We Want MoR – Chapters 21 and 22

WWMoR-Square

The Scientific exploration into magic begins!

I apologize for the delay in getting this out, and the confusion with a dead link for most of a day. I hope the Longest Episode So Far makes up for it.


Original chapters, written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, can be read here and the audiobook chapters, recorded by Eneasz Brodski, can be found earlier in this podcast feed and on the website.


In next week’s episode, we will be covering chapters 23 and 24.


The Slate Star Codex post I keep referencing but forgot the name of: I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

One of the posts, not the one I was thinking of in the episode, Absolute Authority


Discord Link


Album art courtesy of Lorec from The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast’s Discord. Thank you!

Coy on the same Discord manages an RSS feed that compiles the relevant audiobook chapters with the WW MoR counterparts. Just copy and paste that link into your favorite podcast app in the “add by url” option. Thanks, Coy!

Bookmark the permalink.

11 Comments

  1. The download link appears to be broken.

  2. same thing. cannot play this online or download, either.
    too bad, this podcast really makes me look forward to Mondays.
    well,next monday will be great as always, i m sure

  3. I’m getting:

    >Site Not Found
    >Well, this is awkward. The site you’re looking for is not here.
    >
    >Is this your site? Get more info or contact support.
    >
    >DreamHost

    When I try to download and it says the file is only 358 bytes for some reason

  4. Hey everyone! Sorry for the confusion/error here. I wasn’t able to get everything edited on time last night, but stupidly didn’t unschedule the post from being published, so it linked to nowhere. The episode should now be live.

  5. I’ll leave a longer comment later, but I just wanted to say that I really loved this episode! It’s my favourite one so far, and I didn’t mind the length in the slightest :) It was a lot of fun to listen to, looking forward to next week!

  6. Brian is weird. I wonder who he thinks vote for your current President.

  7. Sebastian Weinberg

    You talk about Harry and Draco skipping the step of actually verifying that the decline of magic is a real, observable fact; they seem to start from the position that this is simply a given.

    It was always my impression that Rowling’s magical world unspokenly followed the common trope, “The Ancients were so much greater than us. Nothing we achieve today compares to their works.”  This usually manifests in historical figures receiving legendary or even god-like status, and all powerful magical items being ancient artifacts, not clever new inventions.  I’m not sure that Rowling INTENTIONALLY tried to implement this trope, but it feels like it partly informed her world-building.

    In the MoR setting this is formalised and established as a real fact: the greatest feats of magic that can be achieved today are lesser than the greatest heights achievable a couple hundred years ago, which are themselves lesser than the ones from centuries before that, and so on.

    As Harry and Draco find out in their investigation, this is the natural effect of the wizarding tradition of secretiveness and refusal to share knowledge.  Where in the muggle world knowledge is being built up and up, each generation extending and refining what was discovered before, in the wizarding world knowledge is constantly draining away over time, as secrets fail to be passed on and new discoveries cannot keep pace with the rate of loss, as they lack a robust information strata to build upon.

    Brian had asked whether the downsides of this “secret society of scientists” idea would ever be explored, and here it is.

  8. Yes, the average reader is expected to be familiar with the original Harry Potter books, and in fact to be more familiar with them than it seems like Brian actually is.

  9. Poor Brian. A few months later, we looked at “do these people actually exist” in a *very* different light.

Leave a Reply to EvelynLangley Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.