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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

While we're on the subject of bringing in larger context, I'd like to point out the context of your complaint: The SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) regularly goes off the rails over perceived instances of people not being politically correct enough. One recent incident involved the (female) editor of the SFWA bulletin being forced to resign over the following examples of "sexism":

1) A column in the bulletin used the word "lady" to refer to women and complemented some of them on their appearance.

2) The same issue had a bikini-clad warrior woman on the cover.

This was enough to cause a huge controversy. However, the authors of said column subsequently published another column defending their previous column and pointing out how absurd the controversy was and in particular that "lady" is not a slur. This was considered completely beyond the pail and resulted in the above mentioned resignation as well as the bulletin being put on a six-month hiatus while the issue was being investigated.

Edit: Here are Andrew Fox's and Sarah Hoyt's articles on the subject.

I'm not entirely sure what this has got to do with my comments, other than it is an issue related to feminism in science fiction and fantasy writing. I don't really want to get into this argument, but would suggest simply that it this situation is perhaps more complicated than your post suggests.

8fubarobfusco13y

Your description of the incident does not seem to be very complete or accurate. Fortunately, others have written about it — such as E. Catherine Tobler's open letter, this io9 article ... and, of course, SFWA president John Scalzi's statement.