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Blueberry comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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Comments (866)
I assumed it was a reference to the way young kids sometimes write slash fanfic when they don't know anything about sex, and they make all kinds of mistakes. There are other fanfic references, like Harry's line to Draco, "It makes my heart swoon". I don't know if it's a reference to anything specific, but NihilCredo seemed to suggest that e found it.
Actually, what I meant is that I cannot possibly conceive an eleven-year-old kid openly admitting that he cannot yet have an erection - he'd rather jump into a fire. It makes me wonder what kind of kids Eliezer hung out with.
In most Western societies, boys' relation with sex moves straight from "knowing nothing" to "pretending to know everything". (Wizarding Britain could be different, but there is nothing in Rowling's or Eliezer's writings to explain that.)
And Eliezer has just fixed the sentence (along with a few other small tweaks to Chapter 7). Glad to see improvements!
Can we maybe get a list of these changes somewhere?
Don't think so, sorry (unless archive.org or similar sites are especially zealous with ff.net). But you can do what I did and add the various chapters to the Update Scanner extension for Firefox, which will do the job for you.
Oh, I was more of hoping we could prod Eliezer into supplying us with a list of such. :)
Well, for one thing, sometimes Orwellian Retcons are there for important future reasons. It's one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.
Also, what kind of load does Update Scanner put on FFN's servers?
I was thinking more for the benefit of those of us who only saw the older versions rather than for those of us who only saw the newer versions...
Yes, a diff would be great, so we don't need to read the whole thing to get the Orwellian Retcon.
Well then, please keep notes on the different versions so that future historians can look at the versions. I estimate a small chance that historians will be interested in this work (< 5%), but if one puts a high probability of a Singularity then the probability goes up a lot. So you would presumably think that it is worthwhile to keep them.
The Less Wrong Drinking Game: have a shot each time someone brings up the Singularity in a completely unrelated thread.
What's worse is that I'm one of the people here who seems to give a lower estimate for a Singularity type event... Maybe it should be two shots whenever it is brought up by someone who doesn't identify as a Singularitarian?
You mean the removal of "there's plenty of girls out there who deserve it", or some other change you made in the past?
And why is the auto-scanner anything but good for anyone? Had I not had it running, I would never have become at all aware of the changes, and the old version would have remained the only one I knew.
Default setting is checking each page once per day, though you can set whatever you like, so don't worry, it's not bringing the site down any time soon. The comparison with the last downloaded page is done locally. Here for more.
Oh, some other change I made in the past.
The new sentence is a bit lacking in the original's shock value. I would have left the "that bitch" part in.
I'm not sure the Draco I've been writing for the last few chapters would use the term "bitch" in front of Harry Potter, it doesn't sound dignified enough for the heir of Malfoy.
(But yes I did explicitly consider that alternative. If I get enough votes for keeping the shock value I'll put it back in, or figure out something, I guess.)
Rape isn't nearly shocking enough. We need naughty words.
This, unfortunately, is precisely how most people's minds work.
Correct. Do I need to point out again that no one even noticed the thing with the monastery?
It is expected that villains, even in the canon of children's books, will kill and maybe occasionally torture victims in order to establish that they are bad. It is not expected that villains, especially in the canon of children's books, will permit/condone/commit rape. Additionally, the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede murder and torture are more familiar than the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape, and so someone unfamiliar with the actual etiology of any of those crimes finds rape less relatable and more shocking.
Agreed. I also think the original "Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?" question (in one of the Author's Notes) was a little bit misguided because, as far as most HP readers are concerned, Voldemort is already considered to have passed the moral event horizon from the outset. There's little he could do that would make us think "Wow, I didn't know Voldemort was that evil". And 11-year-old Draco, being the son of a Death Eater, might be expected to hold certain evils as justifiable or compulsory — we expect that he's been conditioned to find it acceptable to kill, torture, and exploit non-purebloods, and generally to manipulate people for his own ends. And as long as he's still young, we're inclined to be relatively lenient in judging him for those attitudes, considering he has never learned anything else, nor been allowed (or allowed himself) to reconsider it. What we don't expect is for him to talk casually about committing rape, considering that nobody in the series does, even the darkest of the canon dark wizards; it makes it seem like it's an idea he came up with on his own, like he just heard a definition of rape and thought to himself "Hey, that sounds like a fun thing to do to young female political enemies, and I bet I could get away with it, too". So I bet most of the objections were based not on thinking "that's more evil than Voldemort", but "that's way more evil than Draco is supposed to be right now".
Also, murder can be presented in fiction with enough distance to be fun, but this isn't true of rape.
Note that there are mystery weekends for solving murders, but not for solving rapes.
Aren't the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape just extreme sexual arousal, frustration, and anger? Is that what you mean? I'm not sure how accurate that is in real life but that doesn't seem too unrelatable.
There are few people above the age of 10 who find the word 'bitch' shocking nowadays. What was shocking about it isn't its 'naughtiness' (??), it's what it revealed about Draco's mentality, namely that it's polluted by a good amount of medieval misogyny.
I vote for putting the shock value in. I'd also change it to "When I'm old enough, I'm gonna rape that bitch and knock her up" or "When I get a chance, I'm gonna rape that bitch." As well as being old enough to get an erection, 11-year-olds are old enough to rape, though of course this could just be Draco's bravado.
I have a notion that this bit (especially the earlier version where Draco admits to not having erections yet) was the result of story constraints.
After somewhat about the Malfoys being pretty cool in ways which are important from the point of view of the story, it was necessary to shockingly remind the reader that they're also morally deficient and seriously bad news. At the same time, it was also a good idea to make this a hypothetical threat-- the story line isn't now (and perhaps not ever) about Hermione being in danger.
Read chapter 22 and 23, then look at what you just wrote. Are you sure that's the same Draco? If the passage actually does need more shock value (and I'm not quite sure that it does, especially given the wide variance in reader taste and the number who enjoyed the rest of the fic but thought that one part was too shocking) then it has to be more in-character for the later-revealed Draco. There's a simple way to increase the shock without adding vulgarities that polite young Death Eaters don't use - namely, substitute "torture and rape" for "rape" - but I already think this whole conversation is getting a bit off-topic for LW.
It didn't bother me. If Malfoy was thinking about self-control and wasn't really bothered, he wouldn't be using a curse at all; once your self-control is lost, it doesn't matter whether you use 'bitch' or some amusing Elizabethanism like 'trull' or 'maculate hobbyhorse'.