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RobinZ comments on A discussion of heroic responsibility - Less Wrong
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Neither Hermione nor Harry dispute that they have a responsibility to protect the victims of bullying. There may be people who would have denied that, but none of them are involved in the conversation. What they are arguing over is what their responsibility requires of them, not the existence of a responsibility. In other words, they are arguing over what to do.
Human beings are not perfect Bayesian calculators. When you present a human being with criteria for success, they do not proceed to optimize perfectly over the universe of all possible strategies. The task "write a poem" is less constrained than the task "write an Elizabethan sonnet", and in all likelihood the best poem is not an Elizabethan sonnet, but that doesn't mean that you will get a better poem out of a sixth-grader by asking for any poem than by giving them something to work with. The passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Eliezer Yudkowsy quoted back during the Overcoming Bias days, "Original Seeing", gave an example of this: the student couldn't think of anything to say in a five-hundred word essay about the United States, Bozeman, or the main street of Bozeman, but produced a five-thousand word essay about the front facade of the Opera House. Therefore, when I evaluate "heroic responsibility", I do not evaluate it as a proposition which is either true or false, but as a meme which either produces superior or inferior results - I judge it by instrumental, not epistemic, standards.
Looking at the example in the fanfic and the example in the OP, as a means to inspire superior strategic behavior, it sucks. It tells people to work harder, not smarter. It tells people to fix things, but it doesn't tell them how to fix things - and if you tell a human being (as opposed to a perfect Bayesian calculator) to fix something, it sounds like you're telling them to fix it themselves because that is what it sounds like from a literary perspective. "You've got to get the job done no matter what" is not what the hero says when they want people to vote in the next school board election - it's what the hero says when they want people to run for the school board in the next election, or to protest for fifteen days straight outside the meeting place of the school board to pressure them into changing their behavior, or something else on that level of commitment. And if you want people to make optimal decisions, you need to give them better guidance than that to allocating their resources.
That's the part I'm not getting. All Harry is saying is that you should consider yourself responsible for the actions you take, and that delegating that responsibility to someone else isn't a good idea. Delegating responsibility, however, is not the same as delegating tasks. Delegating a particular task to someone else might well be the correct action in some contexts, but you're not supposed to use that as an excuse to say, "Because I delegated the task of handling this situation to someone else, I am no longer responsible for the outcome of this situation." This advice doesn't tell people how to fix things, true, but that's not the point--it tells people how to get into the right mindset to fix things. In other words, it's not object-level advice; it's meta-level advice, and obviously if you treat it as the former instead of the latter you're going to come to the conclusion that it sucks.
Sometimes, to solve a problem, you have to work harder. Other times, you have to work smarter. Sometimes, you have to do both. "Heroic responsibility" isn't saying anything that contradicts that. In the context of the conversation in HPMoR, I do not agree with either Hermione or Harry; both of them are overlooking a lot of things. But those are object-level considerations. Once you look at the bigger picture--the level on which Harry's advice about heroic responsibility actually applies--I don't think you'll find him saying anything that runs counter to what you're saying. If anything, I'd say he's actually agreeing with you!
Humans are not perfectly rational agents--far from it. System 1 often takes precedence over System 2. Sometimes, to get people going, you need to re-frame the situation in a way that makes both systems "get it". The virtue of "heroic responsibility", i.e. "no matter what happens, you should consider yourself responsible", seems like a good way to get that across.
s/work harder, not smarter/get more work done, not how to get more work done/
Why do you believe this to be true?
That's an interesting question. I'll try to answer it here.
This seems to imply that no matter whatever happens, you should hold yourself responsible in the end. If you take a randomly selected person, which of the following two cases do you think will be more likely to cause that person to think really hard about how to solve a problem?
Personally, I would find the second case far more pressing and far more likely to cause me to actually think, rather than just take the minimum number of steps required of me in order to fulfill the "role" of a problem-solver, and I suspect that this would be true of many other people here as well. Certainly I would imagine it's true of many effective altruists, for instance. It's possible I'm committing a typical mind fallacy here, but I don't think so.
On the other hand, you yourself have said that your attitude toward this whole thing is heavily driven by the fact that you have anxiety disorder, and if that's the case, then I agree that blaming yourself is entirely the wrong way to go about doing things. That being said, the whole point of having something called "heroic responsibility" is to get people to actually put in some effort as opposed to just playing the role of someone who's perceived as putting in effort. If you are able to do that without resorting to holding yourself responsible for the outcomes of situations, then by all means continue to do so. However, I would be hesitant to label advice intended to motivate and galvanize as "useless", especially when using evidence taken from a subset of all people (those with anxiety disorders) to make a general claim (the notion of "heroic responsibility" is useless).
I think I see what you're getting at. If I understand you rightly, what "heroic responsibility" is intended to affect is the behavior of people such as [trigger warning: child abuse, rape] Mike McQueary during the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, who stumbled upon Sandusky in the act, reported it to his superiors (and, possibly, the police), and failed to take further action when nothing significant came of it. [/trigger warning] McQueary followed the 'proper' procedure, but he should not have relied upon it being sufficient to do the job. He had sufficient firsthand evidence to justify much more dramatic action than what he did.
Given that, I can see why you object to my "useless". But when I consider the case above, I think what McQueary was lacking was the same thing that Hermione was lacking in HPMoR: a sense of when the system might fail.
Most of the time, it's better to trust the system than it is to trust your ability to outthink the system. The system usually has access to much, much more information than you do; the system usually has people with much, much better training than you have; the system usually has resources that are much, much more abundant than you can draw on. In the vast majority of situations I would expect McQueary or Hermione to encounter - defective equipment, scheduling conflicts, truancy, etc. - I think they would do far worse by taking matters into their own hands than by calling upon the system to handle it. In all likelihood, prior to the events in question, their experiences all supported the idea that the system is sound. So what they needed to know was not that they were somehow more responsible to those in the line of fire than they previously realized, but that in these particular cases they should not trust the system. Both of them had access to enough data to draw that conclusion*, but they did not.
If they had, you would not need to tell them that they had a responsibility. Any decent human being would feel that immediately. What they needed was the sense that the circumstances were extraordinary and awareness of the extraordinary actions that they could take. And if you want to do better than chance at sensing extraordinary circumstances when they really are extraordinary and better than chance at planning extraordinary action that is effective, determination is nice, but preparation and education are a whole lot better.
* The reasons differ: McQueary shouldn't have trusted it because:
...while Hermione shouldn't have trusted it because:
All right, cool. I think that dissolves most of our disagreement.
Glad to hear it. :)