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QC Profile picture
@QiaochuYuan
May 12 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
fundamentally the problem with telling any new stories set in the world of harry potter is that jk rowling didn’t notice she set up magic to be an allegory for being part of the ruling class

the allure of the original harry potter books is finding out you are secretly a prince, and rich, and being invited to your hidden kingdom where you learn how to exercise your royal power before taking the throne. this is a juvenile fantasy set in a juvenile world; you can’t tell adult stories about adult protagonists in this universe without running up against the fundamental power imbalance between wizards and muggles. muggles can never learn magic - peasants can never simply decide to become ruling class - and wizards get to arbitrarily manipulate their memory whenever they want to maintain their invisible rule, and nobody in the wizarding world sees a problem with this. muggleborns exist but are indoctrinated into wizarding life via boarding school - the ruling class indoctrinating talented outsiders. nonhuman magic is tightly controlled and regulated - the ruling class maintaining its monopoly on power

harry potter is a story about the reptilian conspiracy, from the pov of the reptilians. it pretends to be about fighting fascism in the form of voldemort but the way the premise structures wizard-muggle relations (and relations with nonhumans, eg house-elves) is itself almost inherently fascistic
the sign of a truly good fantasy series is when the magic in it is an allegory for magic
eg
hogwarts being a boarding school is not an incidental detail but a centerpiece of the fantasy!

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More from @QiaochuYuan

QC Profile picture
Nov 2, 2024
tried getting claude to write funny tweets starting from 9 examples. it generated some okay stuff but nothing that actually made me laugh. then i tried asking it to generate tweets written from its perspective rather than a human's and actually laughed. hmm Image
asked claude to use a more authentic voice, then asked it to reflect on the nature of humor and what kind of humor would be more authentic to it. not bad, a couple of these made me laugh out loud. that last one though lmao Image
asked claude to lean more heavily into being an AI. these are cute i like these. "just large language model things" Image
Read 9 tweets
QC Profile picture
Oct 6, 2024
there’s this woman awhile ago who tweeted something like “i was mentally ill until i fell in love with someone i had to have my shit together to be with, so i decided to stop being mentally ill and it worked” and not to overstate this but there’s something real and impt here
coherence therapy takes the pov that many (most?) mental illness “symptoms” are on some level strategies for getting needs met. it assigns the “patient” enormous amounts of agency, which starts out shadowed, and part of how the therapy works is reclaiming this agency
the internet complicates this picture by providing many incentives for being mentally ill (sympathy, fitting in with peers, Generating Relatable Content); i think there’s sort of a mentally ill online lifestyle attractor, which provides benefits like avoiding responsibility
Read 4 tweets
QC Profile picture
Feb 14, 2024
thread of notes on scattered minds by gabor mate
Image
> ADD has much to do with pain, present in every one of the adults and children who have come to me for assessment

> "Every aspect of my life hurts," a thirty-seven-year-old man told me during his second visit to my office Image
> These men and women... have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Their moods fly back and forth from lethargy and dejection to agitation. Image
Read 20 tweets
QC Profile picture
Feb 14, 2024
ADHD megathread
1. @visakanv constructive ADHD draft notes (Contains Actionable Advice)

2. @hormeze notes on gabor mate's scattered minds

Read 10 tweets
QC Profile picture
Feb 4, 2024
on the question of whether human-level AI is possible even in principle, people seem to reflexively believe “obviously yes” or “obviously no,” and i’ve never seen anyone publicly change their mind in either direction. and the split is like 80% predictable by STEM background
being a rationalist in the yudkowskian sense selected heavily, among other things, for people who believe that human-level AI is obviously possible. to me at age 22 it boiled down to “humans are just very complicated machines built out of molecules by evolution”
and similarly “human brains are just very complicated computers built out of molecules by evolution”

and the thing is that despite having loosened the iron grip scientific materialism had on me growing up, i still believe all this and have not seen compelling arguments against
Read 11 tweets
QC Profile picture
Dec 26, 2023
short reviews of / commentary on movies i watched on netflix because netflix told me they were leaving soon, or some other place, or for some other reason:
1. the road to el dorado (2000): aged weirdly. it's impossible to ignore the colonialism now and chel now stands out as bizarrely horny for a kids' movie. nobody's allowed to be that horny anymore. some cool animation but deeply mediocre music. watch prince of egypt instead
2. kung fu panda (2008): fat jokes aside, the real story is about shifu getting his heart broken by tai lung, being hardhearted with the five, and getting his heart re-opened by po, and that's a surprisingly strong emotional core that still holds up
Read 15 tweets

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