But it's not an idiot ball if there's an actual legitimate reason for being stupid.
Like, in The Naked Time and The Naked Now, the initial infections were pure idiot ball.
The subsequent infections, and the crew doing spectacularly stupid and even suicidal things, were not.
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 116.
There is 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.)