this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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It's definitely a world building exercise, and I think you're really close to the ways that Yud does it badly. Like, the TERF unrelated to the now-passed fabric store is not particularly interested in world building outside of giving the story the appropriate vibe. Her world is absolutely littered with inconsistencies and things that don't really hold together even before you start bringing in the Yuddite ideology and associated models. What a good and interesting writer would do is use that as the jumping-off point. Why don't wizards arbitrage their gold and silver coins? There could be a dozen interesting answers to that question that could be fun to explore or create neat complications for a story. But rather than actually engage with either the setting he's reading or the science he's writing into it, Yud just name-drops it to show how smart he and his friends are compared to this setting.
I read HP before JK came out as a rabid reactionary, and while I didn't rate the later books the first 3 or 4 were decent YA fantasy. You could see the lineage of classic British public school stories (if you want a better example, check out Kim Newman's Drearcliff Grange series) and there's enough allusions to classic myth and fantasy to keep the wheels on the cart. But somewhere around there Rowling became richer than God and could basically fire anyone who disagreed with her.
Yeah. I think the "uninterested in world building" comment came off harsher than I meant it. Not every fantasy author is going to be Tolkien and exhaustively craft the mythologies, languages, and cultures that make up their secondary world ahead of time. That kind of extensive detail should be able to answer at least some of the kind of questions Yud brings up here, even if they're not relevant to the narrative. HP is more interested in getting into the action of the scene rather than the overarching design of the world, and so the world building plays out the same way. We learn about the kinds of snacks available on the train or the specific wand motions Harry practices in charms class, but not the details of how space folds around platform 9 & 3/4, or through what theoretical underpinnings wizards are able to contradict the otherwise-applicable laws of physics.
My biggest point of disagreement with Yud is that this choice isn't actually a weakness of the story, even if it means it doesn't meet this one particular form of scrutiny.
I've read some SF/F where the author is way more into worldbuilding than their readers are...