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Protagoras comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 [deleted] 06 July 2013 03:02AM

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Comment author: Protagoras 06 July 2013 10:13:02PM 8 points [-]

Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don't really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn't so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione's fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.

Comment author: Creutzer 07 July 2013 06:05:23AM *  6 points [-]

If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don't understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn't to be called "Unfortunate Implications". Because there is no implication of anything.

These things seem to me to work like implicatures. "The author could have told the story in a different way. But she didn't, she told the story in a way conforming to this or that culturally prevalent pattern. Interesting.". But if the author couldn't have told it in any other way anyway and the conformity with the pattern is a purely accidental property and the cultural prevalence of the pattern has nothing to do with anything in how it came about, then this isn't interesting.

Comment author: redlizard 11 July 2013 02:00:58AM 2 points [-]

If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don't understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn't to be called "Unfortunate Implications". Because there is no implication of anything.

That sounds a lot like Conservation of Expected Evidence to me, by analogy if not quite literally.

Comment author: David_Gerard 07 July 2013 08:59:29AM 2 points [-]

You appear to be saying that readers are unfair to authors. Well, yes, they are.