Comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 09:13:15 GMT

having not read all of the books should not stop him.

That's not true. Without exhaustive knowledge of canon, there's no way to know whether a given detail is specified at all or not. For example, Eliezer may not have realized that Harry and Draco's experimental results should have been outright confusing given the canon-available information on inheritance.

why is Peter Pettigrew as Scabbers stupider than the rules of Quidditch, for example?

This much at least makes sense to me. Scabbers!Pettigrew requires one person to have done something ridiculously stupid, all on his own. Quidditch is a group error, the kind that can accumulate insidiously from an initially reasonable state and linger for a long time even when every member of the group would have been smart enough not to initially make the error that they're all propagating.

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