Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93

daenerys

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 93. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.

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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,18,19,20.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

No, it doesn't indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don't think you'd disagree, but I imagine you'd probably not agree that we shouldn't play it.

Criticism isn't about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.

Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn't to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one's past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.

For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.

http://www.feministfrequency.com/tag/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/

No, it doesn't indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don't think you'd disagree, but I imagine you'd probably not agree that we shouldn't play it.
Criticism isn't about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.

When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you're talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or... (read more)