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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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I've been having some problems with MOR Hermione, and chapter 42 amplifies them, with a side issue of what seems like very strange behavior from the other girls.
She seems like a bit of a monster, without concern for whether Harry's apologies actually make sense. Is it plausible that she would have so little interest in fairness?
I'm not talking about whether you think some, or many, women (or girls) would behave like that, but whether it makes sense for Hermione.
This is honestly making me feel a bit aspie over here. As I understand the rules for social interaction, dropping a 12-year-old girl off the roof should generally be recognized as a misdeed. Hermione, as I was modeling her, was annoyed enough by having to climb the icy castle walls, and after falling off the roof, had gone beyond annoyance into a kind of detached curiosity. Bear in mind that she doesn't know anything about Harry's plans for Malfoy; so far as she knows, Harry is doing all of this for no other reason than to be annoying. I had trouble understanding wedifrid's reaction to Harry and hypothesized that he enjoyed empathizing with a dominant character and didn't want that dominant character to apologize, but now Nancy thinks Hermione is being unfair and, well. I feel a bit aspie because I don't quite understand where it's all coming from. Canon!Hermione in particular seems like she'd be really really annoyed with Harry making her climb up an icy wall and then getting her dropped off the roof. She'd forgive it in a flash as part of the war against Voldemort, but not if it was, say, part of a prank. What am I missing here?
Not as much as I'm missing. They were in the final stage of an important war(game), so climbing icy walls with magic technological help seems to me a minor discomfort, just part of the game. They all had Feather Fall potions, so no-one was in any danger, whatever the lizard brain thinks of looking down from a long way up. Hermione even told Draco to drop her (according to the possibly unreliable girls' chatter afterwards). Harry had no way of knowing exactly how the rooftop chase would play out, although I would guess that he secretly practiced beforehand to get an advantage.
So, what is there for Harry to apologise for, and in such an extreme manner? I was expecting something else to be revealed in 42, but apparently not.
I know nothing about canon HP, but I don't think that matters here.
Have you ever been rock climbing? I assure you that the fact that you're safe, and even the fact that you know you're safe, does not shut off the (untrained) lizard brain, at least not the sort of lizard brain that's afraid of heights.
Bizarrely enough, I went rockclimbing a couple of months ago. The first time in years, and the knowledge that I was safe seemed that it did make a lot of difference. At 50 metres up I deliberately violated the "don't look down" rule because I am somewhat masochistic when it comes to challenging my (miscallibrated) instincts. But the vertigo I expected just didn't come at all - I was genuinely surprised. My theory is that my "lizard brain" was already engaged with my rather stronger competitive instincts.
I find the same thing. Climbing isn't scary at all when you're tied on.
I only went climbing less than a dozen times, so I can’t be sure about “getting used to it”, but then again Hermione probably wasn’t used to dropping from castles.
When I climb a “simple” vertical wall I don’t get any vertigo or other “lizard-brain complaints” as I had expected. (I rarely get vertigo from heights in general, and among my friends I’m usually the guy closest to any ledge, with everyone telling me to get back, from a safe distance.)
However, I did once a climb an indoor route (not sure about terminology) that wasn’t just vertical, it had a kind of lateral transfer to a ledge at the top, and the part where I didn’t see a wall below me all the way down did feel like having butterflies in my stomach despite being tied to a rope. I liked it, but I can see it as a very unpleasant experience for a bookish (i.e., not a tom-boy) 11 years old girl.
Technicality: she's 12 by now; in fact, she's been 12 since mid-September. (Yes, I am a nerd.)
It doesn't mean anything afterwards, though, and afterwards is when the puzzling scene happens.
I haven't been rock climbing, but I can tell you that the main reason I'm scared of heights is because I get an urge to jump off, and I have to fight it back down again. If there's a full glass window or something between me and the drop, on the other hand, heights don't bother me at all.
(We read that play out ourselves.)
If Harry had deliberately zapped Hermione to make her stumble and distract Draco, that would explain everything, but in the text he's running away, dodging their spells. He might have set some sort of trap on the roof, but there's no indication in the text.
I don't want to bring up PUA, but...
...if you're empathizing with the character...
...then one thing you might feel here is searing embarrassment at the sight of a boy acting this way in front of a girl. I had in mind the old saw about men being attracted to looks, women to status. 'I'll do anything, I'm begging you on my knees' is utter abasement, and even if 11-year-old Harry thinks this is what normal interaction between the sexes looks like, it's still painful to see someone humiliate himself.
