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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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That was a hard swat at "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".
As for why Harry has such an exaggerated sense of responsibility, it might be that growing up on science fiction thing. A lot of science fiction is set up so that the hero can have a huge effect in a satisfying way. Perhaps Harry should have balanced it with reading history. On the other hand, he's living in fiction, so maybe he's right for his situation.
Lois McMaster Bujold has described sf as fantasy of political agency [1], and I think she's on to something.
I assume that shutting down Azkaban has a political solution rather than a magical or violent solution. This will be interesting to watch.
Why would Snape ask Harry for his take on Snape's past? One of the underlying premises of the story is that the smarter characters (possibly with the exception of Hermione) always have a deeper plan. Did Snape actually expect to get good advice? To be told that all his choices were correct? To have a reason to be angry at Harry? None of these make huge amounts of sense (to me, at least-- I have trouble keeping track of all the scheming), even though the scene was very emotionally effective.
This is basically my review posted to fanfiction.net-- let me know if there's a problem with reposting such here.
[1] The link goes to quite an interesting speech
Thanks for that link. To rephrase: unlike romance or detective stories, many SF/fantasy stories are carefully rigged to give the "underdog" protagonists huge power over the world. It's scary how much this pattern fits.
I think he was testing the differences between Harry and his dad, and was surprised enough at the contrast to keep asking questions.
Quite the opposite. I was tempted to respond to the review but had been left without an appropriate forum.
I had to go back and figure out where you thought the Omelas reference was. Harry's observation just seemed obvious to me.
Personally, I don't even see anything to explain. Billions of people are suffering, and at least billions are going to die, and most people are observably doing nothing about it. Harry seems to have good reason to think he's the only one that can do anything, if only because he's the only one (or one of just a few) who noticed and/or cares.
Harry is right to take responsibility for the universe's troubles, as we all should.
I think Harry was just using Azkaban as an example, and there will turn out to be more of a general solution to the world's problems unless Harry finds himself dealing directly with Azkaban.
Harry's problem seems to be not that he has decided to do something about it but that he takes pride in feeling guilt over the suffering of everyone (even obscenely evil people). It is on thing to prefer to take over the universe and allow the evil people to live freely in a way that can't hurt others, but it is quite another to be all emo about it. That achieves nothing except allow harry to feel self righteous.
IMO he's not all emo about it. He is also aware of his feeling guilty about it and agrees with Neville when he says he's silly. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall him feeling proud of it.
I also wonder why Snape got offended. Harry's answers were extremely supportive of Snape's situation back then: which makes me think Snape wasn't really offended, just pretending to be. Maybe the whole point was just for Snape to tell Harry the unpleasant truth about his parents in an emotionally powerful way, as a way of getting back at Harry because of his parents.
Snape still loves Lily and was upset about hearing her insulted, was my interpretation.
Awww... but that puts Harry in an impossible position. There's nothing he could have said that would have worked. If he had said Lily made a good choice, that would have directly insulted Snape. And Snape must have known that Harry would be in an impossible position, so he must have wanted to trap Harry into thinking he had done something wrong.
It's not quite impossible. He could have roundly blamed everything on James, casting Lily as a pure, victimized, agency-less casualty of his manipulations. That seems to be what Snape does.
It is possible to respond in a less direct way. Competent social skills would suggest putting very little actual content into his answer. I am less cunning than Harry and not known to be particularly conservative in my expression of potentially provocative positions but even so I do not think I would have all that much trouble responding with tact. Snape would still make a hostile reply but he does that to answers to potions problems anyway. He probably wouldn't be tempted to kill me.
I don't know about you, but having someone tell me I should give up something I've been overfocused on for a long time can be quite painful.
Assuming Snape was genuinely hurt by Harry's interpretation of Lily, I would expect to see a fraying between Snape and the Dumbledore faction as Snape questions why he is so faithful to Lily.
Yes, I suspect that was the point of that scene - to make things harder for Harry by taking away a (secret) ally. That would align with Eliezer's stated philosophy of fanfiction.
Furthermore, the major event in Aftermath 2 is that Snape reads students' minds again-something he agreed not to do under his agreement with Dumbledore. Which is further evidence that he has "gone rogue."
Ch. 18
In Aftermath 2 it seems reasonable that safety of Alissa requires reading her mind.
Edit: Thus, the change is that he directly addressed cause of her distraction.
What is most interesting to me is how Snape handles being offended. Snape has been portrayed in this FanFic as being extremely shrewd and self controlled. Harry even made observations along those lines himself, upgrading his respect for Snape considerably.
Snape (quite rightly) downgraded his trust in Harry's cunning. I wonder if Harry downgrades his respect similarly. If Severus had the cunning of even the 11 year old Malfoy he would not 'never talk to Harry again". Any benefit that he could hope to extract from Harry is still there and Severus is enough of a political agent to work past some offence when given a few months to cool down.