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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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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".
Those are the children's books version, and MoR is not a children's book, nor is most fanfiction. If you'll pardon the size of the hypothetical: If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
This is true. But even among works of fanfiction, the ones that point this out tend to also be the ones that are full of sex acts in general, which MoR is not.
MoR points things out for the sake of pointing them out, by way of trying to teach the art of the awakened mind. Actually I'm not clear on what if anything we're arguing about at this point.
I see no need to limit that claim to the males.
I agree. My point was only that, in the context of the canon, having an 11-year-old boy talk about committing rape seems more jarringly unexpected — narratively, not inferentially — than having him talk about committing torture and murder (or having an adult Death Eater commit or talk about committing rape), relating to my point that the "Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?" question was probably not relevant to people's actual objections.
(For the record, I'm not arguing the line shouldn't be there, and I don't disagree at all with your rationale for including it. I'm just trying to imagine the thinking of people who did react negatively to it.)
Would people be shocked if they found out that Voldemort didn't believe in Pure Bloodism and/or didn't care whether it was true-- he was just using it as a means of getting power and an excuse to kill people?
Huh? That was what I assumed when reading the books. I recall some 'blood purism' claims but thought they were just cheers. The sort of thing that only the low-to-mid level death eaters actually believe, before they evolve enough to actually 'get it'.
I suppose on reflection that in a fantasy story I should expect the 'evil' to be blamed on something politically incorrect rather than on universals of human nature.
I'm reading this, which goes into some detail about how carelessly built the Harry Potter universe is.
Still, while blood purism is an obviously easy win for the author, it strikes me as pretty well built into human nature to have a destructive political movement based on amping up prejudice. What would you consider to be a more universal basis for evil?
I have to say, for a blog (?) focused on good writing and story structure, that's a really terrible essay/brain-dump - highly repetitive, problems mostly alluded to rather than described, fact & citation-free, and very very ranty. (I suspect I'd also find a number of self-contradictions if I cared to re-read.)
If it didn't have the occasional good insight, I'd never have finished reading it. I did, but I still hate essays which are intermittent reinforcement schedules.
But here's one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can't live forever 2) you shouldn't avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 ('fine, I can't live for ∞ but can't I live for a few thousand years at least?'), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from 'what is Quirrelmort's grand plan?' to 'how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?'
No, because the books heavily imply that Voldemort didn't believe. He was not pure-blood himself (Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a very bad example of the Aryan ideal). And, I think that the discussions of how Voldemort chose to interpret the prophecy as referring not to Neville (as pureblood as they come) but to Harry (who, through his mudblood mother, is impure) specifically take this tack.
Interesting. My recollection was that as the books progressed, the plausibility of LV not caring about pure-bloodedness grew larger, but he himself didn't admit to any such thing onscreen. Then in Deathly Hallows he suddenly did care about it again, because Rowling suddenly realised that he didn't actually have a motive at all. So any old ill-fitting one would have to do, as part of the overall trainwreck.
Then again, my perspective on HP has been thoroughly polluted by the brilliant essays over at http://www.redhen-publications.com/.
Voldemort says so little on-screen that I don't really get much out of him. His minions certainly do get more pure blood-centric as time goes on - look at Dolores Umbridge even before Deathly Hallows.
Thanks. I really should give up on having opinions about most details in the books-- I've read them at most three times (once for the last two) and have forgotten a lot of detail.
Do you think the Death Eaters really care about Pure Bloodism?
Is MOR's Draco being shocked to find out that Pure Bloodism isn't true just a sign that he's young and naive?
That sounds exactly right to me.
Only twice here, but I have a good memory for written material, and the ideology, physics, and philosophy of Harry Potter interested me long before MoR - so this is just an old topic for me.
Some do. The Blacks and Malfoys, probably. Others are in it to 'back the strong horse', and others are in it because it gives scope to their sadism.
Yes. Eliezer has written about 'nonoverlapping magisteria' before: they are transparent efforts to shrink religion to something which can't be falsified, an effort at special pleading. Even though religion (especially Western ones) have made many empirically falsifiable claims - which largely have been falsified. A very young person might take those claims seriously and be shocked that they are falsified.
To not know theological explanations of the theodicy (a topic recently relevant because I finally got around to reading Eliezer's Haruhi story (which was very good)), to not 'believe in belief', to not dismiss empiricism, to lack all those sophisticated dodges and excuses that intelligent adult theists use to remain theist - this we call 'young and naive'.
I'd be somewhat but not entirely surprised if I learned that about canon Voldemort. I'd be pretty surprised if Smart Science-Aware HPMoR Voldemort hasn't figured it out (not sure how likely it is that he knew all along).
My deduction was that the Malfoy family culture included rape for spite, not that it was something Draco came up with.
The new wording — "As soon as I'm old enough I'm going to rape her" — makes it sound, in the absence of any alleged biological limitations now, like it's some sort of traditional rite of passage in the Malfoy family. (Or at least that's what it made me think of. Probably not the intended meaning.)
I wouldn't be surprised if it were one.
Was there supposed to be something after that quote, or did you cast a non-verbal Protego and deflect one of my points back at my own argument? (If that's the case, I don't quite see the significance of that line. Is it that we're supposed to have the same attitude toward Draco?)
I suspect that Eliezer may be taking that statement as a challenge.
I certainly hope so.
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.
It seems to me that people think rape is preceded by sickness, as in "he must be a real sick bastard". That's in large part because the common picture of rape is someone leaping out of the bushes at a random stranger, when a lot of rape is actually between acquaintances who know each other, and like or at least voluntarily spend time around each other.
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'.