Astral Codex Ten

Harry Potter

16 min read

Harry Potter

Article

Harry Potter is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 12 times across 12 issues between February 14, 2021 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Voldemort , the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books”; “It’s also whether they love Harry Potter”; “extracurricular Harry Potter”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Eliezer Yudkowsky, New York Times.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 12
  • Issue count: 12
  • First seen: February 14, 2021
  • Last seen: October 24, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Statement on New York Times Article
February 14, 2021 · Original source
He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books.
Inline links: some feminists as something close to Voldemort
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
Along with these real problems, it also picked up a new set of trivialities. "Self-care" became a feminist watchword, plausibly under commercial pressure from people who wanted to sell self-care products. Feminist analysis of media, previously more focused on geek niche interests like Harry Potter, became the bread and butter of media criticism more generally. Watching Sex And The City became a feminist act.
In the same way, the difference between the "socialist" and "liberal" tribes isn't just whether they subscribe to further-left or centerer-left politics. It's also whether they love Harry Potter or reflexively scream "READ ANOTHER BOOK" whenever someone mentions it. Whether #TheResistance is brave or ridiculous. Whether John Oliver and saying "Drumpf" all the time is hilarious or cringeworthy. Whether low-status-anti-social-justice groups (eg incels on Reddit) are a terrifying public menace, or a target for mockery and ironic imitation. Whether "civility" is an applause light or a trap to be avoided (this opinion is purely aesthetic; nobody has been civil on the Internet since at least 2010).
Your Book Review: How Children Fail
June 11, 2021 · Original source
All of these failure modes have the same cause. Learning in schools is externally imposed, not intrinsically motivated. School requires a power structure, with incentives and accountability, to cause children to reliably learn, to learn the Right Things, and to be able to prove that they did. In 1998, you didn’t need to assign chapters to get one out of three kids to read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets--they read it because they wanted to see what happened next. You didn’t need to test them in order to find out how much they’d read and understood--they would insist on telling you about the book’s plot, and ask questions about anything they didn’t understand. You didn’t need to find any way to get them to reliably sit still for it--they could be allowed to set their own schedule.
Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
(I can’t remember if it was Teach or an imitator who applied this analysis to Harry Potter. Harry isn’t the smartest or hardest-working person in the school - that’s Hermione. He’s not the most ambitious/decisive/strategic/active person - that’s Lord Voldemort, which automatically codes him as a villain. So why is Harry the main character and the hero? Because a prophecy placed the burden of specialness on him, without him asking; it was forced upon him by an omnipotent entity, no action required. Harry Potter is wish-fulfillment; the modern person wants to be special not because they accomplished great stuff but because special-ness is just who they are. Brands tell them that this is true, and in exchange they buy the brands. [Brand]: Because You Deserve It.)
Actually, he shows contempt for people who seek self-knowledge, full stop. Self-knowledge is of the same genus as the Harry Potter uniqueness fetish: if only I had the right brands / the right dream interpretations / the right personality test results, I could understand my deepest self and then succeed effortlessly.
A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows
May 30, 2022 · Original source
…and not like a Goth version of Hermione Granger. I think DALL-E assumes that anybody in the vicinity of a raven must be a Goth, and anybody in a library must be at least sort of Hermione Granger (I bet its corpus included a lot of Harry Potter fan art).
Why did the quality drop so sharply? I think that “library” suggests a certain style of maybe Harry Potter fan art which keeps up at least some minimal quality standards, and “bookshelves” doesn’t.
If you give it a subject that sounds like the kind of thing depicted in medieval stained glass, it will depict it in a medieval way. If you give it a subject that sounds more modern, it will depict it in a more modern way. Some topics, like Santa Claus and Hermione Granger, form vast black-hole-like attractor basins in conceptual space, dragging in anything even remotely related, and turning the scene into Christmas decorations or Harry Potter fan art.
Trying Again On Fideism
February 15, 2023 · Original source
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is Let Them Debate College Students. I’m not a college student, but I’m not Anthony Fauci either, and I am known for blogging about extremely dignified ideas like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory. I haven’t seen ivermectin advocates using “Scott takes this seriously enough to argue against it!” as an argument, and I have seen them getting angry about it and writing long responses trying to prove me wrong. Sometimes they have used me getting some points wrong as a positive argument, and I would be open to the argument that I failed in not arguing against it well enough that they couldn’t do that, but nobody has been making that argument, and if they did, then it would imply that people who are smarter than me should take over the job, which I endorse. III. I worry Scott Aaronson thinks I’m saying you shouldn’t trust the experts, and instead you should always think for yourself. I’m definitely not trying to say that. I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I think experts are right remarkably often, by some standards basically 100% of the time - I realize how crazy that sounds, and “by some standards” is doing a lot of the work there, but see Learning To Love Scientific Consensus for more. Bounded Distrust also helps explain what I mean here. I also try to be pretty clear that reasoning is extremely hard, it’s very easy to get everything wrong, and if you try to do it then a default option is to get everything wrong and humiliate yourself. I describe that happening to me here, and presumably it also happens to other people sometimes. What I do think is that “trust the experts” is an extremely exploitable heuristic, which leads everyone to put up a veneer of “being the experts” and demand that you trust them. I come back to this example again and again, but only because it’s so blatant: the New York Times ran an article saying that only 36% of economists supported school vouchers, with a strong implication that the profession was majority against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actually, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not responding. If you are too quick to seek epistemic closure because “you have to trust the experts”, you will be easy prey to people misrepresenting what they are saying. I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I don’t think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or “expert consensus” is extremely variable and complicated and can’t be