While it's true that the average man is more attracted to looks than to status, and the average woman is more attracted to status than to looks, be careful not to over-generalize these preferences. Harry doesn't seem to mind, for instance, that Hermione is plain looking, and admires her intelligence, while the average man prefers beautiful women noticeably less intelligent than he is. Hermione isn't particularly attracted to high status men in canon (she picked Ron over Viktor Krum, for chrissakes), and there's no indication that she's different in MoR. Neither of them fit the personality profiles that the PUA community has studied most heavily, which I've heard described as "extroverted young women of average intelligence" and... well, I haven't been informed about the type of men specifically, but I'll hazard a guess that they're not like MoR Harry. So PUA models of interaction between the sexes wouldn't give you very reliable intuitions about how Hermione and Harry should act towards one another. Never mind that they're prepubescent and applying any adult models of interaction that were developed with sexual relations in mind to them seems kind of creepy in the first place. "Relationship" aside, they're mostly friends at this point.
I mean, I agree with you that Harry's apology was rather embarrassing, but that was because it wasn't warranted by the circumstances. If he'd actually done something worthy of an abject apology to Hermione, then he should be giving one, not restraining himself in order to protect his dominance over her.
The differences are also typically exaggerated in popular culture and also in individual reports. If we compare actual behaviour to reported preferences the sexes are a whole lot more similar in their preferences (when it comes to status and money vs looks) than they tell themselves. Mind you, there is only so much faith I can place in the results of such studies (usually done in speed dating type 'laboratory' settings.)
Interesting. I'm not sure if the correct dichotomy is status vs looks either. It could very well be money vs looks with both as indicators of status, since a woman's status (and ability to confer status on a man with her attention) is often determined by her looks. Have their been studies comparing attraction to, for example, very beautiful female sex workers vs less beautiful cheerleaders? Disclaimer: I'm wildly speculating here...
Not as far as I know, but there definitely should be. I don't think there is any way such a study could not be interesting. There should also be some studies done on The Cheerleader Effect.
Yes, this is why I didn't want to bring up PUA -- it drags in a host of connotations which were unrelated to my point. Which was simply that loss of dignity in front of the opposite sex is far more painful for males. The PUA-disclaimer was meant to convey that, even though I attributed the difference to the evo-psych reason I gave, I didn't want to derail the conversation with this sort of thing. Ah well.
To be honest I would have been almost as embarrassed if Hermione had done it. And probably even more bewildered.
Dropping a twelve year old girl off a roof is generally recognized as a bad idea in this world, but we don't have magic spells.
Hermione was enthusiastic about the war, and had asked to be dropped.
Since I might be a weird person myself, I've set up a poll about the plausibility of MOR Hermione.
Meanwhile, I recommend Jo Walton's Among Others, a fantasy novel with autobiographical elements about the coming of age of an intelligent, stubborn young woman. It won't be out till January, but I'll lend you my advance reading copy if you'll PM me your snail address.
Tentative theory: MOR Hermione is shaped by a combination of feminism and PUA, and the result is extremely odd. In any case, I find Harry, Draco, and McGonigle quite plausible, and I wonder if you've used different methods for creating them than you used for Hermione.
I know nothing about PUA except what I read in other people's blog comments, and this part honestly leaves me baffled. Wha? Amplify please?
My knowledge of PUA is almost entirely from the comments here, too. Part of what gets on my nerves about it is that it seems to have a model of relationships in which people are in them solely because of status and fertility markers. There's nothing I can see about people actually liking each other (or, for that matter, disliking each other), or not being completely fungible if a better deal comes along.
There's that bit where Harry explains Lily's choice completely in terms of status issues-- this suggests that PUA/evolutionary psychology at least seems like a plausible set of theories to you. It's possible that I'm conflating them as having more in common than they actually do.
It gets to me that Hermione seems to be thinking in terms of herself and Harry having a Relationship rather than focusing on what they actually are to each other-- I think she'd have better sense. Or maybe I just hope she would.
It's interesting that I've gotten upvoted and a couple of positive comments for my complaints about the most recent chapter, while still getting information which suggests that Hermione is generally seen as more plausible than I see her. I tentatively suggest that my suspension of disbelief is broken, while other people are seeing some specific implausibilities that don't bother them nearly as much.
One suggestion about the Ravenclaw girls' vote-- they may well be voting for the most entertaining drama for themselves rather than what's best for Hermione. This may have already occurred to you, considering that so many of them wanted to catch Harry.
In their case, more of them should have generalized from one example.
Here maybe I see (but also generalising from one example) why people like your comments but don't qutie agree with you. This is definitely what I'd expect from a 12-year old, at least in the society that I grew up in, which should be similar to Hermione's. (Come to think of it, this reminds me of my sibling at that age, although not myself.) But it's not what I would have hoped.
The fact that status influences our behaviours does not make them any less real. Nor does the fact that there are good evolutionarily explainable reasons for loyalty mean that loyalty is any less noble.
I agree that status influences our behavior. I don't agree that status is the only thing going on.
If you replaced "I don't agree that" with "I don't believe that" then it would avoid a misleading implication. ;)
I see that you made a claim that I didn't address, but I think you also missed what I was saying.
