“Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR), a novel running to 650,000 words (substantially longer than War and Peace), is among the most widely read pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction on the internet. Yudkowsky started working on it in 2010, posting chapters online as he wrote them for the next five years.
     Yudkowsky's Harry Potter is a wizard in training and a child prodigy with a set of interests and goals suspiciously similar to those of Yudkowsky himself: eliminating death is at the top of his list. The book has chapter titles like "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis," "Bayes's Theorem," and "Personhood Theory." Yudkowsky's Potter is supposed to be eleven, but he talks much more like the adult Yudkowsky. And like Yudkowsky, he wants to save the world—his way. "World domination is such an ugly phrase," Yudkowsky's Potter says at one point. "I prefer to call it world optimisation.”