It is in that blog that this one is based. You may have noticed a similarity in layout. This is conscious emulation; I'm but doing the same work on another field. I'll attempt to go through Mr. Yudkowsky's fanfiction, chapter by chapter, and try to find out just where the appeal comes from.

So tune in, we're in for a ride.

16 comments:

  1. Yes, "Methods of Rationality" is an Author Tract in the manner of Ayn Rand, and it has been from the start. It is unapologetic about that, and definitely gets heavy-handed at times. So, yeah, I like it (I'm part of the choir being preached to, and even made a few posts in the DLP forums), but I don't expect that everyone else in the world will. So, well, Don't Like, Don't Read.

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  2. It's not even an Author Tract; Yudowsky said that he wanted a fictional vehicle to test some new ways about teaching people about rationality, and fanfiction.net was the fastest way he knew of to get reviews of a piece of fiction—so he had to write his vehicle as fanfiction. Further, Harry Potter fanfiction was what people on that site payed most attention to, so that's what he wrote. It was never "about" Harry Potter any more than Math class is about who has more apples—he's just a teacher, writing a dialectic allegory.

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  3. I'd argue that he's not a teacher. To quote Perspicacity, he's the Bill Nye of rationality. He's not an academic or teacher of any sort, he's just trying to popularize his field.

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  4. I've been always slightly appalled by the fact that there are actually real people who make X-sucks blogs.

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  5. I'm proud of you Mordac. It takes real fanboy guts to create an entire blog attacking someone simply because they used your favorite fictional world as a vehicle to discuss something about the real world.

    And linking yourself to xkcdsucks? Good move, might as well turn the rest of the internet against you as well. You, sir, are a god among trolls.

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  6. If people can be this stupid, then there will be a ""Methods of Rationality Sucks" Sucks" blog!

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  7. Well, it suck less than original Harry Potter.

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  8. I was glad to find someone out here ready to vent on ESY and his Aspergian parody of Harry Potter. I am not so enamored of the original to insist it couldn't be improved in a variety of ways, but turning it into a stroke mag for fans of the Scientific Method is not any of them.

    But jeez, a chapter-by-chapter refutation? That's crossing an important line between revulsion and attraction. Just piss on it and move on, don't linger.

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  9. As one meta hipster to another, keep up the good show!

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  10. I guess it's too much to ask that everyone decide for themselves whether they like it or not and keep their opinions to themselves?

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  11. I can't tell if this is intentionally calling attention to the worst parts of blogging and criticism and is some kind of double satire, or if the author is actually as self-righteous as he seems.

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  12. It sounds like you might be mad on the internet! Don't worry, bro. We all know that feel. Just let it out.

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  13. An entire website dedicated to why a story is not worth reading shows a surprising amount of dedication. Even if you think it sucks you are moved by it to the point that you've created an entire forum devoted only to discussing it (regardless of attitude.) Whether it sucks or not doesn't change the fact that it was clearly good enough to move something in you. Seems stupid to be so pissed off about WHY he made the story. Authors write for money. Is writing for popularity any worse? Whether you like or hate it, you can't deny that Less Wrong's writing ability, (and the editing ability of whoever he has double checking him) is stellar. So he expresses his beliefs in the story and uses it to steamroll rationality to the masses. Don't ALL author's do that with their own beliefs to some degree?

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  14. Please come back. I miss this blog.

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  15. The most pretentious thing I have ever seen: this blog.

    omg saying "the scientific method is right" is shoving ur opinion up peoples throat. creationism ftw

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  16. Honestly methods of rationality is a literal troll itself. It starts good then just fornicates with its self. every character is OOC. Stop recommending the drivel.

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