Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

It's one of these like planning the singularity documents.

I it gave me chills because it was exactly what he continued to do with stuff like HPMOR, like with Harry Potter and the methods of rationality.

That was like the plan and the plan originally in the singularity was to do that so that technophobes didn't find out and stop him.

Okay.

And there's this huge like talent farming operation and AI alignment is the highest status cause for like a decade.

and it's the basis of people love the fun cult that Eliezer has made around it.

They like HPMOR, they like the way the sequences are being initiated into being a wizard or something.

That makes it so that this is the hot place to be and there's all of this talent ready to work at places like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Yeah.

You were making the, uh, HPMOR audiobook or podcast

Yeah

And you had the great idea to distribute, uh, some of the, some of the roles that you weren't being yourself.

Mm-hmm

And my name sounds very German, so they were like, "Oh, there's this one German guy, uh, that's also involved." And then sometimes people recognize me.

"Oh, wait, yeah, this one German who was [laughs] in the HPMOR, uh, audiobook"

Mm-hmm.

Great.

Eleazar has revealed more HPMOR lore.

No way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyways, he says, uh, "Harry, the, Tom Riddle and Hermione, it is my ship.

If you're familiar with the relevant tropes, then HPMOR is, or I thought it would be instantly recognizable as a Tomione story" Which, oh, oh yeah, because Harry has been replaced with Tom Riddle and, uh, and it's just Tom Riddle and Hermione having a relationship.

It's kinda-

I grew up with the Harry Potter books, and not being content with the canon, I went down the fanfic rabbit hole.

H-P-M-O-R is incredible.

H-P-M-O-R? No!

No! This isn't a review of the phone, by the way.

You know, yeah, that is who buys special edition phones.

...

Harry Potter and the Rationality, whatever that book was called, the, when he was like-

Okay, fine.

Fuck it.

I suspect that if the rationalist project wants to take root in China, it has to solve problems like not being immediately branded as holier-than-thou, and adjusting to the cutthroat attention economy of Chinese social media.

HPMOR is an example of something, grimdark power-scaling quasi-Issachai fantasy, that likely appeals to Chinese netizens.

Peter Singer is not.

I like to say that if less wrong is on the spectrum and more autistic than normal, where normal is set to the ambient Western culture, then China lives past the right endpoint of the spectrum, at even more holistic than normal.

Published on September 20, 2026.

When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.

I only wished I had found it sooner.

When I started reading the sequences, I discovered that the Chinese translation group had translated only the first volume.

If there is no major good news about AI safety in the next few months, I plan to quit my job before February 2027 and devote myself full-time to work related to AI safety.

For now, I already spend most of my time outside work, as well as whatever spare time I have during work, on it.

Two months ago, I learned how to typeset comics in Photoshop and completed a preliminary Chinese typesetting of the HPMOR comic.

When GPT-6 was released, I paid for an AI service for the first time, not counting AI translation, and then began working on two projects.

Published on September 20, 2026.

When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.

I only wished I had found it sooner.

When I started reading the sequences, I discovered that the Chinese translation group had translated only the first volume.

If there is no major good news about AI safety in the next few months, I plan to quit my job before February 2027 and devote myself full-time to work related to AI safety.

For now, I already spend most of my time outside work, as well as whatever spare time I have during work, on it.

Two months ago, I learned how to typeset comics in Photoshop and completed a preliminary Chinese typesetting of the HPMOR comic.

When GPT-6 was released, I paid for an AI service for the first time, not counting AI translation, and then began working on two projects.