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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Sure, but Ron was an idiot in canon also .... And Hagrid being an imbecile is simply taking the issues with the character already and putting them into a serious context

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.