If you don’t know what this is, it’s Eliezer Yudkowsky’s bible, basically. He’s the leader of the capital-R Rationalists, the only people who think Roko’s Basilisk is actually going to happen (along with some really fucked up techbro brainworms) and, as I just stated, is a movement based in a Harry Potter fanfiction posted on fanfiction.net. I would wholeheartedly recommend not reading it, or reading it purely from a ‘this gives insight into the unhinged thoughts of the author behind it’ type heuristic.

A friend and I are doing a read-through riff session of it over intermittent FaceTimes and not only is it just lib-brained, it manages to take Harry Potter, an already libbed-up cobbled-together world, and somehow make it worse. Not even in the amateur-writer-expected quality downgrade way, I’m talking actively self-sabotaging to make what I can only surmise is a subconscious urge to make The Room of fan-fiction.

I’ll give you some highlights from the sixth and seventh chapters, the one’s I read with him this week, with very slight embellishment:

• McGonagall basically has so far only existed to be Harry’s intellectual punching bag. There’s a bit in chapter six where this eleven year-old child all but says ’Women, amirite?’ to a random shopkeep who is familiar with her: "Don’t worry, I understand that she’s only awful to me because she loves me.” I might be reading into this one too much, but it’s fucking Eliezer Yudkowsky writing this so it susses me out.
• One of Harry’s core memories is one time where he was scared of being mugged when there was muggings in their neighborhood, and his mom asked him to return a pan to another neighbor and assured him that he wouldn’t get mugged, and then he didn’t get mugged. But since logically :kubrick-stare: it was statistically likely he would get mugged, this is somehow a core memory for him and he still holds it against his mother for… saying something wouldn’t happen, and that thing not happening? It’s the type of pettiness you’d almost expect from an eleven year-old, but Harry immediately segues into another odd tangent that contradicts this depiction.
• Which is a bizarre, off-the-cuff rant about CPS, ‘knowing about inappropriate touching and all of that’, and accusations of child abuse ”ruin[ing] people and destroy[ing] families even when the parents are completely innocent! I’ve read about it in the newspapers!” This comes out of nowhere. Harry literally pulls her into a random alleyway barely prompted and starts yelling about it—“The system doesn’t know how to stop, it doesn’t believe the parents or the children when they say nothing happened! Don’t you dare threaten my family with that! I won’t let you destroy my home!”—which… listen, maybe Yudkowsky had a bad experience with CPS after someone learned that he dropped out of schooling and became an autodidact after middle school, worrying that something had happened. Who’s to say?
• “Children aren’t meant to be too much smarter than their parents,” Harry said. "Or too much saner, maybe - my father could probably outsmart me if he was, you know, actually trying, instead of using his adult intelligence mainly to come up with new reasons not to change his mind -" Harry stopped. "I’m too smart, Professor. I’ve got nothing to say to normal children. Adults don’t respect me enough to really talk to me. And frankly, even if they did, they wouldn’t sound as smart as Richard Feynman, so I might as well read something Richard Feynman wrote instead. I’m isolated, Professor McGonagall. I’ve been isolated my whole life. Maybe that has some of the same effects as being locked in a cellar. And I’m too intelligent to look up to my parents the way that children are designed to do. My parents love me, but they don’t feel obliged to respond to reason, and sometimes I feel like they’re the children - children who won’t listen and have absolute authority over my whole existence. I try not to be too bitter about it, but I also try to be honest with myself, so, yes, I’m bitter. And I also have an anger management problem, but I’m working on it. That’s all.”
• Harry is eleven years-old, by the way. Did you know he’s eleven years-old?
• Eleven year-old Draco Malfoy makes a rape threat and then describes in precarious detail how he’d get away with it scot-free. Harry’s response is to dance around the issue, instead of moving to a different train car or just fucking [redacted], internally monologue that Draco’s not a monster (???) because he doesn’t have intrinsic psychopathy and can express empathy so he’s just doing a normal human thing that normal humans did before the Enlightenment when they had nobles and stuff (fucking rich coming from the mouthpiece that is a British child, go delete your House of Lords first) and coming up with a weird logical placation to hinder Draco’s advance on a ten year-old. Eleven years-old, by the way.
• Eleven year-old Draco Malfoy basically all-but-recites the fourteen words to Harry Potter when he asks for a quick summary of the blood purity thing, and Harry uses the power of Facts and Logic and Science and Rationality to systematically dismantle The Dumb Stupid Bad Thought from the child brain and make him a true Enlightened Rational Scientist with one weird trick (moon landing textbook pictures) I guess. It works :sartre-pipe: they become allies. Rape threat still not fully addressed, by the way. Eleven years-old, by the way.

This is all just two fucking chapters of this. I’ve been told it gets worse. What the hell is going on :what-the-hell: