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Nornagest comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 120 - Less Wrong
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Comments (115)
That Harry came up with something so callous I can accept, but why would McGonagall go along with it? That's not the sort of conversation that should be sprung on someone who just lost his entire family and hasn't even begun to cope. It's not as if Draco had any valuable information that was urgently needed.
If this is the justification Harry gave McGonagall, she should have deducted 20 points from Ravenclaw and sent him off.
There's callous, and then there's that. There's really no good way to say "sorry I killed your dad", but Harry's approach goes past "understandably lame" and into "monumentally clueless".
Here's how this sort of thing works, Harry: you are allowed any number of apologies and expressions of regret, but no more than one short excuse, which had better be a good one. You are not allowed to witter on about necessity and morality and political convenience. If Draco had called you out in the middle of that speech -- and I mean not just "said you're a jerk" called out, but "formal duel" called out -- I would have thought it understandable.
Harry has, throughout the story, demonstrated a tendency to lecture people when simpler words were far more likely to get results. He is... not a good communicator.
Yeah, that's Harrys MO. By this point it's almost a running gag (or it would be if it were less sad). In the first bunch of chapters Harrys lectures are really funny for just how out of place they are if you actualy imagine them coming from an 11 year old. In fact they are out of place if you imagine them coming from any real person at all, rather than from a character in a book. In the early chapters this is played for laughs and then even called out when Hermione notices that people in books speak like books.
Here though the exact same behavior goes from funny to sad. Stakes are too high.