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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong
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Hermione was the smartest student in canon-- what would a thoroughly power-boosted Hermione look like?
I don't have a link offhand, but I recall EY stating his reasons for not boosting Hermione:
Sure. Those are all reasons to not boost the character as much as the other characters get boosted. But that doesn't mean any boost is a problem. It isn't difficult to imagine what a slightly boosted Hermione might do. I gave an example elsewhere in this subthread. But one can easily imagine other similar examples.
That's a good point. But I imagine a more powerful Hermione would not only have a good memory she'd be able to use it. If Harry makes an offhand comment like
"Most spells are from garbled Latin" she should be able to say something like:
"Around 80% of First Year spells fit that description. I noticed it when I was looking at my textbooks and based on linguistic analysis I suspect that the direction is actually reversed: Latin was at some point heavily influenced by spellwords. Here's my data and the linguistic evidence."
But that doesn't happen even to that extent. We don't get her making any discoveries at all. Instead the power boosted Harry makes fundamental discoveries about potions and transfiguration and about casting the Patronus. Why can't Hermione make any on her own?
That's a good point. Fortunately, HPMOR is hardly the last Harry Potter fanfic.
She's 11/12. Harry Potter is Tom Riddle who is 65. This is why Harry acts like an adult, including making discoveries, while Hermione acts like a very intelligent child.
Observation: there appears to be a significant amount of mind-killing occurring in this thread.
How can you say that? Only the other side is mind-killed; my side is being perfectly rational!
I think this is a joke, because Voldiemort killed the infant Harry's mind to overwrite it with his own.
Interesting. I thought it was a polite discussion of disagreements about the issues at hand. I have seen substantial mind-killing on this sort of topic here before, but it doesn't seem present in this conversation to me.
That argument as explanation doesn't really work: first of all, many of Harry's discoveries are low-hanging fruit, and it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of those. Second of all, Harry only has some aspects of TR. He grew up a (relatively normal) child without any of the procedural or other memories of TR. As far as we can tell, the primary way that Harry is akin to TR is close to the same starting minds and being raised in different ways.
Moreover, smart children make discoveries even in our world where there are a lot of scientists. Here a 16 year old discovered a novel method of quickly killing ticks. 11 and 12 year olds have discovered supernovas, and now a 10 year old has now granted that's observational, but that's still the same pattern. Young children have also published math papers.
Finally, this doesn't help because the concern is at a meta-level. Dumbledore, Harry, Voldemort, and Draco all got massive resource and power boosts. But not Hermione.
I don't really know how the whole 'HP is TR' thing works. I mean, on the one hand no 11 year, however gifted, old works out a way to run hypercomputing algorithms on a closed timelike curve provided by time-turners. On the other, Harry presumably didn't start talking with an adult vocabulary when he was an infant, so... I dunno.
And sure, I can buy 11 or 12 year olds making observational discoveries. But for an actual, highly intellegent 11 year old who isn't sharing her mind with fragments of an adult's psyche, the correct tactic is to learn as much as possible, and start doing experiments when you're older, which was Hermione's plan.
Certain of the female charicters did gain a power boost, while Baba Yaga is a new charicter and nicholas flamel is actually female.
Moreover, the way Dumbledore and Voldemort have changed is simply that they are acting like intelligent adults, rather than characters in a children's story. By comparison, Hermione is acting like a child rather than a child in a children's story, which... isn't that much of a change.
The tricks with the Basilisk and the Proddian[sic] charm seem like they could have been adaptable to HPMoR, but at the same time, canon Hermione was older when she accomplished those things.
Even in canon, discoveries in potions were plainly not her thing, at least; see Half Blood Prince.