From 63:
The 7.5% of the glass that was full, which proved that people really did care about water, even if that force of caring within themselves was too often defeated. If people truly didn't care, the glass would have been truly empty. If everyone had been like You-Know-Who inside, secretly cleverly selfish, there would have been no resisters to the Holocaust at all.
This passage bothers me because it implies that people have 'true' dispositions sometimes masked by external factors, rather than being a result of their brain activity at any given time. In light of what we know about neuropsychology, it doesn't make sense to say that there's a consistent subconscious 'force' of caring which battles the forces of selfishness in an effort to be felt -- people either care or not depending on which neurons fire.
It seems curiously non-scientific to talk about people as though they had true but concealed feelings conflicting beneath the surface, rather than just having feelings.
Really? There is a scientific question here: Are some people more likely to balk in the Milgram experiment than others? I don't know how one would test this; you can't just repeat the experiment on the same subjects, because their behavior would be affected by the memory of the previous trials.
But it is a valid question. How much of that 7.5% is due to individual variance of behavior, and how much is due to variance over the population?
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
After 61 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and 5 discussion threads with over 500 comments each, HPMOR discussion has graduated from the main page and moved into the Less Wrong discussion section (which seems like a more appropriate location). You can post all of your insights, speculation, and, well, discussion about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic here.
Previous threads are available under the harry_potter tag on the main page (or: one, two, three, four, five); this and future threads will be found under the discussion section tag (since there is a separate tag system for the discussion section). See also the author page for (almost) all things HPMOR, and AdeleneDawner's Author's Notes archive for one thing that the author page is missing.
As a reminder, it's useful to indicate at the start of your comment which chapter you are commenting on. Time passes but your comment stays the same.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: