2000 words into Ch. 86.  I literally got to spend time on HPMOR for only two days out of the month of July, so that’s not too bad.  With any luck, things will regularize for me after SPARC concludes in mid-August.  This Progress Note is short because I spent the time I could’ve used on it, writing Ch. 86 instead, a decision I’m sure you can all understand.  Next update on – you guessed it – September 1st, 2012, at 10PM Pacific Time.

And lo!  Behold the awesome new website of the Center for Applied Rationality!

(This was supposed to post automatically.  It did not.  I apologize for that.)

Real life still slaying me.  I did manage to put out the new, British English versions of Ch. 1-17, with significant tweaks to the writing in Ch. 6, Ch. 7, and Ch. 9.  I know a lot of you will probably decide you liked the originals better.  But they were polarising chapters; and I believe, though it’s impossible to know using Fanfiction.net’s current web stats, that they were scaring away some readers.  I’m okay with driving off some readers for major reasons, but not for minor ones, and it’s quite understandable to me why someone might have a conditioned pain response to songs in fanfiction.

I have completed the scene-by-scene plot of the next arc, working in Scrivener for the first time.  I do still need to review that plot; detail it to the sub-scene level; check tension levels, goals/resolutions, character conflicts, etcetera; but hopefully – this is the hypothesis being tested – once all that is done, the actual writing should go fast.  The current layout has the next arc carrying to Ch. 91, though I suspect at least one of those “chapters” will break in half.

There’s some substantial loads of new fan-art but I’m afraid I don’t even have time to list them out in this update.

I hope to have better news for you next time.  Just please remember, it took J. K. Rowling, literally, 10 years and 21 days to publish the entire Harry Potter series; and there has been progress on the next arc, it’s just slow progress.  This is still going faster than “real” books usually come out.

Much thanks go to all the contributors of the HPMOR Ch. 1-37 Britpick Thread on the r/HPMOR subreddit, with special gratitude to noking for compiling all the suggestions into a single page – this was tremendously helpful in executing the changes.

Next Progress Update on August 1st, 2012 at 10pm Pacific Time.

So… my life has been rather hectic recently.  There was a huge push to get the May Minicamp units done, and now we need as many more units again for the weeklong July minicamp.  (On the plus side, the May minicamp was an overwhelming success by all the measures we tried – the units were perfected in time, everyone visibly enjoyed the hell out of it, all the participants are keeping in touch afterward, and a lot of people were tossing around words like “life-changing”, though, of course, long-term life-outcome followup tests won’t be in for a while.)  I basically put everything else aside and tried to finish up my units for the May minicamp, and then when the first Minicamp was done (on May 15th) I had to write up a rationalist wedding ceremony for two adorably-in-love rationalist friends who asked me to officiate.  (I’ll also be doing a lower-key wedding ceremony this Saturday – you know how it is, you don’t officiate any weddings for years and years, and then you have to do two in 6 days.)  Composing the ceremony used up my background-writing thoughts or a while after Minicamp, I’m afraid.

And then there was the failure of my Buffalo Terastation Pro II, followed by literal smoke coming out of my other drive.  As of yesterday night and $60 worth of SATA-to-USB converters and a crazy amount of work getting mdadm to read my degraded RAID-5 array, I am successfully reading off data into my nice new simple RAID-1 mirrored drive.  Word to the wise:  Don’t buy Buffalo Terastations, and don’t trust RAID-5.  (All this would have been a hell of a lot more inconvenient if I hadn’t already put all my active works-in-progress into Dropbox.  Dropbox is awesome.)

The upshot is that I’m just now getting back to HPMOR, literally yesterday.  And since people have started trying to make printed books of HPMOR – which I neither permit nor deny, but accept as inevitable regardless – I figure I’d better get around sooner rather than later to some intended revisions to the earlier chapters…

No!  Don’t panic!  This isn’t a rewrite, just a few revisions.  Ch. 1-20 have some stylistic and character inconsistencies with the later chapters; they were written before everyone’s personality had settled down more firmly in my mind, and there are some basic writing errors I now know how to correct.  Yesterday I revised Ch. 1-4 on FF.net, and if you don’t see any visible alterations it’s because the changes were pretty minor.  6, 7, and 9 are the main chapters that might require larger revisions, and I expect there to be some controversy.

Today I got to Ch. 5 (again minor alterations only) and am, at this instant, almost done with Ch. 6, which was the first chapter to require major repair.  One section of the chapter had Mood Whiplash – tension rising too quickly, with insufficient warning – which I think I’ve now repaired mostly.  The deeper problem in Ch. 6 is that Harry’s conflict with Professor McGonagall looks too much like a victory – it is a major flaw of Methods that Harry doesn’t lose hard until Ch. 10, so he must at least not win too much before then.  That’s the part I’m working on at this very instant.

