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JoshuaZ comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That argument as explanation doesn't really work: first of all, many of Harry's discoveries are low-hanging fruit, and it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of those. Second of all, Harry only has some aspects of TR. He grew up a (relatively normal) child without any of the procedural or other memories of TR. As far as we can tell, the primary way that Harry is akin to TR is close to the same starting minds and being raised in different ways.
Moreover, smart children make discoveries even in our world where there are a lot of scientists. Here a 16 year old discovered a novel method of quickly killing ticks. 11 and 12 year olds have discovered supernovas, and now a 10 year old has now granted that's observational, but that's still the same pattern. Young children have also published math papers.
Finally, this doesn't help because the concern is at a meta-level. Dumbledore, Harry, Voldemort, and Draco all got massive resource and power boosts. But not Hermione.
I don't really know how the whole 'HP is TR' thing works. I mean, on the one hand no 11 year, however gifted, old works out a way to run hypercomputing algorithms on a closed timelike curve provided by time-turners. On the other, Harry presumably didn't start talking with an adult vocabulary when he was an infant, so... I dunno.
And sure, I can buy 11 or 12 year olds making observational discoveries. But for an actual, highly intellegent 11 year old who isn't sharing her mind with fragments of an adult's psyche, the correct tactic is to learn as much as possible, and start doing experiments when you're older, which was Hermione's plan.
Certain of the female charicters did gain a power boost, while Baba Yaga is a new charicter and nicholas flamel is actually female.
Moreover, the way Dumbledore and Voldemort have changed is simply that they are acting like intelligent adults, rather than characters in a children's story. By comparison, Hermione is acting like a child rather than a child in a children's story, which... isn't that much of a change.