From my point of view, it was a huge improvement to not have the Fleegles talking as much as in the previous books. I was getting really bored with their being stupid at each other. They're still strong, still chaotic and enthusiastic, and really good as a foil to Tiffany's seriousness.
I wasn't tracking the angle that's bothering you, but the witches did seem bizarrely helpless for a good bit of the book against a rising tide of anti-witch prejudice.
One thing both books had in common was that there was serious prejudice against characters who were committed to harmlessness and extraordinarily useful. It's a way of saying that prejudice is bad, but I think there's a falseness to it.
Most people are somewhat useful and relatively harmless [1], but I wonder what would happen if people said, "Everyone's a public hazard-- me, you, any people you've got prejudices against. We need to figure out how to live decently (find as many positive sum transactions as possible) together anyway."
[1] I believe that if the majority of people weren't doing more good than harm, the human race would have been taken down by entropy.
In the vein of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion threads this is the place to discuss anything relating to Alicorn's Twilight fanfic Luminosity. The fanfic is also archived on Alicorn's own website <strike>(warning: white text on black background)</strike>.
Previous discussion is hidden so deeply within the first Methods of Rationality thread that it's difficult to find even if you already know it exists.
Similar to how Eliezer's fanfic popularizes material from his sequences Alicorn is using the insights from her Luminosity sequence.
Spoilers for the fanfic itself as well as the original novels need and should not be hidden, but spoiler protection still applies for any other works of fiction, except for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality chapters more than a week old so we can freely discuss similarities and differences.
EDIT: Post-ginormous-spoiler discussion should go to the second thread. (If you have any doubt on whether you have reached the spoiler in question you have not.)