Are you really comfortable putting "hurtful and/or stupid things written in a Potions textbook" in the same category as financial insecurity?
Yes, I am absolutely comfortable doing so. I'm talking about two children who have never been taught to communicate with intention, with raging adolescent hormones, and with typical teenage naïvete regarding bother their own emotions and those of others.
I don't have two high-school friends to rub together. The fact that I'm still in touch with one person from twenty years ago is the freak result of a whole series of unlikely coincidences. But somewhere in those years I've harbored runaways that age, I've sheltered semi-homeless kids that age, I've broken up fights between kids that age, and I've provided relationship counseling to kids that age. It's hard to make them get along if they aren't inclined to. It'd be shit-easy to imagine making them fight if you could convince one that the other was doing hurtful things, which is what we are led to believe happened.
I guess what I'm saying is that you are either limited in information on teenagers or in imagination. Sorry, but I don't know how else to answer you, just now.
My apologies, I wasn't clear. I meant, pick two of your high-school friends when they were in high school. Or if you prefer, pick any two of "your kids", whatever that means to you, at an age when they'd been friends for at least five years. Not two kids who "aren't inclined" to get along, two kids who are.
What, concretely, do you write to start them fighting? I see several straightforward ways to worsen an existing argument, but creating a new one, without either participant noticing the asymmetry, is much harder.
...I guess what I'm
EDIT: New discussion thread here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With two chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 500 comments. The latest chapter as of 17th March 2012 is Ch. 79.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: