(Part 2) Best products from r/HPMOR

list of linked fictions in order posted repeats omitted, see my other comments for what EY said about them.

Dungeon Keeper Ami by Pusakuronu As a .docx

Mandragora (HP)

To The Stars (Madoka)

My Little Pony: Friendship is Betrayal (MLP)

Earthfic

Unequally Rational and Emotional(Negima/damn near everything)

The Missing Risk Premium (Non-Fic)

Mahou Sensei Negima manga


Harry Potter and the Natural 20 (HP/DnD)

Naruto: Game of the Year Edition(Naruto)

Big Human on Campus(Ranma/RosarioxVampire)

Friendship is Optimal (MLP)

Myou’ve Gotta Be Kidding Me(MLP)

Prince of the Dark Kingdom (HP)

Fallout Equestria (MLP)

Time Braid(Naruto)

Hybrid Theroy(Mega Crossover)

Luminosity (Twilight)

[Discworld] (http://i.imgur.com/kvqoC1h.jpg)

The Best Night Ever(MLP)

Imperfect Metamorphosis(Touhou)

Sanctum

Friendship is Optimal: Caelum est Conterrens(MLP)

Tales of Mu

Black Cloaks, Red Clouds (Naruto)

Dirty Old Men(Naruto)

The Eyre Affair (first novel in the Thursday Next series)

Postnuptial Disagreements(F/SN / Sekirei)

Saga of Soul

Murasakiiro no Qualia

NGE: Nobody Dies: The Trials of Kirima Harasami(Eva)

Love Lockdown(Naruto)

Worm

MLP Loops(MLP)

City of Angles

The Last Christmas

Branches on the Tree of Time(Terminator)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Lord Voldemort(HP)

Emperor of Zero(Familiar of Zero/Napoleon)

Cenotaph(Worm)

Memoirs of a Human Flashlight(Worm/Exalted)

She Who Skitters in Darkness(Worm/Exalted)

Goblin Queen(Worm/Exalted)

Starry Eyes(Worm/Lovecraft)

Tale of Transmigration(Worm)

Bug on a Wire.(Worm)

Sunshine

Toasterverse(Avengers)

Back Again(LOTR)

Carpetbaggers(Narnia)

A Bluer Shade of White (Frozen)

Metropolitan Man(Superman)

Ra

Homestuck

In Fire Forged(Naruto)

Right Moments(Ranma)

Hitherby Dragons

Nice Dragons Finish Last

The Shadow of What Was Lost

The Unwelcome Warlock

Path of the King (F/SN)

Gate! Thus the JSDF Fought There

Weaver Nine(Worm)

https://www.fanfiction.net/community/Rational-stories/117575/99/4/1/0/0/0/0/
https://www.reddit.com/r/rational

Relevant book recommendation: Wizard's Bane and following series, by Rick Cook.
Synopsis: basically like the programmer's physics in Friendship is Optimal, but a little bit more fleshed-out and with some neat ideas. For example, in order to prevent undefined behavior, the magic-programmer builds and formally verifies magical "assembly" instructions, and then builds several no-common-ground compilers and only allows a build to go forward if the compilers produce identical assembly.

You may enjoy Too Like the Lightening by Ada Palmer. Has a cast of engaging characters, with major themes on enlightenment philosophy, science fiction, global politics, ethics, metaphysics, service, humanism and redemption. Quite the combination.

Otherwise, characters with long-term plans and wit can be seen in Sherlock Holmes and Luther by the BBC.

A few recommendations....

Worm is an amazing fanfic, think Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson except more depressing. It has a slow beginning, but soon becomes awesome.
Synopsis:An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons.

Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus is hilarious and absurdist, a bit like Terry Pratchet. Still updating every two weeks.
Synopsis: Lily is not quite a normal little girl. The Dursleys always say she's a freak just like her freakish parents, her uncle Death seems to be convinced she's the grim reaper, and her ever political and invisible best friend Wizard Lenin just thinks she should take over the world. On top of all that the secret society of wizards think she's Jesus. AU female!Harry among other things.

Saga of Soul is Puella Magi Madoka Magica meets science. Slow to update though...
Synopsis: Meet Eriko, an introverted, intellectual teenage girl with good intentions. Now, watch Eriko get caught in the middle of multiple simultaneous plots as fairies, demons, inter-dimensional empires, evil geniuses, immortal killers, cosmic horrors and more all make their move, and it's up to her to save the day."Saga of Soul" tells the story of Eriko, A.K.A. Soul, as she strives to protect the world against all odds. Updated on an irregular basis.

Imperfect Metamorphosis Takerfoxx took a scrapped character from Touhou and made them an vengeful abomination bent on killing and absorbing everyone into their eldritch body.

To the Stars I guess this is like Star trek meets Puella Magi Madoka Magica? It's completely different from the source material, the world created is immense.
Synopsis:Kyubey promised that humanity will reach the stars one day. The Incubator tactfully refrained from saying too much about what they would find there.

