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skeptical_lurker comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It isn't an aggregate pattern in almost anyone's work: it happens in individual cases and adds up. The problem is made all the more severe because it is very clear that Eliezer is aware of all these tropes and issues.
Sure. What about Neville or Draco?
Sometimes. Look at the trope page- there's a large amount of variation on how much of a role they've played prior to fridging. Moreover, Hermione while she did play a role, she also had the least power boost of anyone in the story.
Sure, and obvious way of helping get rid of this sexism is not to reinforce it in stories by using gender as a quick emotional tug.
That's not to say that there were not legitimate reasons to have Hermione be killed, and from a "is this a reasonable thing for Voldemort to try to do" perspective it makes some sense (although it does indicate that he may not understand the importance of martyrs for how people think). But there were many other options, and again, her death wasn't even heroic, she saved zero lives and wasn't even in a position to save lives. When she's explicitly trying to be a heroine out of feminist ideals, and she then gets quickly killed, what does that look like?
As I said, Draco tries to kill Hermione wouldn't work, because Hermione's family don't have the influence to send Draco to Akazaban, which starts the chain of events leading to the death. Neville isn't as important a charicter as the other two.
Ron and Hagrid have both been presented as imbeciles when they were heroes in canon.
What if its wired into us at the biological level because a tribe can repopulate after losing 90% of the men more than after losing 90% of the women?
Neville in many ways had more actual character development than Hermione. If anything, Neville's death would have been far more tragic if he had died trying to be a hero in the sense of having an impact on Harry. Neville is only at all heroic because of Harry. It would have been a far more emotional rebuke to Harry if Neville had tried trying to be a hero.
Sure, but Ron was an idiot in canon also, and there are literally multiple subgenres of fanfic to get Ron out of the picture because so many people dislike his character. See for example Ron the Death Eater (again standard TVTropes warning.) And Hagrid being an imbecile is simply taking the issues with the character already and putting them into a serious context where actually harming children might actually have a real response. This is for example parts of Wait, What? (which in its own way is a rationalist fic).
That seems very strongly like a just-so story. I'd be very interested in seeing some sort of evidence backing up that this sort of attitude is strongly cross cultural. There are other cross-cultural reasons this might happen but that would be the minimum level.
Note also that just because something is innate doesn't mean it is a good thing: that's most of the point of learning to deal with cognitive biases for example.
My point is that Ron and Hagrid were not upgraded, and as such I see no overall pattern where the males are upgraded and females like Hermoine are not.
I'm neither an anthropologist nor an evolutionary psychologist, so I can't say whether this is the case with high certainty. I'm also not saying its a good thing to have substantially higher empathy for females over males, but if biases such as this exist, then it does make fridging a little more understandable. Even if you consciously believes in gender egalitarianism, you're still running on what is, from your POV, corrupted hardware.
But neither became a major character, and both were stupid to start with, so it was much easier to just keep them stupid. If you prefer the following: every character who remains a major character in the story gets an upgrade with an exception of one: Hermione.
Ron, in canon, wasn't much less bright than Harry: they were both fair-to-mediocre students who bumbled through adventures mostly on the strength of luck, chutzpah, Hermione, and the beneficence of older and more experienced characters. Ron being a non-viewpoint character, though, we didn't have as clear a view on the motives behind his failings, and so they came off as less explicable. On the other hand, he did have that talent for chess where Harry didn't, though we only really see it in the first book.
For that matter, Hagrid wasn't portrayed as especially dim either; he wasn't a particularly educated character, but when the script called for wisdom of an earthier kind than Dumbledore's, he was often the one to give it. He just had a blind spot where dangerous animals were concerned, one that for mysterious plot reasons his higher-ups were happy to give him opportunities to indulge.
Well, Hermione is also the least in need of an upgrade. There are important literary reasons not to upgrade her, and insisting that the story must be exactly gender-balanced is a big constraint that limits what stories can be written.
Sure. The problem there though is that everyone else in the original started at around a 1 or a 2 in some 1-10 scale of intelligence/education/rationality and she was at a 3. Then a lot of characters got bumped to 4 or 5 and she didn't get bumped.
There's no insistence in this case that things must be "exactly gender-balanced" but rather than less gender inequity would have been nice.