Harry Potter Gets Rational

It's funny how you can spend years reading a series of books and never notice something glaringly obvious until someone points it out to you. Then of course it's, well, glaringly obvious!

I read the first 6 Harry Potter books and thought they were great. I thought they were something I could recommend to a young person to read, but then I just learned about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and I realized, Harry never questioned the magic, never thought critically about it, never tested it. He just instantly accepted it as the new reality.

The Methods of Rationality is fan fiction, but I hear from Julia Galef over at Rationally Speaking, that this is good stuff. In it Harry Potter uses rational and critical thinking to analyze whether things are really magical or if there is a more plausible explanation. He devises experiments and tests his hypotheses. So far I think there are 63 chapters.

I have to confess, I haven't read any of it yet, this is all going on Julia's recommendation, so if it's really horrible, let me know! I am still reading The Selfish Gene so this is on my list for when I'm done.

Go Here for the pdf, epub and mobi (for kindle) versions that you can download and let me know what you think!