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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8 - Less Wrong
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I'd been meaning to raise that question, too.
Dumbledore is talking like a typical administrator from Mediocristan [1]. It's easier in the short run, and the medium run, and sometimes the rather long run, to tolerate bullying if you aren't subject to it. However, every once in a while, you get a civil rights movement or an Arab Spring.
On the other hand, Harry isn't exactly dealing in non-violence, and it's possible that his faith in the effectiveness of punishment is naive. I await further chapters.
[1]Nassim Taleb's name for the condition of being able to make pretty good predictions about tomorrow by simply saying that it will be like today.
I don't think bullying is qualitatively different from normal social interaction, merely quantitatively different.
Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.
I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't a bad thing. My point is that the standard discussion seems to be about detecting bullies, as if they were a type different than other people. Even when the similarity of bullying to regular behavior is acknowledged, I have heard appeals to magical categories along the lines of "how can we distinguish regular behavior from bullying", as if they were different in kind.
The flawed question of asking how to detect bullies prevents people from having to admit that their own normal children may contribute to social problems, as does pretending that normal social grouping is perfectly fine, zero percent bad, and unrelated to bullying.
It's also an anti-consequentialist focus on behavior rather than its effects.
I think the current debate around bullying is designed to make participants feel self-righteous and as if they were doing something, but not asking the right questions and not able to trade the benefits and lack of costs to the participants for benefits for children.
Could you expand on your idea that there's no well-defined difference between bullying and normal social behavior?
Definitions from wikipedia and http://www.stopbullying.gov, with emphasis added:
and
I think power struggles and subgroup formation are part of a normal social dynamic, and these things have negative consequences in a normal social dynamic. I think society has only noticed the most harmful such behavior and is overreacting to the worst behavior and underreacting to most bad behavior. The best social dynamic would still have people getting emotionally hurt as described above, though far less often and intensely.
That's an interesting angle, but I think the worst dominance-establishing behavior does enough damage that trying to snip that tail off the bell curve could be worth the trouble. Moving the center of the bell curve towards decency is also a worthy project, but perhaps more difficult.
That's not how the project is perceived by people involved in it, at least that's what I presume granted the media they emanate. They don't talk about, and I am guessing they don't think about, what causes normal dominance behavior to progress into the most affecting kind, and the focus is on getting normal people to report rather than change their social behavior.
Quoting the first three paragraphs of the front page NYT article from August 30, which I didn't see when I wrote anything above:
So the focus seems to be convincing normal people to report, rather than suggesting that they are doing anything at all wrong or that they might, by increasing the severity of normal behavior they are already doing, become targets under the new law. There is no push for introspection nor for considering the feelings of others, the worst people are asked to consider of themselves is that they had not been reporting the bad behavior of others often enough - a small sin.
Does anyone have a guess as to when the first article about the use of this law (taking effect September 1) to bully someone will be written?
Delusional descriptions of a problem generally can't be justified by claims that the description is targeted at the worst behavior or designed to get the most return out of a small investment because an accurate picture of reality is usually the first step to implementing any strategy well, regardless of its resources and scope.
It looks as though I was thinking about anti-bullying programs the way I think they ought to be done, and you had the specific example in mind of how current anti-bullying programs are being described..
Anti-bullying programs don't seem to have done a lot of good.
I've read an account of a school-- Great Walstead, a British boarding school in the 60s-- which really didn't have bullying. The head of the school wanted his students to do well, and hated bullying-- it wasn't a pasted-on anti-bullying program. (This is from Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God, a memoir which is mostly about growing up in a family which was at the top of the early Religious Right-- the description of the boarding school is a minor episode.)
That all makes sense.
What I want to know is why Harry didn't accuse Dumbledore and his staff of not doing enough to prevent bullying. I know I would have.
The interesting question is whether it didn't occur to Eliezer or it didn't occur to Harry.
I can see it either of them not thinking of it because at this point, Dumbledore is well established as not caring about bullying. It's pretty clear that Harry would have to start from scratch to convince Dumbledore that bullying is something to oppose.
He came fairly close back in the early chapters. He was going to start a PR campaign on the subject...
Ah. I guess its been too long. Which chapter was this?
This was bullying by Snape, not by students. See here.