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tondwalkar comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93 - Less Wrong
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Comments (354)
I found 93 incredibly refreshing-- it was good to see so much cooperation, good will, and clear communication after a tremendous amount of earned and unearned mistrust.
It can't be completely stable, of course, not least because Quirrel is around, but also because I think stories don't work to maintain high points before the end.
I wasn't horrified at McGonagle's announcement. This is a story where learning how to do better is a good thing, and I respect the idea that children need to be raised to be adults.
Undoing the problem of people who've been trained to do nothing is going to be harder than it sounds. Having rewards for doing something sounds good at the moment because very few people did anything, but all rewards are subject to Goodhart's Law. I expect to see people doing a lot of ill-thought-out somethings because the reward structure is too simplified.
Harry's father's letter is emotionally excellent, but I wonder whether the idea that adults should be protecting children rather than the other way around entirely applies to Harry's situation. On the other hand, if it's foreshadowing, that could be a relief. Arguably, Harry learning how not to be isolated is a major theme of the story.
As for Eliezer's rant, my first thought was HGMOR would be delightful, and it wouldn't take bending canon nearly as much. It's a lot easier for me to imagine canon Hermione taking an interest in theory of how to think better than canon Harry.
Meanwhile, if you want a brilliant-Hermione-at-the-center-of-the-story fanfic, try Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation. Any recommendations for more of the same?
I have mixed feelings about reading through a gender-focused lens. It gets really claustrophobic, and I find it spoils a lot of fun for me. On the other hand, I'd forgotten how disappointed I was in HermioneMOR compared to canon Hermione. I don't think Eliezer expects as much of his female characters as he does of his male characters, and even if the story plays out in some surprising way (a female wizard playing behind the scenes at Quirrel's level?), what's on stage for most of the story matters at least as much as revelations at the end.
It's been a while since I've read cannon, but isn't this almost exactly what happens in cannon? HGMoR sounds like it'd just be cannon written with JKR following around HG instead of HP (which, admittedly, would be rather interesting)
JKR couldn't write rationalist fiction. She lacks the relevant domain knowledge. She could plausibly write a spock-rationalist fiction or perhaps responsible-academic fiction.
Well certainly. I wrote that sentence from the perspective of "cannon happens, author follows around writing down the story" rather than "author makes up story." I guess a better way to communicate that would be to say "were we to write HGMoR in the cannon universe, we wouldn't have to change anything."
That's just the thing: canon!Hermione doesn't act rationally according to the way used here or in MoR. An actual rational!Hermione would act entirely differently and the whole story would change. Rowling did not create a rational Hermione and in fact could not have if she tried. The story would be different.
Since Rowling follows around HP and not HG, we don't actually know how HG thinks. Since JKR wrote the story, she can use preknowledge to make HG arbitrarily smart, and since she doesn't have too large of an impact on what actually happens, she can do this without needing to account for how smart HG is; even if she were to devise some genius plan to beat voldy, she'd have to act through HP, who could easily and stupidly reject her plan offscreen. That is, I'm arguing that even if you kept making HG arbitrarily smart (but not arbitrarily powerful or prophecy-choosen), you could easily keep everything else the same by making HP or some other characters arbitrarily stupid, possibly offscreen.
EDIT: Oops, I edited the previous comment to leave out the phrase "since HG acts rationally" a few seconds after I posted it, since that's not really what I meant, but you seem to have beat me to the response.
That's arguable but if true it would also demonstrate the point. An actually rational agent in her situation would have made a significant impact.
No. That would not be a HG:MoR story. That would be Hermione Granger and the Excessively Upgraded Idiocy All Around Her.
This just isn't true. I think you drastically underestimate the difference between the smart and conciencious girl as conceived by Rowling and an actual rational upgrade of Hermione and the consequences that would have. An arbitrary rational Hermione, even with the only the IQ of canon!Hermione, would be an active agent. If not, it isn't Methods of Rationality at all. It's Methods of being a Responsible and Slightly Clever Schoolgirl.
Offhand, the only thing I can remember canon Hermione saying about the theory of thinking is the bit where she explains that she remembers more than most people because she pays attention to what she perceives.
This seems subjectively plausible to me, though it might be hindsight bias-- that is, sometimes when I don't remember things after first exposure, the trying to remember them just brings up a fog as though those things were never noticed, even though in some cases, I know I was paying some degree of attention. It's just that whatever it was didn't get moved from short-term attention into memory.