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ygert comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101 - Less Wrong
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Yes. In the heat of the moment when the character needs to make a split second decision, the author can sit back and and think long and hard about the answer.
When the hero has a choice and no opportunity to research it, the author can still do that research, or make up how the answer goes in his world.
What I was driving at is something subtler: I cannot count the times I have heard someone praise HPMoR for, among other things, teaching them something new to them. People loudly talk about how the got into rationality and Less Wrong from it, and how they got from HPMoR ideas that change their lives. This is good, and a sign that HPMoR is a darn good piece of fiction.
But: Eliezer did not gain any of those things. Eliezer cannot read HPMoR and be enlightened, for every piece of enlightenment contained within came from his mind. No, Eliezer is not perfect either, and I am sure he makes many mental mistakes that he has the smarter HPMoR character avoid. This is a point. He can write smarter characters than him. But, everything he has the characters do is something he knows, and it must be that way.
Eliezer may only know some of the things he has the characters do on the type 2 level, but know them he must.
I get where you're going, and I mostly agree, but technically it's not 100% exact. Eliezer, like every human, forget things all the time, and reading HPMoR can makes him rediscover things, or can make him see things under a new light. It can also teaches him things about himself, about how his vision of things evolved with time.
Re-reading things (be it "serious" stuff like LW posts/comments, fiction work or even to a point source code) I wrote a while ago regularly enough does "enlighten" me, making me remember things I forgot, making me "propagate" some updating I did since but didn't fully propagate, and improving my internal model of myself.
No, no... that's true in a limited way, I mean the characters don't know about any real-world experiments that he doesn't, for example.
However, they can have novel insights. This is a good reason to write fiction, in fact. I write dialogues between characters in comics that I read when I'm stuck on math or programming problems. When I do this, it's still me that's thinking of it, of course. But it comes to me in a character's voice.
So that might happen with HPMOR, too. There might be things in HPMOR that Eliezer only figured out when he heard, internally, one of his characters say them.
That assumes that the words specify exactly what the characters do in the interpretation of the reader. That isn't the case.
Meaning get's created by the reader based on his own mental background.