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JoshuaZ comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Gondolinian 10 March 2015 06:10PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 March 2015 03:28:20AM 0 points [-]

I was going to ignore this comment when it was at -5. But it is now at +7. so I'll respond (although I have to note that this is an oddly rapid change in a comment of this nature).

So to be clear: absolutely no one here has made any argument that Harry being male has anything wrong with it. That's a complete strawman which is utterly irrelevant to anything under discussion. The problem is not that Harry is male. The problem in a nutshell is the portrayal of the major female character and her role in the story. Everyone got a power boost in the story but Hermione. Major characters get to make serious novel discoveries about things, but Hermione. And when Hermione, based on her explicitly stated feminist ideals tries to be a heroine, she is ignominiously killed off. That collectively is the problem.

Comment author: Lumifer 14 March 2015 04:40:57AM 0 points [-]

That's a complete strawman which is utterly irrelevant to anything under discussion.

That's because I'm not participating in this discussion which resembles a bar-room brawl much more than a reasoned conversation. I'm just pointing a finger (well, maybe sticking it up X-D) and laughing.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 March 2015 01:57:59PM -1 points [-]

Please don't deliberately damage the signal to noise ratio.

Comment author: Lumifer 14 March 2015 02:52:09PM 0 points [-]

There is no signal -- other than the observation that you are wedged on Hermione in HPMOR and would much rather prefer it to be HGMOR -- so there is not much to damage. But in any case, books don't write themselves, so if you are accusing Eliezer of misogyny you might as well come out and say so directly...

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 March 2015 03:20:22PM 0 points [-]

other than the observation that you are wedged on Hermione in HPMOR and would much rather prefer it to be HGMOR

Huh? No one is making that claim. That would be stupid. There's a massive difference between treating her as a stronger character and making it all about her. Draco is a much more interesting and smarter character in HPMoR than he is in canon; no one could get confused and think that this was HDMoR.

if you are accusing Eliezer of misogyny you might as well come out and say so directly...

Strawman. There's a massive difference between misogyny and seeing sexist aspects in a work or seeing ways in a work suffers from residual sexist attitudes or could have been improved in those regards.

It also isn't like this hasn't had real impact. I have a friend who cosplayed with me for Vericon a few a years ago. I went as Harry dressed as the Chaos General and she went as Hermione dressed as the Sunshine general. That friend stopped recommending people read HPMoR. Similarly, there's at least one woman who is highly involved in the rationalist community (including heavy involvement in CFAR) who stopped reading HPMoR outright because of the gender issues. Now wonder how many readers had similar reactions that are less involved. How many readers do you think have been turned away from rationality by these issues in the work?

Comment author: seer 14 March 2015 06:09:59PM 5 points [-]

How many readers do you think have been turned away from rationality by these issues in the work?

Do you have similar objections to the gratuitous gay-fanfic lines since they make it harder to recommend the fanfic to Christians?

Comment author: JoshuaZ comment score below threshold [+] (8 children)

Comment author: seer 14 March 2015 09:26:08PM * 1 point [-]

Oh, I'm pretty sure I know the reason why, namely one objection is high status in your RL social circle and the other isn't. I just decided to ask on the off chance you had an actual rational reason.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 March 2015 09:40:05PM 0 points [-]

Ok. Then because apparently you have no ability to model other humans who disagree with you whatsoever, let's discuss a bunch of different reasons:

0) You confuse at a fundamental level status issues with genuine disagreement about values. There's this common temptation to use certain frameworks to force everything into and status is a fun one. (Although incidentally, I'm curious that you would use such LW specific terminology as a relatively new user. Just wondering, did you have a prior LW account?) I don't particularly agree with people who favor for example a larger military but I wouldn't dismiss a call for increasing military spending as a pure status issue, any more than I would dismiss people here who are concerned about a hard-take off in a matter of seconds as pure status (even as I assign it a low probability).

1) Many Christians are perfectly fine with gay marriage. See data here. So many fewer would people would have an issue.

2) There's a lot of gay fanfic out there already, and young people are the primary readers. Since young people already strongly support gay rights by many metrics, see e.g. here, that means even fewer people would have an objection.

3) Two throw away comments are not the same as overarching themes.

4) The primary problem here isn't just alienating feminists. There's a problem of alienating women in general who aren't necessarily feminist, and writing the best possible fanfic one can that gets people interested in rationality. If the lesson comes across as "you can be rational, only not as heroic" that's not exactly great, is it? Note that about half the human population is female and moreover that the fan fiction community is disproportionately women. Role models that match peoples expectations matter.

5) Let's say counter to fact that I disagreed with Eliezer about attitudes towards gays. That would still be very different, because he would have made a conscious decision to put text in that reflected the authors intent. In that case, I might spend time with him arguing on that specific issue. But that's not what is going on here, the problem is in part that these are in fact values which in some forms Eliezer agrees with. So pointing out "hey, this value you say you care about isn't being well served by what you've done here" is very different.

Comment author: seer 14 March 2015 09:51:33PM * 3 points [-]

The primary problem here isn't just alienating feminists. There's a problem of alienating women in general who aren't necessarily feminist

If you think the treatment of Hermione would alienate non-feminist women, you probably haven't met any.

Comment author: Lumifer 14 March 2015 10:51:37PM 0 points [-]

There's a problem of alienating women in general who aren't necessarily feminist, and writing the best possible fanfic one can that gets people interested in rationality.

Clearly, Comrade Yudkowsky has deviated from the Party line and thus his latest opus might not be fully suitable for agitation and propaganda due to insufficient ideological purity. He was seduced by the sirens' lure of the so-called "art" and forgot that his purpose is to provide finely-honed tools for plowing the seeds of the Correct Thinking into the muck of the public consciousness. The insidious sexist contamination will sabotage the efforts to force open and pierce the minds of the potential revolutionaries with the massive tool of enlightenment that HPMOR was designed to be!

And that just will not do. So after a suitable re-education the tool will need to be reforged, the book rewritten to properly reflect the Correct Guidelines, reinforce the Revolutionary Rules, and resist the rot of the reactionary regime. To work, Comrade Yudkowsky!

continue this thread »

Comment author: seer 16 March 2015 12:51:27AM 4 points [-]

There's a massive difference between misogyny and seeing sexist aspects in a work or seeing ways in a work suffers from residual sexist attitudes or could have been improved in those regards.

So does a work containing ''sexist aspects" predict anything? Or is this just a free-floating term?

I went as Harry dressed as the Chaos General and she went as Hermione dressed as the Sunshine general. That friend stopped recommending people read HPMoR. Similarly, there's at least one woman who is highly involved in the rationalist community (including heavy involvement in CFAR) who stopped reading HPMoR outright because of the gender issues.

Given that this thread started with Coscott pointing out that HPMoR angered feminists, and you claiming that they had good reason to be angry, I don't see how mentioning that you personally know two of said feminists is supposed to be evidence of something.

Comment author: Lumifer 14 March 2015 03:26:55PM -1 points [-]

Well, don't let me stop you from your righteous crusade :-) Since I am still unable to take it seriously, I'll just snicker from the sidelines, if you don't mind.

JoshuaZ comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong Discussion

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