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user-inactivated · 3890 days ago · link · · parent · post: Inexploitability -- Eliezer Yudkowsky's continued thoughts on the process of writing intelligent characters
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.