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wedrifid comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Chapter 41 (So spoiler alert and chapter notification.)
(Fun chapter and all... go Neville! But...)
Harry is a total wuss. What on earth is he doing going about with grotesque supplication and begging for forgiveness?
There obviously isn't any need for Harry to be obnoxious about it. I would expect Hermione to consider that Harry owes him for that one. I would acknowledge a certain symbolic debt and fulfil demands for recompense (within reason) with grace and good cheer. But remorse of the kind Harry was throwing around is something that matters. Sometimes you really do screw up, and that's when you need forgiveness. Throwing out your biggest apologies when you did basically the right thing and would (if you were sane) do roughly the same thing again next time just cheapens the whole thing. Just how much does an apology mean if you go around apologising to people for, roughly speaking, wussing out and letting them beat you?
(Mind you, I'm evaluating Harry by the standards of the someone somewhat closer to the age that he acts than to the 11 years old that he technically is. With a few years of marinating in testosterone ahead there is hope for him yet.)
Yes, but using feather-fall costs her Quirrell points! That's why she's upset. Or at least, that's one hypothesis that explain the facts. Harry's apology is unnecessary grovelly otherwise.
It's a great point and should get mentioned in the text. Even if it's only a minor reason for Hermione's annoyance, it would tie in nicely with the earlier scene of Hermione having trouble knocking on Quirrell's door.
Excellent. That is the desirable outcome. If enemies unite against you should sabotage their Quirrell points wherever convenient.
"So Granger, how about next time you want something from me you ask nicely for me to participate before you unite with Malfoy?"
They tried that, didn't they? All three generals went to Quirrell together to ask for no more traitors. Harry defected.
Eh, even if Quirrel points were the problem, Harry's apology is still unnecessarily grovelly.
I would go as far as to say the grovelling is worse if the Quirrell points were the problem.
Also, I don't think fire is prohibited, so did Harry warn everyone that they shouldn't try eliminating his bungee cords by burning them?
Unsurprising, and I don't see it as a problem.
Come on - Harry clearly manipulated that situation and needed to lose to make it work. Forcing Draco and Hermione to work together would not have worked nearly as well if they hadn't actually beaten them. Now Hermione doesn't think Draco is evil and irredeemable (especially since he tried to save her), and Draco was actually protecting a mudblood and then shut up and multiplied in order to win.
Wouldn't you like to know? I can think of three main categories of reasons:
I'm such a wrong person, I read that as "Draco made friends with a mudblood and then went forth and multiplied in order to win".
In light of the fanfic's famed/notorious length, this presents some disturbing implications...
Haha, I was just going to post the "Harry is Rand al'Thor" theory myself. Clearly the best explanation.
Followed closely by "Harry is Richard Rahl". :)
Unlike Rand al'Thor, though, Richard Rahl would definitely hit a girl.
If Harry is actually in love with Hermione, is apologizing his best move? Would he do better to show more respect for her intelligence?
Or is he apologizing for something other than setting things up so that it was likely that she'd be dropped?
The 'love' hypothesis was mostly motivated as an explanation in the case that Harry is not making his best move.
I'm pretty sure he's apologizing for a whole package of evil regardless of the dropping. I doubt Harry planned that that particular contingency would happen, and so I would also believe that he's genuinely remorseful that she actually fell.
I was bringing in Hermione's point of view as a possibly interesting part of the situation.
There is a genuinely interesting question here. I know I personally are far less likely to take the advice of or learn lessons from wusses. I am reasonably confident I am not generalising from one example here but for your part does Harry's wussiness have any bearing on how much you expect your own behaviour to be influenced by Harry's example in the MoR parables?
This is to what I referred when I said "some arbitrary social agenda" and that I could see as many reasons to orchestrate winning as losing. Deliberately losing isn't something that I find distasteful. In fact it would be impressive, a rare instance of Harry not doing something motivated primarily by his ego. (Did I say that already? Probably. It sounds like something I would say.)
Brilliant. And that is one of the reasons (apart from excessive braid tugging) that I stopped reading the Wheel of Time series. And this is despite the fact that the very name "Wedrifid" is from the character I created on the Wheel of Time mud who spent months of real time joining the Gaidin and eventually becoming a ridiculously powerful Warder.
That was a lot of fun. All that completely useless status I acquired in an utterly irrelevant social hierarchy! I still use the name 'Wedrifid' in online forums because the Wedrifid persona is more resilient and has a personality that is better adapted to the online discussion context. The "Cameron Taylor" identity works better with, you know, actual flesh and blood people.
Do you have a binary wuss or not a wuss model? If Harry makes himself unduly subordinate to Hermione, does that eliminate the effects of him taking on Dumbledore in regards to Snape?
No, but neither is it univariate. As with many words 'wuss' means rather a lot of different things depending on the context.
Let's leave the word 'wuss' aside for the moment, to look at the implications of those scenarios has on Harry's credibility. I'll also note that subordination isn't always wussy. Grand Viziers are subordinate and far from wussy. In fact, I just got back from playing board games - something that I am extremely good at and in which I make extensive use of subordination to further my goals. Humans are heavily biased towards dominance and I find that a useful trait to exploit. No, neither subordination nor apologies are something that are intrinsically 'wussy'.
But back to the question:
Being incompetent at achieving social objectives seems like a good reason for using 'genius scheming' instead of standard methods. The fact that he does this is one of the reasons that I sympathize with him as a character.
