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That volume coherently. Obviously mere volume can be done by a literal monkey on a literal typewriter.

Also, I didn't say "correlated with intelligence", what I said was more of a cut-off threshold — asserting that one cannot be an actual moron given writing coherently on that scale is more of a boolean than a correlation.

I do need to write more (my own attempt at a novel has been stalled at "why can't I ever be satisfied with how I lead into the dramatic showdown!" for some years now, as none of my attempts have pleased me once written); but as for reading? Well, if you think my taste must result from insufficient breadth and depth, I must wonder what you think of Arthur C. Clarke, Francis Bacon, Larry Niven, Alexandre Dumas, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Neal Stephenson, Robert Heinlein, Alastair Reynolds, Isaac Asimov, Carl Jung, … I'm going to stop there rather than enumerate my whole library, but I can critique each in a different way without resorting to calling them playground insults, even the ones I dislike.

But I will say it was interesting to contrast Chris Hadfield's "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" with Richard Wiseman's "Shoot for the Moon" — or H. G. Wells with Jules Verne.




It's bad writing. It's objectively terrible writing in fact. Purely on a volume standpoint, the average novel is 100K words. The Brothers K is HALF the length.

If we ignore that it's a rewriting of JKR's 7 novel series, which gives it a certain amount of coherency, Yudkowsky violates almost every writing guideline in a bad way. In fact, I could probably write an infinitely long coherent essay describing the ways HPMOR violates a reader's mind. It would be easy given almost 700K source material.

But to point at some gaping holes, the plot has no pacing, and the entire story is a badly written self insert where the mc goes around and "fixes" JKR's plot-holes by writing themself into a corner.

The solution to this, is, of course, to write another 20K words of expecto patronum, dispel the plothole with more rationalist bullshit.

Your average fanfic is probably better written.


> It's bad writing. It's objectively terrible writing in fact. Purely on a volume standpoint, the average novel is 100K words. The Brothers K is HALF the length.

I infer you favour Blaise Pascal: "I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one."


I always thought that was Mark Twain who said that, so I asked ChatGPT who initially told me to not self harm myself and that I’m not alone... But, yep, I have been misinformed my whole life. It was Pascual. Apparently the chat bot thinks I’m having an existential crisis over this but thank you for educating me.




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