Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93

daenerys

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 93. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.

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. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,18,19,20.

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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

No, it doesn't indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don't think you'd disagree, but I imagine you'd probably not agree that we shouldn't play it.

Criticism isn't about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.

When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you're talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you're making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn't have used the language of "fail" and "succeed".

Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn't particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it's simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don't think anybody will deny this.

Now, if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it's legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you're not saying it shouldn't conform to these pattern, I think it's not relevant. And the reason is this:

However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic.

I'm not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I'm saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don't count; in the same way that someone who doesn't speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn't count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.

The point is that once an author is made aware of a trope which can be off putting to some readers, they can attempt to avoid it in future. Obviously the author doesn't have to, and sometimes this particular trope might be necessary, but I don't think its bad to go "hey, this doesn't work for me for x y and z reasons".

From a story telling point of view, ignoring feminism for a minute, I personally find characters dying "randomly" unsatisfying. Joss Whedon does this occasionally, killing off characters essentially at random, rather than... (read more)

15Protagoras13y

Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don't really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn't so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione's fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.