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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: palladias 02 July 2013 02:13AM

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Comment author: palladias 02 July 2013 02:17:05AM 24 points [-]

I loved this:

That's not how responsibility works, Professor." Harry's voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn't looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. "When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That's why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least.

Does anyone else run into the problem of frequently giving this advice to yourself and finding it useful, but struggling to find a non-awful way to convey it to other people? I don't want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control. Stoicism seems like the main way people hit on this idea of responsibility in my social circle.

Comment author: Alsadius 02 July 2013 05:27:36PM 7 points [-]

Does it feel wrong to anyone else that he's basically complaining to a woman old enough to be his grandmother about how immature she is? This despite the fact that she's proven herself repeatedly to be willing to listen to good advice, and has pulled his bacon out of the fire by quick-witted crisis management at least once?

Comment author: drethelin 02 July 2013 07:59:28PM 7 points [-]

He's an angry 11 year old, and this isn't the first time he's yelled at her.

Comment author: Alsadius 03 July 2013 03:26:18AM 5 points [-]

Of course. This isn't surprising behaviour, but it is behaviour that makes me think less of Harry. (That said, it's one of his few traits that makes me actually think he's eleven, so perhaps I should be grateful)

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 03 July 2013 10:54:52AM 4 points [-]

He seems bad at using people. And that is a weakness, compared with his opponent.

Comment author: Decius 02 July 2013 09:07:37PM 1 point [-]

She's handled a couple of crises well, but she didn't gain very much respect for not scolding Harry for taking more money out of his vault than she thought he needed.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 02 July 2013 07:47:47PM 1 point [-]

Maturity and competence are not the same thing.

Comment author: Alsadius 03 July 2013 03:20:42AM 2 points [-]

Immaturity may not be precisely correct, but he's definitely not accusing her of incompetence. Irresponsibility, perhaps. He's not saying that she tried and failed, he's saying that she didn't try. He's saying that she's just blindly playing a role, instead of actually acting responsibly, and that it's so hard-wired into her that it's not even worth him trying to correct it. Hard-wired irresponsibility is close enough to immaturity that it's a reasonable approximation.