I'm assuming that Harry had a background plan-- to get Draco and Hermione to cooperate, and to feel as though they are on each others' side on a gut level.
Even though the "drop me" scene is cute, I'm not convinced it's plausible behavior for Draco. I bet he hasn't had the Anglo/muggle training about not hurting girls, and learning that blood purity isn't true may not have affected his reflexes.
Harry's apology may be strategic. Or he may still be learning to navigate between empathy and rationality. Or (not an attractive hypothesis) tropes may be taking over some of the story.
ETA: Perhaps that should be empathy-signaling rather than just empathy.
So Eliezer fell prey to counterfactual muggling while writing that part?
Er, who says Draco's grabbing Hermione because she's a girl? He's grabbing her because she's falling off the roof.
Fair point. I jumped to a conclusion.
On the other hand, it isn't dangerous for her to fall. Draco grew up in the wizarding world. I'd expect him to have a gut-level trust in the potion.
Or is Hermione showing excessive trust in the potion because it's labeled as working a certain way, while Draco has more experience with magic that doesn't quite work?
"I bet he hasn't had the Anglo/muggle training about not hurting girls"
I agree. The "don't hurt females" meme and the idea of chivalry arise from the fact that men are physically stronger than women. But in the magical world, physical strength hardly matters in comparison to magical ability, which seems to be evenly distributed between the sexes. A witch would feel angry, or perhaps just confused, at being treated like porcelain. Granted, Hermione and Harry come from the muggle world, but Draco doesn't, and he shouldn't behave like he does.
Didn't it arise, at least partially, because power and legal rights belonged to men (by decree of Heaven) and therefore it was seen as the duty of men to protect women, as an item under the general heading of protecting the weak?
What did chivalry (ed: fixed) look like in cultures other than Medieval Europe?
You mean chivalry? Wikipedia says that the European Christians actually got it from Muslims, whose version was more extreme. This probably includes the doctrine of courtly love), which is the source of chivalrous ideals on the treatment of women.
In contrast, one website says the ideal wife of a Japanese samurai would also be a strong person, so perhaps bushido took the opposite attitude. (Internet searches on this turn up too much modern stuff for me to get any good idea.)
Yes, my typo; fixed.
First you write
Then you write
I think that you've answered your question.
And, in so doing reinforced the core thesis: Harry!Ch41 is a wuss. The overprotective thing can work, particularly when produces displays of dominance or heroism (eg. Christmas Eve dinner) but pointless supplication is the opposite of what he wants to be doing.
It totally breaks the flow of the story for me. If I am reading along empathising with the main character and he pulls stunts like this I feel a huge surge of revulsion. This is particularly the case if it seems like the behaviour is presented as a good moral that gives good results rather than "look at the naive character act like a git and then realise he needs to wise up!"
Sure, I agree with that.
But I don't agree with this:
It finally made Harry seem like a real person to me again. I like seeing how MoR!Harry (and MoR!everybody) differs from canon, but sometimes he's a little too perfect.
I expect that to happen in a later chapter. Surely EY doesn't think that Harry is acting sensibly? That would be a horror! (Unless Harry has some really devious plot that I don't anticipate, of course.)
That's just eh experience I got from chapter 36 (visiting the Grangers), my favourite chapter thus far.
I think that's the thing for me. I actually aren't so sure. Some of the other foolish things Harry has done MoR!Author seems to be trying to convey as sensible decisions. For example... the other apology Harry has made to Hermione. When Hermione had panicked and cast finate incantatem on their transfiguration work. The apology itself was reasonable but it seemed like both Harry and MoR!Author were trying to convey that casting finate was a sane thing to do. Not, for example, isolating the room and running to fetch McGonagal. Being responsible doesn't mean turning off your brain at the first sign of danger!
ETA: The latest chapter was interesting. Less nauseating but more bizarre.
Not.
H'm, you may be right. Altough it may yet be accepted that Harry was overreacting.
Anyway, it leads to a nice introduction to Remus!
(Edit: add ‘although’ in first line, which is really what I meant all along.)
The feather-fall potions were protection against a case that wasn't supposed to happen. Harry doesn't take precautions so that he's licensed to need them, he takes precautions so that people don't get hurt. Hermione falling wasn't supposed to happen -- he endangered her for the sake of a game. He raised the stakes farther than they were supposed to go, and it was someone else who could have gotten hurt.
Fixed for you.
It does seem to happen that way sometimes, doesn't it? But in my observation the only cases where marinating in testosterone makes people worse in the areas of grovelling, supplication, unnecessary apologies and approval seeking are in people who refuse to update based on evidence. We can assume that unlike many nerds Harry is able to make observations from the environment and use them to realise that his strategy doesn't work and go ahead and create a better model of human behaviour and a better strategy.
In guys who are good at instinctive instrumental rationality will tend to be prompted by testosterone to, as they say, 'grow a pair'. Simply because experience tells them that the other options just don't work.
I don't think Harry is romantically interested in Hermione, he still thinks kissing is icky, etc.
I figured Harry gave Draco and Hermione the potion because he wanted them to triumph over him together, but in a really dramatic challenging way. If their triumph was hard-fought and dramatic they would be more likely to bond over it. Once Draco was friends with a muggleborn, he would be forever lost to the blood-purists, and Harry would have one a great victory. That is what Harry cares about the most. He obviously is willing to lose to let it happen because he engineered the Dramione alliance from the beginning.
Really? I thought those two things were entirely compatible. And rather cute. :)