Gods & Monsters God character development (or should I say character regression?) If you like broken characters trying to do the right thing, take a look.
Synopsis: Miranda struggles to keep a fractured Jane Shepard focused on the task of defeating the Collectors. Meanwhile, Maya Brooks steals Shepard's clone and tries to stay one step ahead of Cerberus. Pairings: It's complicated.

Legend of the Sun knight It's not a fanfic, but a fan translation of a popular Taiwanese novel. Gods cannot walk the earth, so they choose human representatives who are supposed to be perfect. The Sun knight is supposed to be the living carnation of justice and compassion; however he has megalomaniac tendencies...

Edit: added in synopsis

I don't know why this message does not have more upvotes. I have looked up both books and they both seem very interesting. Mastery seems worth a read as well.

I don't look actively for rationalist themes in books, so take this as 'books that someone who likes hpmor also likes', and don't spend too much blindly. I do like characters that are at least not obviously stupid, and if the idiot ball is too blatant I will notice, so perhaps at least some level of interest is warranted.

It's all fairly mainstream and recent SF/F.

• The Laundry series by Charlie Stross
  
• Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
  
• The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois M. Bujold
  
• Dreamblood series by N. K. Jemisin
  
• Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
  

Please replace the amzn.to link (under John Scalzi's Redshirts) with the full original URL (minus the referral tag). URL-shortened links aren't necessary on reddit, and they'll always get spamfiltered - especially if they contain an Amazon referral tag.

<Edit:>
For storytelling there is a list of fairy tale tropes that occur in a given order, someone did a paper on it in analysis of Russian fairy tales, but I don't have the time to Google it. The below is more for programming.
</Edit>


Regular expressions: Oriely Mastering Regular Expressions Very useful for pattern matching in text.

I haven't read it, but EY recommended the novel Jumper in a recent post.

If you want a good book that explores sociopathy, try the psychopath test.

Another way is a sort of riff off EY's "Minds are made of parts." After creating a decently complex character, imagine that all the people who get in his way are just simple programs and ask yourself: how he would respond to those few lines of code? After all, code has no feelings...

>I don't plan to continue this thread much further - this isn't a terribly good time or place to summarise a first year moral philosophy textbook for you, nor would doing so benefit you in the same way that reading that textbook and thinking about it would.

Weird you should drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode, because we're actually agreeing vehemently on everything of substance.

>There is no "moral reality" in the way that there are atoms or energy levels or other physical things.

Not quite. We haven't found one when we've investigated. It's worth remembering that even at the time of the Enlightenment, the field of moral philosophy started with a mixture of divine command and natural-law as its "informed priors" (the frame for its questions). Darwinian evolution dealt a major blow to natural-law/natural-teleology theories, as well.

The finding that we cannot locate an "atom of morality" or a universal optimization target (at least, one that fits our moral intuitions better than the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is a posteriori. Unfortunately, some people drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode and insist that their moral intuitions have so much epistemic value that naturalism must be completely wrong.

And these people have tenure!

>Yet almost everyone lives by some kind of moral code,

Well yes, of course.

>and almost everyone thinks something rather nice has happened over the last few hundred years as we drove back ignorance, racism, sexism, slavery, oppression and so forth.

With emphasis on the almost. There are still serious moral philosophers who may like modernity, but take positions that are technically opposed to it.

>Arguably civilisation couldn't work at all unless most people most of the time followed moral rules, or if it could work there would be massive overheads in policing everyone.

It also requires massive policing overheads when you try to run it very, shall we say, wickedly. It shouldn't be too unsupported to assert that nice rulers require more police than mean rulers.

>So how do we justify moral beliefs in a universe that hasn't been so kind as to give us an atom of evil or a wavelength of sin or anything similar? Well, if you want the long version then study moral philosophy. The very short version is we just make something up, or we do something reasonably sophisticated with game theory to get to a very similar place assuming self-interested agents capable of big picture thinking.

Yes, this is exactly what I said. We can take an anti-realist stance ("make something up"), or we can take a very sophisticated, reforming sort of realist stance that involves precise naturalistic grounding (game theory and psychology are aspects of nature too, you know).

But in either case, the Is/Ought Gap, or Moore's Open Question Argument in its other form, are simply not Hard Problems in the sense of demonstrating that the gap is impossible to bridge. In the a-posteriori absence of mystical moral particles, morality is left amenable to natural, empirical investigation via very precise theories of which empirical facts count as moral facts (or via outright anti-realism, which denies that there exists any gap between normative ethics and moral psychology, and thus denies the normativity of ethics in general). The problem is that some trained, professional academic philosophers remain actually committed to the position that the strength of their realist intuitions constitutes evidence against naturalism, or attempt to rationalize ways in which naturalism self-undermines.

I'm currently reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. I wish I had not bought it on audible, as I often have to re-listen to sections to fully understand them. I will pick this up next.

> I'm talking about the possibility that teaching particular mental skills or rationalist techniques in the format of an HPMOR sequel might do more harm than good, and I want to hear your opinions on the matter.

I think I'm missing something. What's prompting you to ask this question?

It sounds like you're planning to wrap some advice in a framing story. That's a common enough device.

Fan Fiction is seen as a bit nerdy. But so what? The only people who will run into a HPMoR fan-fiction are fan-fiction readers.