Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Article
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 19, 2022 and September 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “simulate a chapter of the popular Harry Potter fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”; “Distribute Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality copies to students in Bangalore, India”; “Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, ACX, ACX Grants.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 19, 2022
- Last seen: September 11, 2025
Appears In
- Janus’ GPT Wrangling
- ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
- Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Related Pages
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- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- AI 2027 team (1 shared issues)
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- AI2027 (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
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- AskReddit (1 shared issues)
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- autism (1 shared issues)
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- Bangalore (1 shared issues)
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- Buddhist enlightenment (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
Can the characters work out that they are in GPT-3, specifically? The closest I have seen is in a story Janus generated. It was meant to simulate a chapter of the popular Harry Potter fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. You can see the prompt and full story here, but here’s a sample. Professor Quirrell is explaining “Dittomancy”, the creation of magical books with infinite possible worlds:
Inline links: here
Distribute Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality copies to students in Bangalore, India. A surprising number of people get into the rationality/effective altruism ecosystem through this particular fan-fiction, and someone calculated that distributing copies of it was a super-cost-effective way to grow the movement. I didn’t fund this because the last time someone tried this, lots of people got angry at them for spending charity money on printing a fanfiction, and I hate when people get angry at me. Maybe if one of you funded it through an impact cert, and then someone provided evidence that this was good, I could buy back the impact cert without looking like a crazy person. Alternately, we could funnel this one through the EA Infrastructure Fund, which is supposed to do this kind of field-building.
Inline links: Distribute
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.