Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6

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8 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6

by Unnamed

27th Nov 2010

1 min read

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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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 — LessWrong

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ArisKatsaris15y-50

I'm sorry, but "Hagrid is lonely" is not a concern worth five seconds of thought when Harry could be working on getting rid of dementors or Azkaban or Death Eaters or death.

This is a nonsensical statement. It's not as if Harry was using up those five seconds, or five minutes for any of those concerns.

Harry was just being a little jerk.

Desrtopa15y130

But actually befriending Hagrid is a decision that would take up a considerable amount of Harry's time.

Harry's only human, he can't devote all of his free time to saving the world. He needs intellectual and emotional cooldown time. But Harry's also an introvert. Spending social time with people he doesn't relate to is not cooldown time for him, it's something he'd need cooling down from. That being the case, being friends with Hagrid would eat into Harry's productivity time. It's a transparently bad move, and he doesn't have to spend five seconds considering it in much the same way that a competent chess player does not spend five seconds considering whether to checkmate himself.

28Kaj_Sotala15y

I sometimes feel like there's a fallacy that's similar to privileging the hypothesis, only in the moral domain. Hogwarts is full of people who'd find it awesome if Harry Potter gave them some of his personal attention. Before he was confined to Hogwarts, he could have gone out to visit all kinds of people who are in really horrible straits but would remember for the rest of their lives that The Boy Who Lived cared enough to stop over and take the day to talk to them. We don't think Harry was "being a little jerk" because he didn't previously go to the effort of visiting those people. Why should we think that he's being jerkish when he's offered a similar chance and explicitly turns it down, when we didn't mind him implicitly turning down a thousand such chances before?

12NihilCredo15y

Harry also stated, quite reasonably, that he was concerned about being linked to the past events of the Chamber of Secrets, and being revealed as a Parselmouth.

See in context