Ritalin comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: palladias 02 July 2013 02:13AM

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Comment author: palladias 02 July 2013 02:17:05AM 24 points [-]

I loved this:

That's not how responsibility works, Professor." Harry's voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn't looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. "When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That's why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least.

Does anyone else run into the problem of frequently giving this advice to yourself and finding it useful, but struggling to find a non-awful way to convey it to other people? I don't want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control. Stoicism seems like the main way people hit on this idea of responsibility in my social circle.

Comment author: Ritalin 02 July 2013 07:15:51PM 2 points [-]

I don't want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control.

Someone please tell Shinji Ikari about this radical notion.

Comment author: CronoDAS 02 July 2013 08:28:17PM 2 points [-]

Someone did, but not until the last episode of the TV series.

And Shinji's personal and emotional life was screwed up, but NERV did indeed manage to stop every invading alien Angel; the threat that did them in was of a far different nature.

Comment author: loserthree 03 July 2013 02:33:54AM 0 points [-]

I don't want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control.

Someone please tell Shinji Ikari about this radical notion.

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Comment author: Ritalin 04 July 2013 06:09:38AM -1 points [-]

I'm sorry, are you from Gargantia or Ente Isla? I can't understand a word.

Comment author: sketerpot 04 July 2013 06:18:19AM *  3 points [-]

That post consisted of (fairly minor) Evangelion spoilers, encoded with rot13 for the benefit of people who haven't seen it yet.

(For completeness' sake: the language of Ente Isla is English with a bunch of letter substitution, and the language that Ledo speaks in Gargantia is a letter-substituted offshoot of German. They're similar to rot13, but much more pronounceable, since vowels map to vowels and consonants to consonants. More info here.)

Comment author: Ritalin 04 July 2013 07:04:12AM -2 points [-]

I'm talking about Rebuilt, especially 3.0. Kaworu is kind of like a kid Dumbledore; nice, mysterious, facetious, and completely sucks at consoling or giving advice.