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Davy

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Davy is currently reading

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Goodreads Author)

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Davy said: " REVIEW IN PROGRESS

Started this years ago, loved it, didn't finish, never forgot it, coming back to it now during a long plane ride, just as engaging as the first time. The overall concept of teaching the scientific method/philosophy of rationality th REVIEW IN PROGRESS

Started this years ago, loved it, didn't finish, never forgot it, coming back to it now during a long plane ride, just as engaging as the first time. The overall concept of teaching the scientific method/philosophy of rationality through a mix of fantasy and satire is FANTASTIC. Like, a humorously written bait and switch escapist fantasy that makes?lets? me question everything I know and feel in the real world is just well and truly my jam. Would love to see someone update this to include what we have come to learn about gender/sex/etc and make the HP world reckon with that one.

I understand and partially agree with people's critiques about the infodumping making the piece less generally accessible than it claims to be, but a) I am exactly the kind of nerd that loves that type of infodump and b) I do think decent efforts were made to space out the dumps and decently situate them in the story and c) it's a fanfiction, editing is not going to be top notch. For a 2k+ page fanfiction - and compared to many 'edited' published books- I do think the writing flows phenomenally, and I am both blown away and deeply jealous of the quality this story has in its raw form.

I STRONGLY disagree with the reviews which state this fanfiction is bad because it features an obnoxious and well-educated 11 year old boy as the main protagonist.
A) It is fully explained in the story why Harry is so 'unrealistically' smart.
Also, no one has the same critiques for Hermione so... why CAN'T he simply be that smart, in this AU?
Also, while I don't think Harry's level is realistic for the average 11 year old, I do also think that the average 11 year old is significantly underestimated when it comes to the levels of knowledge retention and reflection-based sophistication that they can achieve. I myself got really into the scientific method and the pursuit of rationality exactly around the ages of 8-12 (shoutout to my iconic science teacher Stein- wouldn't be a doctor today without him!!!), as did many of my friends.

B) What is wrong with having an 'obnoxious' main character? Harry CONSTANTLY faces comeuppances for his arrogance and ignorance right from the beginning and is clearly and repeatedly shown being upset by these instances and striving to do and be better. And then, yes, he fucks up again, sometimes in the exact same way. To me that makes him a great POV character. What is more relatable than being overconfident, then fucking up, then realising you know nothing, and then doing it all again? 11 is a fine age to reach the first phase of the Dunning-Krueger effect (also, I was absolutely tickled when Harry realised this himself). Also, as a child I DEFINITELY had the same frustration Harry does of not being taken seriously by adults, and also was placed into into shitty and unsafe situations because of that. It is REALLY VALIDATING to see that reality represented. One of my main resolutions as an adult now is to take kids seriously for what they see and hear and think and know and I love that this book advocates for that as well. ...more "

progress:

(27%)
— Jan 29, 2026 02:27PM

Jan 29, 2026 02:59PM · see review

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Butch Is a Noun

by S. Bear Bergman

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Feb 18, 2025 01:20PM

Davy is currently reading

Ugly, Bitter, and True

by Suzanne Rivecca

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Davy said: " Good Quote notes:

"And you’re so ashamed of your failure, so afraid of burdening people, so terrified of being beholden to or controlled by whatever might save and contain you, that you just recede, and disappear."

"I’d reached that dark inner place a Good Quote notes:

"And you’re so ashamed of your failure, so afraid of burdening people, so terrified of being beholden to or controlled by whatever might save and contain you, that you just recede, and disappear."

"I’d reached that dark inner place at which a catastrophe seemed less outlandish than a reprieve."

"I felt like it was my job to make the city care, to tell the story right, and I had to walk a fine line in order to do it: to tell the unvarnished truth about how desperate things were, but in a way that didn’t offend or accuse or beg too hard. The desired tone—verbal and written—was a kind of tempered, humble rationality, and the jarring dissonance between the tragedy and injustice I witnessed and the tepid equanimity with which I packaged it felt like a daily betrayal, of myself and of reality. When I resumed this job after my hiatus, I remembered how necessary the dissonance was, how it seeped into the daily fabric of my life and consciousness."