I haven't seen people who are into PUA make an explicit claim that there's nothing to relationships but status and fertility signaling. What I do see is talk about relationships as though there's nothing else. All I know about you folks is what you write, or at least how your text looks to me.
I believe I've pointed this out before, but at least some "PUA" training emphasizes personal development, emotional connection, and trust as the foundation for interaction and relationships. (The word "status" is not mentioned once on that page, and if I recall correctly, it is not mentioned in any of the videos being sold there either.)
I was making almost the opposite point. You addressed a claim that I wouldn't make and I was distancing myself from it!
"You folks"? I am not and have never been a PUA of any kind! You are welcome to your stereotypes but please exclude me from them. :)
Do you remember where you saw writing that gives you this impression? I've seen PUAs talk a lot about status and fertility signals underlying relationships. I don't think that the consensus is that "there's nothing else," but I've seen some PUAs write stuff that could give that impression, such as Mystery.
As I understand it, there are at least three separate things there: actual scientific evolutionary psychology; pop ev-psych, which is generally used as convenient rationalization for sexism and (less frequently) racism; and PUA, which is less science than engineering, but which comes with certain theories about why it works. I suspect that distinguishing the three properly probably requires a certain level of familiarity with the first one.
Early returns on the poll suggest that I was generalizing from one example. More people find Hermione plausible than not. Admittedly, it's a small sample, but I'm not expecting the results to reverse.
IMO you aren't missing anything. I found your depiction of Hermione's reaction, and Harry's reaction to her reaction, quite realistic. The other commenters are demanding 12-year-olds to be unrealistically sane. In fact most women I know would behave the same way at 20, and a lot of men too.
But 12 year olds are sane - at least relative to what will be going on three years hence. If I were to criticize EY's handling of this stuff, it is that he should have followed canon by putting off dealing with romance issues until the kids are in their third or fourth Hogwarts year.
But, if EY has to drag romance into this story, I wish he wouldn't have the heads all of his minor female characters so filled with romantic mush and gossip about same that they don't seem to be much use for any other purpose. Eliezer gives his male characters a variety of idiosyncratic, yet typical young male foibles - twin Weasley pranks, Ron Weasley quiddich mania, Harry's enthusiasm for things military, even Draco's misogyny. I wouldn't mind if he teased his female characters regarding a variety of equally silly and endearing stereotypically female traits. But it seems he can only think of one.
I approve of sane apologies.
People kept emphasising that being dropped was safe, and it didn't feel like Hermione was that afraid of it, probably because the scene wasn't from her point of view. Maybe you could portray that a bit more. When Harry was dropped it was quite vivid that he was overcoming his fear.
Also it seemed obvious that Harry went out on the roof as part of a plan in order not to lose the game, and I assumed Hermione and Draco would have come to the same conclusion. So of course it wasn't a prank. So when Hermione suggested it was revenge for the date and Harry also had something against Draco, she was just joking about their unpleasant situation.
I can see I missed a few things there, but that's how it seemed on my first reading.
I noticed later they might think it would have been easier to win without Hermione having the gloves. So it could be somewhat plausible they'd think it was a prank or revenge, given that they don't know Harry's motives and may jump to conclusions.
My own take on this. Hermione didn't have to go on the roof. She could've thought of a different method of taking Harry down. I forget if it has been specified, is there a time limit? They could've waited for harry to get tired walking about on the roof and picked him off later.
As such she is responsible for the risks she took going on the wall after Harry. Harry should have shown concern after her fall, but a full on apology does seem a bit thick.
Hermione and Harry are acting a bit out of character in these last few chapters. Canon Hermione is straightforward, sometimes even abrasive, and extremely concerned with fairness. That is why she started S.P.E.W., after all. I can understand making her more social and diplomatic in order to strengthen her above canon, but the preoccupation with fairness and justice is pretty central to her personality. Is she toying with Harry (which isn't like her), or are they both blind to how silly he's being?
This apology business doesn't strike me as cute, like Ch. 36 was. It's just strange.
And just where did this whole 'unanimously vote that Draco should drop Harry' thing come from? Why would a bunch of girls (or anyone) unanimously vote for something so boring? When you have seen someone voluntarily have himself beaten to a pulp how could it be remotely exciting to see him float down a building in controlled circumstances when a girl had already done it voluntarily without preparation? That doesn't sound remotely like the sort of things girls would suggest.
It does seem odd that in the past Harry has made sure that he doesn't moddycoddle Hermione in the battles, realising that she would be insulted if he did and yet now acts in completely the opposite manner. And Hermione and even Draco don't find it strange...
This could be a situation where nobody really likes the outcome, but (since it was obviously a very fair punishment) they all treated it with respect (wanting to signal that they liked it). So nobody suggested anything really exciting, figuring that nobody else would go along with it. (There's a name for that fallacy of decision, where everybody votes for their second choice to be nice, since they think that it's the first choice of everybody else.)
Or else, they each had a secret plan (to summon Harry to their arms).