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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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I gave my team the explicit instruction to call me out if I ever did anything that they'd estimate would make Picard disappointed in my leadership.
Someone brought up some harry Potter fanfic which apparently and bizarrely motivating the philosophy of peter thiel and his ilk.
I read the synopsis, and (regardless of your feeling on generations) is essentially extolling the philosophy of the bad guy in that movie.
Picard, reflecting: "Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives, but I'd rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all Number One, we're only mortal."
Speak for yourself, sir. I plan to live forever.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
If Thiel's group is saying they're in someway inspired by it, they hilariously misinterpreted the point of the story.
I don't know what synopsis you read, but the story in no way is extolling the philosophy of Dr. Soran, given that any death is generally treated as a worst-case outcome, whereas Dr.Soran was willing to sacrifice 100s of millions of people to get what he personally wants.
Thiel named his security agency Palantir and calls everyone who criticizes him the antichrist, his group misses the point constantly.
The philosophy of HPMoR is genuinely contemptible though, even if it's not quite as bad as the Dark Enlightenment dorks
I did like certain elements, and I am still amused to this day that the guy managed to crowdsource his ending to a group of "critical thinkers" without any of them catching on.
The beginning of the story was definitely stronger than the rest of it, partially just due to the world of Harry Potter being not-well-thought-out. It's fun to poke holes in the poor world-building. As for the ending, I think a lot of web serials are written that way (taking ideas from the comments), and I'm pretty sure he was open about doing it. Right? Am I misremembering that?
What about the philosophy of HPMoR is contemptible? I'm genuinely curious as to what you find repugnant.
Most fanfiction/webnovel authors don't run the comment section like they're enlightening the savages with their grasp and explanation of basic game theory. Yudkowsky, however, seemed to think he was passing down wisdom as the golden god of rational thought.
As for the contempt I hold for his personal philosophy, I'm not interested in pulling out quotes from HPMoR in 2026 but I'll say that his current thoughts on how a true AI will inevitably kill all humans for not contributing to its goals says a lot more about his personal worldview than any interesting speculation on how an artificial consciousness will see the world.
I'll give him some credit for rejecting full bore naive utilitarianism though, even if all his other thoughts on the matter bely his true opinions on the matter.
Roko's basilisk? That's not in the story, but one of the 'great' outputs from the forum that the author created.
No, he's got his own ideas about it. For what it's worth he thought Roko's Basilisk and the whole time war-esque torture cube of it all was a silly extreme of his completely original thought that AI might kill us because it has different values.
Last I paid attention he was mostly interested in methods to make sure that doesn't happen by making sure any AI shares those values at least in part.
Oh yeah, Yudkowsky is a super weird dude. I haven't looked into what he's been doing over the past few years, but I assume he's gotten... more eccentric.
I couldn't get through HPMoR. Did that story really inspire Peter Thiel? I didn't sense anything fascist-coded in it, but again, it was a cringe-worthy read and I stopped right around the end of the first chapter because Harry's barely-veiled smarmy attitude was too noxious for me to tolerate.
I don't know that inspire is the right word, influenced him and the other proto-fascists he hangs out with, sure.
That's not a missed point, that's contempt.
I bought palantir stock in 2020 and sold when I found out the literal first piece of information about Peter Thiel
I was introduced to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by the Behind the Bastards episodes on the Zizians. Or, I should say, reintroduced. I had previously been on a bit of a fanfic binge and stumbled across it. I got a little way through and stopped because (1) it was deeply boring and (2) it was deeply strange.
Just the Wikipedia one. I absolutely admit that not having read the source material (and that the synopsis is crowd sourced and easily could be written through the lens of someone seeing what they want to see) I can't make a real assement.
But yes, death is the ultimate enemy... But, given the synopsis that appears to "rationally" entail that as such, any means justify the ends, and that if you accept the fantasy of a mechanic for resurrection then that gives broad latitude for moral justification for pretty much anything. Even one step further, a moral obligation to do pretty much anything.
I'd argue that Dr. Soran couldn't delineate the fantasy afforded by the nexus from reality: whomever he killed could be conjured back by him in the nexus. The problematic actions could be "morally deferred".
Regardless of any interpretation of the material, I (like Picard) reject the premise that death is the ultimate enemy. And, like Picard, I am very uneasy with any philosophy that claims to have simple derivable moral evaluations, especially if when you pull back the curtain the underlying mechanics boil down to "the ends justify the means".
If these dont apply to the source, then it was a bad synopsis. Or It was a good synopsis and I'm bad at reading.
I just read the Wikipedia synopsis. It's... accurate to the events but leaves out who is on-board with which decisions or what the characters know at the time of major events. Harry is horrified by Voldemort murdering Quirrel to give Hermione a Horcrux, for example. Harry is still the protagonist of the story and Voldemort is still the antagonist.
Dr. Soran is an absolute madman given he doesn't know or understand how the Nexus works. Even if we assume that the Nexus can actually bring everyone back perfectly, he's still a madman because his plan could fail. There's no world in which you could have enough certainty of the outcome to enact his plan.
On death: while I don't know if I would want to live forever, I'd like to have control over when I die.
Weirdly enough, the philosophy behind HPMoR doesn't claim to have any moral evaluations at all, since that's not in its domain. It's more of a framework for thinking about plans of action to take towards a desired outcome.
That's a fascinating observation about the synopsis, seems to lend credence to my musing that Wikipedia editors may drop or include key points which betray their own reading. Probably not a malicious act, but evidence that varied weighting of events can result in divergent interpretations.
That being said, a framwork for evaluating actions in the absence of moral evaluation is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed. The explicit absence speaks just as loudly as any prescription. And I do think Picard would have my back on that one.
Which, I stress isn't a condemnation of the source itself: it's a warning that such a source can be hijacked for nefarious purposes; intentionally or otherwise.
Correct.
However, I want to point out that the framework just explores and evaluates actions based on how optimal they are for getting to the goal. It's up to your moral framework to determine which paths are unacceptable.
I find that full exploration of possible solutions is very helpful when dealing with other people, because they might be willing to pick a solution that you wouldn't. It can help to predict sociopathic actions so they can be preemptively countered.
There is a lot to unpack there, but it sheds a lot of light onto the popularity (and depending who you ask, the subversion) of the work.
I'll start by saying that people joke about how school doesn't prepare them for the real world, where was "doing my taxes" class, amirite?
Fundamentally I think that an even more critical and teachable skill missing is how to be empathetic. Not like "I have the capacity to feel bad for people", but a more general form of "I can abandon my own preconceptions to allow myself to accurately view the world through their eyes".
That relative illiteracy leads to exactly the longing you express: how to understand what are theople are going to do, and why.
This couples with another favorite observation: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is going to look like a nail.
What you've described, roughly, is the concept of a breadth-first search. It's a general workable algorithm to establish the type of thing you want to do.
It's inefficient, and especially in the context of a human brain with finite working memory, still prone to suboptimal results. Still better than nothing, but suboptimal given the constraints.
So it's a solution. And, if you didn't have one before, the temptation is to treat that like the hammer.
Because it "works" without a moral evaluation, one might conclude that the moral evaluation isn't important.
And then it's a classic case of the inevitabilities of staring too long into the abyss