"The contrast between my mental state and the manic-pixie-priestess persona I had to embody—“Turn your inner glow into an outie” was an actual line of copy that sprung, like a rogue spiral of silly string, from the blackened hull of my brain—was at least absurd enough to distract me, in a bleak, bemused way."

"Every day felt like an ingestion of slow poison, and I’d lost the antidote. I was getting a little sicker all the time."

"At dusk I stood on various bridges over the Tiber and watched the starlings’ kaleidoscopic heavings, oceanic and billowy, ripe for interpretation, the morphing black Rorshachs of their massed-together bodies coagulating and thinning, waxing and waning, never resting, and I knew I was supposed to find meaning in their aerial designs but I couldn’t. The birds kept shitting on my head"

"I was there, I was fortunate to be there, I was surrounded by deathless monumentality, and I had never felt more ephemeral and unnecessary to the world."

" Italy did not break them; it merely threw their brokenness into profound and excruciating relief. But I didn’t want to believe that they had all merely succumbed, as fated, to some inborn flaw in their synaptic composition. I wanted to believe that there was something Woolson had left undone, something the Academy ghosts had left undone: something they averted their eyes from, and ran from. Something they could have confronted and survived."

"Before the book came out, I wrote a six-page single-spaced letter addressed to every single member of my extended family. The letter was an attempt to convince my relatives that everything in the book was a product of my uncanny ability to put myself in the shoes of highly dysfunctional and fucked-up people whose antics I’d decided to dramatize as a humanist exercise in emotional ventriloquism. Nothing bad had ever happened to me, I assured them, and I was a well-adjusted, normal girl. There was nothing destructive in my depths; there was only a desire to understand and nobly portray other people’s inexplicable and unfathomable darkness.

By the time the book actually came out, I felt disassociated from my writing and unable to tap into the urgency that had always propelled it forward. I turned a polite, sweet, nervous face to the world, the face of a well-mannered and well-brought-up girl whose surprisingly “dark” work was entirely the product of empathetic imagination, not indicative of any justifiable rage or complexity in my own makeup.

I got the book out into the world; I wrote it, that was the important thing, and lying about it was merely the price I had to pay for letting it exist in the first place"

felt both fiercely protective of my secret activity and terrified that the very act outed me as “sensitive”—that is, as someone who absorbed everything everyone said and did with wretched permeability and then took up a pen and grotesquely enshrined it all, as if it mattered, as if I cared, as if it got under my skin. ...more "

May 01, 2023 01:51PM · see review

See all 7 books that Davy is reading…

Davy’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for The Gene: An Intimate History

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

2 highlights

Freaks became norms, and norms became extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced.

... But I'm NOT Racist!: Tools for Well-Meaning Whites

by Kathy Obear

49 notes & 104 highlights

Davy’s Quotes

“Fact is, blatant heterosexuals
are all over the place.
Supermarkets, movies, on your job,
in church, in books, on television
every day and night, every place -
even in gay bars.
& they want gay men & women
to go hide in the closets -

So to you straight folks
i say - Sure, i'll go
if you go too
but i'm polite
so - after you.”
― Pat Parker, The Complete Works of Pat Parker

6 likes

“I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

tags: dark-side, organisation, rule-the-world, sense, universe

119 likes

“A wonderful bird is the Pelican.
His beak can hold more than his belly can.
He can hold in his beak
Enough food for a week!
But I'll be darned if I know how the hellican?”
― Dixon Lanier Merritt

tags: limericks

104 likes

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

tags: ethics, politics

615 likes

“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.

But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

tags: humanism, morality, morals, philosophy, religion

224 likes

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