Tomorrow I hope to get to Ch. 7 and Ch. 9.  In Ch. 7, the Harry-and-Draco conversation needs to be toned down even further because multiple parents have announced their intention to have their children read this fanfic – and I know that revision is going to be controversial, but Draco’s current conversation is also a little out-of-character by the standards of the Draco in later chapters.  And in Ch. 9, I’m trying to decide whether to remove the Ghostbusters song entirely, or just foreshadow/explain it harder – a lot of people loved it, but a lot of people hated it, and I’m not sure HPMOR needs the extra variance.

And before anyone asks, the printed version of HPMOR that someone made briefly available on Lulu was taken down – probably due to complaints from the troll forum Dark Lord Potter; from what I can see of the chronology, the book was taken down a few moments after someone posted a Dark Lord Potter thread accusing me (it wasn’t me) of selling the book for a profit (the poster made it available at Lulu’s base cost).  This particular forum hates hates hates Methods and anything to do with it, so you can probably assume they’ll complain to any service you use to make HPMOR generally available in printed form.

I am now biting the bullet and starting on Britpicking Ch. 1-37 – trying to eliminate Americanisms from the test.  See the just-launched Official Britpick Thread on /r/HPMOR.  Please note that after some bad prior experiences, I am hoping for actual British readers, rather than Americans working from Internet guides, to offer their advice.  No Britpicks have been contributed yet, so assistance is much desired!

Also much desired are more Bay area test subjects for testing rationality-training units.  We’re starting to run out!  So if you’re in the Bay area and willing to be a test subject For Science! and For Rationality!, please help out!

One of the earliest funders of the Singularity Institute, Edwin Evans (literally the first person ever to support my research – for which he was made Harry’s maternal grandfather in Ch. 36 – also he serves as the Chair of the Singularity Institute) is looking for competent programmers to join the startup he cofounded, Proximiant, located in Mountain View, CA.  They’re trying to replace paper receipts, which besides saving paper and a lot of corporate accounting bureaucracy, will also allow people to do science to their spending habits in greater detail.  Your job will involve, in Edwin’s terms, “getting inanimate objects to communicate telepathically”.  They have funding and are offering competitive salaries along with early-stage startup experience.  Their jobs page is here – and tell them I sent you!

When I’m done with the early-chapter revisions – hopefully tomorrow before I officiate my next wedding – I will fire up Scrivener, the new novel-writing software I’m trying, and start work on the next HPMOR arc, possibly with an altered Ch. 85 thrown in.  (I had something different in mind for Ch. 85, but failed to write it to an acceptable level before the posting deadline; I may try again now that I’ve had a while to think about it.)  For the actual next arc I intend to try plotting out the entire arc scene-by-scene before I write it, using Scrivener’s side-notes pane.  With any luck, that will make the next arc go faster.

But (I hastily disclaim) there’s still a lot of work to be done at the Center for Applied Rationality, as it is now known, getting ready for the weeklong July minicamp, and then the August SPARC mathcamp for exceptional math talents of high school age.  I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I am, at the moment, busier than usual.  Try not to panic; I still mean to finish what I start, and when I actually got a few moments to work on HPMOR, I was able to revise Ch. 1-6 pretty quickly.  On to Ch. 7-9 and beyond!

The next Author’s Note / progress update will be posted at hpmor.com/notes on July 1st, 2012, at 10pm Pacific Time.

“Thank you so much for writing this! My 12-year-old son used to say that he hated math, and now, after reading HPMOR for only 84 chapters 🙂 he’s coming to me and asking me to explain Bayes’ Rule!” — KSVH

Speaking of which:  We’re setting up an expenses-paid week-long summer camp for 20 mathematically talented youths, of high school age (14-17), on August 6th-13th.  The focus will be on the more technical side of rationality – Bayesian statistics and such – but also teaching the same sort of mental skills as the Rationality Minicamps.  Several International Olympiad-level instructors have already volunteered to teach there.  This program will be fully subsidized, including your plane flight, for accepted attendees.  The extremely tentative name is the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition, it will definitely be hosted at U of C Berkeley, and you can fill out a preliminary application here.

It is now too late to apply for the May 11-13 Rationality Minicamp.  If you want to attend the Minicamp in June or July, apply instantly.

The Singularity Summit 2012 will be October 13-14 in San Francisco.  Enter your email address here to be notified the moment tickets go on sale.  Our speaker lineup this year includes Steven Pinker, Vernor Vinge, Peter Thiel, Peter Norvig, Robin Hanson, and random other awesome people.

Anna Salamon would like to note that the Center for Modern Rationality (possibly to be renamed to Center for Applied Rationality, though we’re still experimentally testing names) is especially interested in job applications from anyone who’s done a lot of successful self-modification.  (We’re aware that this will probably get us a lot of applications from wacky people, but experience shows that the few people who do this successfully and sanely often have highly important contributions.)

Jay Dhyani announces that there is now a somewhat-active HPMOR subreddit, with over 100 subscribers.  “This could be interesting,” I mused.  And if anyone has suggestions, I’d like you to comment on “What similar books / stories to HPMOR exist?” – I’m in need of better reading material.

