I read his level-2-characters piece first, and I found it a better read than this one. Sometimes he seems quite high up on his horse: ...yeah, one of my best friends is a gold medalist for the IMO, and while he is enviably smart, he's also just a person, not some super-intelligence that I am honored to have around. This was pretty funny though:
Yes, I’ve been known to pull off implausible tricks like “Write a Harry Potter fanfiction good enough to recruit International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists”
but come on, Dementors are flying corpses that nothing can kill or destroy and that can only be fended off by happy thoughts in the form of animals.
Oh, please, you can't take him too seriously. And -- you may not know anything about EY or HPMOR, I don't know, but one day about, god, four or five years ago now? he decided to write a spinoff of Harry Potter in order to drum up donations for his research institute. On a whim. Having never written anything longer than six chapters in his life. Now it's got about 15000 favorites on fanfiction.net, which is the most ever, I believe.
I disagree, for two reasons: one, Yudkowsky can write. Really well. He's written other short fiction, he's written five thousand word essays on ethical relativism, on whatever -- and it's all uniformly fascinating. He has voice or flair or style or whatever the English teachers are calling "it" these days. Two, of the ~million Harry Potter fanfictions that exist, 1 percent of 1 percent are of professional quality, and that's still quite a few stories. Not many, perhaps, and it takes a long time to find them, but they're there. Of course, those stories aren't usually the ones with the most reviews on fanfiction.net, which is a kind of shitty website anyway -- which is what makes HPMOR so surprising.