Ravens are hoarding thieves, rather than scholars. There is a similarity, there, but typically a mascot reflects aspects more flatteringly, no?
When you are creating animal mascots to represent your defining features and your defining feature is IQ and cleverness you run into something of a problem. The only scholars I know are humans.
I'd obviously go with crows rather than ravens (both have respectable levels of intelligence). The ravenclaw mascot being a crow just doesn't quite seem right for some reason.
I'm actually not sure that Ravenclaw has anything to do with IQ or cleverness. Harry thinks it does- he notes at one point that "the 75th percentile of Hogwarts students a.k.a. Ravenclaw House is not the world's most exclusive program for gifted children"- but in actual practice it seems more like studiousness, or curiosity, or love of knowledge for its own sake, is the unifying trait. I mean, Dumbledore is a Gryffindor, Voldemort and Snape and Draco are Slytherins...
(The HPMOR discussion thread after this one is here.)
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. There haven't been any chapters recently, but it looks like there are a bunch in the pipeline and the old thread is nearing 700 comments. The latest chapter as of 7th March 2012 is Ch. 77.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: