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wedrifid comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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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.