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Raemon comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Good comment. Upvoted.
I've been wary of the way Hermione was presented so far. A month ago I was involved in a feminist discussion of literature, and more than one person expressed an explicit lack of interest in stories about "white dudes being responsible for saving the world." Upon reading it I thought back to MoR. I know there are constraints on the story that Eliezer doesn't control, except for choosing to have written the story in the first place. Harry's already a white dude responsible for saving the world, and adding SuperRationalist to his resume is going to inherently blow Hermione out of the water in her own sphere of influence.
At the time of the conversation about feminist literature (or lackthereof) we were at chapter 63. Hermione had yet to do anything significant. There were enough hints that Eliezer was aware of the issues facing her, both as a character in general and as "the Girl™" in particular, but those issues had merely been mentioned, not addressed. She had attempted to regain her personhood by becoming the general, and then lost everything she gained when she kissed Harry.
I had a vague faith that Eliezer would eventually address it somehow, and hoped that she would be a stronger character in Act II. But wasn't sure how that would work out. The last two chapters certainly didn't help, without the context of 68. But 68 turned things around in a good way. I don't know how much of this Eliezer thinks of in terms of feminist issues and how much is just making sure all the characters are compelling. Either way I'm glad things are playing out this way.
High probability this comment had something to do with the surprise creation of SPHEW.
Heh. As I noted elsewhere, whatever your exact motivations were, I thought it was pretty awesome.
Oh, it's a critique all right, but it's not a feminist critique. One free karma point if you can guess what it's a critique of.
I have no idea if this was intended, but reading the chapter reminded me strongly of these two posts.
On the one hand, it is possible that Harry has simply gone on to a level where Hermione cannot follow. This suspicion, naturally, is devastating to her ego, but it's part of what she's grappling with now. And that moment is completely part of the archetypal Nerd Journey--for a lot of us it happens in college. All our lives we've always been the smartest kid at school, but suddenly we go to a much bigger school and we're confronted for the first time with the reality that we are maybe not the colossal geniuses our high school teachers and our parents always told us we were. We realize there is a level above our own. That moment can be very difficult.
But at the same time, as Hermione grapples with this realization, she's wondering if she can go any higher, and she's being told: No, because you don't have the aura of destiny.
Of course this is a fantasy story, a world with magic, and there is a special prophecy that names Harry and does not name Hermione. But I think she's right to object when Dumbledore and McGonagall refuse to give her the kind of help they're giving Harry, merely because it's not her name on the title of the story.
The hero archetype?
I think it's something like that-- it's a critique of the idea that a hero accretes followers, and the followers didn't have anything else they wanted to do with their lives.
It may also be a critique of the idea of wanting to be an individual in a fairly loose context when sometimes it's necessary to get more involved to do what's important.
Humans accumulate followers. It's disconcerting to realise just how easy it is to accumulate followers - even from those who'd make quite good leaders themselves - just by telling people to do things and looking vaguely like you know where you're going. This is some sort of human universal.
Fair point. On the other hand, Sam Gamgee following Frodo is probably an oversimplification of the process, and Hermione:MOR is a good counterbalancing image.
Ha. I have no idea what's intended to be critiqued here, but Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches is hilarious. Perfectly works alongside Canon Hermione (It even spells out S.P.H.E.W, I assume intentionally).
And whatever your intentions, I think it does a decent job of accomplishing the actual goals of feminism while lampooning some of the more ridiculous efforts.
Props to Dumbledore.
My guess, its about the other side of the Tsuyoku Naritai coin. An obvious implication of "run your fastest, you shouldn't have to feel bad if get ahead of other people" is "if other people run their fastest and get ahead of you, don't resent them for it". The same point is also made briefly by Draco's internal narration in Ch67.
A meritocratic critique of egalitarianism?
Agency; the idea that one person really can make a massive difference, whether that be all by their lonesome, or by setting things in motion or leadershio.
Eliezer's stories are full of people who make a massive difference. That'd be a weird thing for Eliezer to criticize.
I think it's more a critique that EVERYONE can be that one person. Obviously they can't.
Not necessarily just because the aren't the best either. Support staff is critical. Logistically it's impossible for everyone to be the hero because a hero without a support staff is just a dude waving a lightsaber around on his uncle's moisture farm.
I'm assuming that "bad writing" is too broad an answer, whether or not the more precise answer happens to fall within it. The obvious answer is a tendency (both in writing and among humanity in general) to latch onto figureheads/heroes and give them disproportionate amounts of praise and expectations. But that seems too obvious.
For the record, I'm defining feminism in a fairly broad "women should generally be treated equally to men, for the same reason that people should generally be treated as equal" sort of way. Not that men and women are completely identical or any other specific policies that you might or might not agree with. I know you have some concerns about gender politics, although I don't know what they are. (If the answer was a critique against "objectification of people in general", I'd consider feminism a subsidiary of that)
The concept of the "chosen one."
A satirization of the mahou shoujo genre? Complete with costumes!
An aside, they way you used "feminist critique" isn't the standard meaning of the phrase. A feminist critique would be a critique from a feminist framework, not a critique of feminism, much like a Bayesian critique of something would argue that it's fallaciously reasoning about probabilities.
That is what I mean; HPMOR's Hermione represents a critique of something, but not a "critique from a feminist framework" of that thing.
One dollar.