Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119

Gondolinian

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 119.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 120 will post on March 12th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific Time (7PM UTC).

The next long chapter will be Ch. 122, posting on March 14th, 2015 at 9AM Pacific / 4PM UTC.

There is 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.)

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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 119.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 120 will post on March 12th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific Time (7PM UTC).

The next long chapter will be Ch. 122, posting on March 14th, 2015 at 9AM Pacific / 4PM UTC.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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.