NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3 - Less Wrong
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Does anyone else find the HP idea of sorting children into different houses at age 11 abusive and detrimental? The houses aren't arbitrary labels; they're supposed to define your character. No real person fits into any one of those houses. Sorting students restricts their growth and causes them to develop into a House stereotype. And it's the main cause of tension, hatred, and eventually war, in their world.
It might be worth disentangling the effects of Sorting (possibly bad, should probably be moderated by mixed-House projects) and the effects of the House points system (entirely bad as far as I can tell).
The house point system might not be completely bad. It might encourage competitively minded people to work more if they might be lazy otherwise. Empirically in the real world this sometimes works. For a few years (not sure if still active), Yale and Harvard students had competitions about which could reduce energy per a capita more. When I went to highschool there was a fundraiser for raising money for foodbanks and each class competed to see which could raise more. There was also a "neutral box" for people who wanted to give but didn't compete. By the end of the fundraiser the neutral box would generally have about an order of magnitude less money in it than the the grade box with the lowest amount.