Comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 16:02:38 GMT

You seem to have this idea that if an idea is most immediately relevent to topics other than X, it cannot also be sufficiently relevant towards X to count in a discussion of X.

I don't know where you are getting this from.

I don't see where you're getting this reading from. My full quote is here:

Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, "What does this have to do with feminism?" If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it's particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione's death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn't about that, either, I would think of something else. "Feminism" as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn't occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times.

The point here is not that an idea should be disqualified if it is more immediately relevant to topics other than the intended one; it is that it should be disqualified if, when shown to someone out of context, the correct context is not readily deducible from the quote itself--or, in other words, if multiple different contexts leap to mind upon seeing it, none of which are the intended context. That's what it means for something to be a "stretch". I'm not seeing why you interpreted my words in the rather strange way you did.

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