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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5 - Less Wrong
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Not having read fanfiction before, one thing I find fascinating about MoR is the Americanisation. Mostly it's just fun to spot trivia but the way Eliezer deals with class is pretty curious and I thought I'd get some thoughts down:
Rowling is very careful in the series to draw her heroes from a cross section of the "honest" classes: Ron obviously is very stereotypically working class, Hermoine's upper middle (though not management) and the Dursleys are little englanders.
So kicking Harry up to Hermoine's class (and giving him a multi-barelled surname to boot! Though I'm not sure if that's a stereotype in the US?) and replacing Ron with the aristocratic Draco narrows the class perspective quite a bit. I wonder if this contributes to the more personal air to the fic's conflicts, particularly as Quirrelmort lacks Voldemort's evil aristocrat act, and Draco's now more of a racist than a snob. I'm thinking of reading some more american fanfics, to see how they handle things, it's an interesting insight into how the american's think about class (I'm looking forward to the American adaption of Skins for similar reasons, though in that case the relationship is reversed).
Good point about narrowing of the range of classes-- now that you mention it, the effect is a little claustrophobic for me compared to canon.
I think not having Hagrid has somewhat of the same effect-- he comes off as a something of a low-status outsider, even before we find out he's half giant.
I'll be curious to see if you find patterns about class in American fanfic, but it's worth remembering that it's a non-random sample and probably won't give you a complete view of how Americans think about class.
Now I'm wondering what fiction about a rationalist who's not extraordinarily intelligent and who's up against significant prejudice would look like.
Now i'm wondering about that too. The best way to show how rationality wins (if it does, in fact, win) would be to show how it works even for someone of average intelligence - otherwise you can never be sure if you're looking at the effects of superior intelligence instead.
A very intelligent but irrational person is easy to show, but a rational yet dumb one seems much harder to me. I suppose you could ham-fist it by making them suck at various intellectual challenges - any better ideas?
I thought early Bella from Luminosity did a pretty good job at showing someone rational but with no special cognitive abilities (we're talking about averages, here, not idiots). She just had noticed her limitations and practiced at overcoming them, but that by itself was very good at making her more effective.
One of the simplest author tricks I can come up with is to give your character a thought speed and stick to it. Harry seems to run through ten lines of text in seconds, sometimes, but if you go with, say, your speed reading aloud you can get a reasonable estimate of how long it takes an average person to ponder something. People can mention how they zone out; they can miss opportunities; they can not come up with a good enough solution in time. They can make conscious decisions about what they will and will not think about.
Stubbornly refusing to believe in magic.
Stubbornly agreeing with an outside view prediction even when faced with many convincing arguments why this example is special, if most examples are expected to have similarly convincing arguments.
Stubbornly refusing to consider solutions to a problem before examining it more carefully.
Quickly changing opinion when faced with a valid argument, even though it "should" be emotionally unconvincing.
You can catch a glimpse of this in Harry dealing with McGonagall if you remember that adults are significantly prejudiced against children, before his extraordinary intelligence overpowers and dissolves the situation.
Assuming their goal is to remove the prejudice, my guess is they would work within the confines of the prejudice where possible, towards changing the environment into a place where the prejudice is untenable. Something like agitating for a law that requires subservient tasks to be performed by the prejudiced group, then pulling a Fight-Club-esque "we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep." In a smaller environment such as a woman in an unenlightened workplace, become the indispensable secretary to everyone and then punish the prejudice when it appears (changing the environment so that the prejudice is now directed at an authority figure).
It would be an unfolding plan rather than an impassioned speech and I expect would involve a lot of simple judo-ing of peoples' surface treatments of the issue.
wonder how his parents managed that
Magic!
Presumably, the same way porcupines have sex.
Porcupines have the same dimensions in the important parts. Giants and humans might not.
TheOtherDave was alluding to a joke that goes like this:
Q: How do porcupines have sex?
A: Very carefully.
My answer makes sense even if I knew the joke. Which I do. Was it ever addressed in canon? How tall are the Giants?
Something like twenty feet tall, if I remember right.
I thought it was more like fifty feet, but I checked my copy of OotP and you're right.
Ah, I had a totally wrong mental image. In many movies giants are like: bigger.
[I happen to be about 2 meters (6 and a half feet for the non-metric users), so maybe I need more size to perceive someone as a giant.]
He's human on his dad's side and giant on his mum's, rather than vice versa. I imagine that made things easier.
That's a great point about Hagrid, and yeah I don't think reading more will be particularly informative, but it's interesting given how class-orientated the original's conflicts are.