reflected by a single number or position. And I genuinely think this is part of why ivermectin conspiracies took off in the first place. We say “trust science” and “trust experts”. But there were lots of studies that showed ivermectin worked - aren’t those science? And Pierre Kory MD, an specialist in severe respiratory illnesses who wrote a well-regarded textbook, supports it - isn’t he an expert? Isn’t it plausible that the science and the experts are right, and the media and the government and Big Pharma are wrong? This is part of what happens when people reify the mantras instead of using them as pointers to more complicated concepts like “reasoning is hard” and “here are the 28,491 rules you need to keep in mind when reading a scientific study.” IV. All of this still feels rambly and like it’s failing to connect. Instead, let me try describing exactly what I would advice I would give young people opening an Internet connection for the first time: You are not immune to conspiracy theories. You have probably developed a false sense of security by encountering many dumb conspiracy theories and feeling no temptation to believe them. These theories were designed to trap people very different from you; others will be aimed in your direction. The more certain you are of your own infallibility, the less aware you will be, and the worse your chances. The ones that get you won’t look like conspiracy theories to you (though they might to other people). When you run into conspiracy theories you don’t believe, feel free to ignore them. If you decide to engage, don’t mock them or feel superior. Think “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like - not from skeptics trying to mock them, but from the horse’s mouth - so you have a sense of what false arguments look like. Ask yourself what habits of mind it would have taken the people affected by the theory to successfully resist it. Ask yourself if you have those habits of mind. Yes? ARE YOU SURE? To a first approximation, trust experts over your own judgment. If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government. You might ask: Don’t governments and other big institutions have biases? Won’t they sometimes be wrong or deceptive? And even if you’ve lucked into the one country and historical era where the government 100% tells the truth and the intellectuals have no biases, doesn’t someone need to keep the flame of suspicion alive so that it’s available to people in other, less fortunate countries and eras? The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you. They will claim that they are the special case where you need to take up the mantle of Galileo and Frederick Douglass and Jane Jacobs and all those people who stood up to the intellectual authorities and power structures of their own time. The whole point of “you are not immune to conspiracy theories” is that the evidence for them can sound convincing because something like it is sort of true. This is equally so for second-level claims like “prestigious institutions are fallible and biased”. Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice, but nobody would take that advice, and taking it too seriously might crush some kind of important human spirit, so I won’t assert this. But always have in the back of your mind that you live in a world where it’s sort of good advice. If you feel tempted to believe something that has red flags for being a conspiracy theory, at least keep track of the Inside vs. Outside View. Say “on the Inside View, this feels like the evidence is overwhelming; on the Outside View, it sounds like a classic conspiracy theory”. You don’t necessarily have to resolve this discomfort right away. You can walk around with an annoying knot in your beliefs, even if it’s not fun. Look for the strongest evidence against the idea. Keep in mind important possibilities like: Is it possible that everyone who disagrees with the idea is a bad mean cruel stupid person, but also, the idea really is false?
Inline links: Let Them Debate College Students, like the possibility that the terrible Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal is secretly an alchemical allegory, Learning To Love Scientific Consensus, Bounded Distrust, happening to me here, ran an article, ARE YOU SURE?
The Emotional Support Animal Racket
May 09, 2024 · Original source
And it’s harmless enough with Fido - he really is a good boy. But I’ve had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake. Sorry, I refuse to believe a snake can help you with ADHD, unless it’s one of those talking snakes from Harry Potter and it whispers “Concccccentrate . . . conccccccentrate” in your ears every time you start slacking off. Still, some patients argue very eloquently: “Taking care of the snake helps me keep to a routine, and makes me feel more confident, and she’s my only friend in the world, and I feel like I’d be stressed and lost without her.” It’s a little weird. But do you really want your patient to lose their beloved Nagini just because you refused to write a letter that has no legal requirements and no downsides?
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
Some people write fanfics about Harry Potter. Some people write fanfics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then, well, some people write fanfics about Donald Trump.
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
28: Sympathetic Opposition contra me on taste. If I understand correctly, her thesis is that taste doesn’t just make you hate bad art - it also gives you the ability to love good art more deeply, which can be a transformative experience. I’m not so sure - people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime. I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion - the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t - I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.
Inline links: Sympathetic Opposition contra me on taste
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
May 15, 2025 · Original source
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either […]
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
September 11, 2025 · Original source
Eliezer Yudkowsky, at his best, has leaps of genius nobody else can match. Fifteen years ago, he decided that the best way to something something AI safety was to write a Harry Potter fanfiction. Many people at the time (including me) gingerly suggested that maybe this was not optimal time management for someone who was approximately the only person working full-time on humanity’s most pressing problem. He totally demolished us and proved us wronger than anyone has ever been wrong before. Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it got lavish positive reviews in Syfy, Vice, and The Atlantic, and it basically one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads. Fifteen years later, I still meet bright young MIT students who tell me they’re working on AI safety, and when I ask them why in public they say something about their advisor, and then later in private they admit it was the fanfic. Valuing the time of the average AI genius at the rate set by Sam Altman (let alone Mark Zuckerberg), HPMOR probably bought Eliezer a few billion dollars in free labor. Just a totally inconceivable level of victory.
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
Generalized one-fell-swoop paranormal explanations. Demons are trying to confuse us, or the simulation is glitching, or there’s some kind of Harry Potter-esque masquerade overflowing with wizards and monsters that carefully hides itself from us Muggles but occasionally leaks.