Not to neglect the existing forums, the TV Tropes thread is up to 3,057 comments and the LessWrong Discussion thread just for Ch. 84 surpassed 1,097 comments.  (I expect there’ll be a new thread for Ch. 85 shortly, hence the link to general Discussion.)   On Fanfiction.Net, Methods is up to 17,417 reviews and 9,403,977 non-unique pageviews; and there have been 435,362 pageviews on the new version of HPMOR.com.  And on Facebook HPMOR has 2,934 “likes”, only four of which are from my Facebook friends.  I know damned well that more of you read Methods than that.

Fan art:  Tavoriel brings us a heartbreaking moment.  Nancy Hua shows us wizards shielding their eyes from the shock.  Pencil-Monkey depicts Harry vs. the Dead Duck.  Prima Donna 9396 enters Azkaban (contact me with your cameo name).  Byakubyaku imagines the dark side (ditto).  Harry and Draco appear in this sketch dump by Prite (double ditto).  On the cameo side, Ben Gutierrez cameoed as an Auror in Ch. 83; as did Josh Larios, maintainer of HPMOR.com, cameoing as Arjay Altunay.  RJL20 is his usual Internet handle – bonus points if you noticed what “Arjay Altunay” sounds like.  And Fan Tong has finally gotten her cameo, which I’d originally written for the end of Ch. 63, and then moved to Ch. 85, not dreaming how long the delay would be.

At least three of you utter lunatics went off and wrote computer programs to simulate Professor Quirrell’s horrible humming.  Jason Gross posted this MP3 recording.  Fgenj posted this YouTube recording.  GJM posted cross-platform Python code with tweakable parameters.  Incidentally, I actually do practice humming that lullaby horribly out of tune, as a way to torture my girlfriend Erin.

I’ve eliminated the “distant cry” from Ch. 84 – it was based on a projected part of Ch. 85 that I couldn’t seem to make work out right.  As a result, Ch. 85 is shorter than I’d planned. I may add that part back in later, if I can ever get it to work.

As the next arc is set immediately after this one and will take time to write, we’re probably entering a bit of an interregnum now.  My current plan is to post progress updates in the Author’s Notes on the 1st day of every month, starting June 1st, because I plan to spend from now until May 11th focusing on getting ready for the first Minicamp.  After that, I intend to try writing the next set of updates using Scrivener, which looks like it might be a huge improvement on Word; I’ll keep you posted on how that works out.

While you’re waiting, I commend to you the ongoing series Dungeon Keeper Ami by Pusakuronu, a strangely compelling read which has included some Creative Uses of Science in recent updates.  The stories Mandragora (canon!HP, short) and To The Stars (Madoka) have also recently made my Favorites section.  On the webcomic side, I’m currently going through My Little Pony: Friendship is Betrayal.  And some of you may find Alicorn’s Earthfic amusing.

And the Sequences of Less Wrong await you, as they ever do.

The next progress report will be posted to the Author’s Notes on June 1st at 10PM Pacific Time.

Best comment on Ch. 81, by Hokuten Mage:  “When Harry Potter stares into the abyss, the abyss runs away and hides.”

New fan art:  Karen Dutton brings us that poor Dementor, HK66 (contact me with your cameo name!) brings us Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle, and Chloe silhouettes the Three.  Darek says this was inspired by Quirrell’s many identities – I’m not quite counting it as fan art, but I’m linking it.  And Dinosaurusgede is baaaaaack!

Some people have been asking why I’m posting these at 1 per week.  One answer is that each posting involves a lot of last-minute editing and finalizing, so they are still tiring – the last arc’s final pace of 1 per 3 days was exhausting – and I’m trying to hold it down to one per week this time.  Ch. 83 will be a short chapter posted Wednesday (Apr 4) at 1pm, and then, since that one doesn’t really count, Ch. 84 will be posted next Tuesday (Apr 10) at 7pm.  (And Ch. 85 a week after, according to current plans; that’s the last one queued.)  Next time I may consider trying to finalize the arc further before beginning it, and then posting at a faster pace (at the price of additional delay before starting).

The Center for Modern Rationality is now accepting applications for the next set of Rationality Minicamps, the successors to the highly successful Rationality Minicamp of 2011.  Dates are May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28.  These Minicamps will be planned on the assumption that attendees have read at least some of the Less Wrong Sequences, not necessarily all.  We plan to send out the first batch of acceptances soon, and applying should only take about 10-15 minutes, so please fill out the application now, especially if you prefer to attend in May.

The Center for Modern Rationality is offering $50 prizes for any suggested rationality training exercises that look good enough to test, and $500 prizes for any suggested exercises that we actually adopt into a unit.  Specific descriptions of mental skills, accompanied by the request for exercises to teach them, have been posted for the units Be Specific and Check Consequentialism.  (Think of this as trying to invent the actual content of the bizarre exercises that Harry has been inflicting on the Chaos Legion since Ch. 29… oh, wait, I haven’t mentioned those in the text yet, have I?)