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Right, but how would they even know that caring is the thing they're supposed to pretend to do?
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
In response to
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
Because if you care about someone else (i.e. put a value on protecting and aiding that person), you become a resource worth preserving to that person.
No it doesn't! How would people even know what to pretend, if nobody had ever cared?
They don't know. That is what you observe.
I'm not sure I follow the second sentence. It doesn't seem responsive to the first.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
People don't know how to pretend to care, thus them being terrible at it - see, for example, not even spending five minutes to try to think of a way to bring their friends back to life.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93
Yeah, his Slytherin side has gotten too pessimistic. In fact, the Hogwarts students did about as well as could be expected for a random group of people.
Using Milgrim stats, 35% of people don’t kill the innocent man when they have to press the button themselves and 7.5% don’t kill him when they’re just helping.
In Hogwarts, Harry, the Weasley hive mind, Susan, Ron, and 7 random kids helped. And Neville and Lesath Lestrange each get half credit so that’s 12 people helping. That’s what you would expect from groups of 35 and 160 respectively. Since we are told there are a little over a hundred people there, Slytherin would have done better just going with social science based priors.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93
It's worth noting that in the Milgram experiment, there is no perceived punishment for failure to participate, just a polite repetition. Further, the Milgram experiment models willingness to stop acting in accordance with orders, rather that willingness to act against orders, which, while morally fairly indistinguishable, are psychologically (and legally) substantially different.
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What's the name of this cognitive bias?
It's my understanding that people prefer to go counterclockwise in all sorts of situations, it might just be that.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93
Three times:
And I daresay that most wizards would be hard-pressed to name a single Dark Lady besides Baba Yaga.
(Chapter 70)
That said, I think Baba Yaga's just a shout out like Harold Shea, not an actual character in this story.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93
Baba Yaga has "been dead for six hundred years," and a quick Wikipedia search suggests the historical myth is first recorded in 1755, nor can I find anything particularly relating her to being from around ~1400. Nicholas Flamel is six centuries old (canonically, he was born in 1327), which means the Philosopher's Stone, if it exists, is around the same age.
Not sure what kind of coherent theory you can come up with to put it all together, though... Voldemort = Baba Yaga seems a little... silly, especially given Quirrell talking about female wizard rapists, which, given that Canon!Voldemort is a rape baby and Quirrell is Voldemort, seems like pretty good evidence that HPMOR!Voldemort is a rape baby too.
Maybe Baba Yaga is Nicholas Flamel's true identity.
From chapter 85:
"And the last was cousin to your young friend Lavender Brown, and he -" The old wizard's voice cracked. "He did not return, did poor John, and he saved none of those he meant to save."
Did anyone else get this ref? I haven't seen anyone else post about it.
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So people pretend to care about others because this might cause others to actually try to help them? It's a plausible theory of human behavior, but seems awfully complicated to describe the mental processes of people we are all but explicitly told are too stupid to consistently implement their preferences.
In other words, there could actually be a reason that people think caring is the right thing to do, but trivial inconveniences and other errors of thinking prevent them from actually doing what they really think is right. This seems like a better description of most folks' mental processes than "doesn't care, and knows it" - which is the implication I get from the response sentence.
I would say the likeliest explanation is that people do care, but only insofar as it enables them to signal that they care. Caring much farther than that is pretty much pointless, from an evolutionary perspective, and probably actively detrimental.