Wow Interlude: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

This book is so much fun AND it has been changing my life!

It’s taken me a while to get back to my blog after months of nonstop busyness (holidays, sick season, etc.), but part of the holdup was that I've been wanting to write a post to tell you about this book, which needs more than a few minutes to describe.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (or HPMoR for short) is a creative retelling of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter story. In this alternate world, Petunia married a scientist and Harry grew up as a precocious lover of books, science, and rationality. How does this change what happens when he finds out he’s a wizard, goes to Hogwarts, and meets Hermione, Draco, Professor Quirrell, and all the rest? Read it and see!

While this story is immensely fun (instead of Quidditch games, the featured sport is mock army battles for Defense Against the Dark Arts class; instead of S.P.E.W., Hermione founds S.P.H.E.W., the Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches, which takes on the problem of school bullies; and instead of fighting each other, Harry and Draco form a secret scientific club called the Bayesian Conspiracy, in which they use scientific methods to determine how magic is passed on from one wizard to another, among other things), it’s also explicitly—and brilliantly--educational, using the story plot to teach central concepts of science, psychology/cognitive science, and logical thinking.

As one self-contained example, here’s a passage from chapter 3 in which Harry tells Professor McGonagall about the concept called the “fundamental attribution error”—which concept has been reshaping my understanding of how people interact ever since I first read it here:

"Well…" Harry said, trying to figure out how to describe that particular bit of Muggle science. "Suppose you come into work and see your colleague kicking his desk. You think, 'what an angry person he must be'. Your colleague is thinking about how someone bumped him into a wall on the way to work and then shouted at him. Anyone would be angry at that, he thinks. When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behaviour, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behaviour. People's stories make internal sense to them, from the inside, but we don't see people's histories trailing behind them in the air. We only see them in one situation, and we don't see what they would be like in a different situation. So the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context." There were some elegant experiments which confirmed this, but Harry wasn't about to go into them.

I could go on all day discussing this book and the things I’ve learned from it. (I’m also reading—and being changed by--the author’s nonfiction collection of essays that discuss the same concepts, which you can find in various formats here.) It’s a long work, and sometimes a bit cerebral, but well worth the effort. Even if/when you find you can’t follow Harry/Eliezer down every philosophical road, there is still much extremely rich food for thought, the thinking-through of which makes one’s mind a stronger place.

You can read it online in various formats at hpmor.com, or listen to it via downloadable audiobook files here. I listened to it--and am now re-listening to it--using my regular podcast app. (It was tricky until I realized I had to set it to show the earliest episodes first.)

So check it out if you're interested!