An edited paste of a conversation I had with a friend

Alicorn: I'm increasingly disappointed with Hermione's character. Eliezer has never been great with female characters, and he's trying so hard with her, but he's made her so silly, so pathetically, appallingly silly. She's not stupid, she's not evil, but she's more a child than anyone else who gets character development and she is such a silly girl. I don't mean, like, she has a sense of humor, which is the other meaning of the word "silly". She is not Pinkie Pie, she's just a ninny.

Alphabeta: To be fair, all the other people her age with that much development are fucking crazy.

Alicorn: All the girls in their year are silly, though, I don't think this is just Hermione's personal character flaw that she has to have because she got developed a certain amount. It's more irritating in her, because we see more of her and it's contrasting against higher intelligence, but all the girls are silly.

Alphabeta: That sounds like something Eliezer needs to hear

Alicorn: yeah, I'm considering pasting this conversation in the LW discussion thread

Alphabeta: Also, in fairness, most of the boys are silly, and McGonagall is very good at not being silly. Okay, most of the NPC boys are silly.

Alicorn: McGonagall is not silly, it's true. McGonagall may be the best female character Eliezer has done. But I'd feel better about it if she'd been revised for hypercompetence while Moody was a minor side character serving as a cautionary tale about wasting time on low-probability risks, or something.

Alphabeta: Well, Director Bones is competent, even if she did drop the ball on Quirrelmort's identity pretty hard

Alicorn: Bones hasn't been invited to a place of significance in the protagonist's story. As far as Harry is concerned, she is set dressing. Moody just got promoted.

Alphabeta: Also, why is Harry using Snape as his example of guys he might end up attracted to instead of Quirrelmort?

Alicorn: Good question. I'll paste that too :P

Your third sentence (at least up to the semicolon) should be rot13ed, although the proposition it expresses is pretty well known.

HPMOR is making me rethink human nature -- because of how people react to it. This is a story full of cunning disguises, and readers seem reluctant to see past those disguises. RL rkcerffrq chmmyrzrag ng ubj many readers took forever to decide Quirrell = Voldemort; I think I now know why.

I suggest that humans are instinctive "observation consequentialists." That is, we think someone is competent and good if the observed results of their actions are benign. We weigh what we observe much more strongly than what we merely deduce. If we personally see their actions work out well, we'll put aside a great deal of indirect evidence for their incompetence or vileness.

In HPMOR, Quirrell's directly observed actions are mostly associated with Harry getting to be more of what he thinks he wants. Even rescuing Bellatrix amounts to Harry getting to save a broken lovelorn creature in terms of what we directly observe. To believe Quirrell evil we have to bring in all kinds of expected consequences to weigh against those immediate positive observations.

Does the resistance to saying Quirrell=Voldemort maybe reflect a broader unwillingness to overlook what we directly witness in favor of abstract deduction? If it does, this implies some interesting predictions about human behavior:

• if you can be kind and moderate in your personal behavior, you can get away with incredible amounts of institutionally-mediated violence and extremism, especially to anyone who feels like they "know" you. Hypothesis: the most dangerous people are those who can give us the illusion of "knowing" them while they command an institution whose internal operations we don't see.

• More generally, an institution "wired" to do us harm can get away with it much longer than an individual doing it personally and directly. Faceless corporate evil, faceless societal evil, and faceless government evil are much more deadly than our emotional impulses realize. Hypothesis: we are biased to confuse the institutions with our attitude toward their leaders, or to refuse to act against the institutions because of the outward manners of their leaders.

• if this 'observation consequentialism' bias is heuristic, then maybe it evolved as an anti-gossip function. In that case we should expect that people are too quick to believe outrageous things about people they can't observe. Hypothesis: the further away someone is from your understanding, the less likely you are to think of them as mostly a typical human being, and the quicker you are to believe them a saint, a monster, or something similarly exciting.

• And, alas for EY, hypothesis: telling a story about cunning disguises, in which the protagonist of the story does not see through those disguises, is almost always going to lead to lots of readers also not seeing through those disguises.

But the same happens with things like the Trolley problem or Torture v. Specks. Many "irrational" answers to hypotheticals come out of reflexes that are perfectly rational under ordinary circumstances. If the hypothetical-proposer isn't willing to allow that the underlying reflex has its uses, the hypothetical-proposer is ignorant or untrustworthy.

It depends a bit on how well the discussion is going - if it isn't trying to reach true beliefs then that is your problem, not the appropriateness of the hypothetical.

But if the discussion is going well, then knee-jerk reactions to the hypothetical aren't helpful. The fact that a reflex answer usually works is no evidence that it handles edge cases well. And if it doesn't handle edge cases well, then it might not be a very coherent position after all.

One good reason to "fight the hypothetical" is that many people propose hypotheticals insincerely.

Sometimes this is obvious: "But what if having a gun was the only way to kill Hitler?" or alternatively "But what if a world ban on guns had prevented Hitler?" are clearly not sincere questions but strawman arguments offered to try to sneak you into agreement with a much more mundane and debatable choice.

But the same happens with things like the Trolley problem or Torture v. Specks. Many "irrational" answers to hypotheticals come out of reflexes that are perfectly rational under ordinary circumstances. If the hypothetical-proposer isn't willing to allow that the underlying reflex has its uses, the hypothetical-proposer is ignorant or untrustworthy.

For example, while in principle killing by inaction is as bad as killing by action, in practice it's much easier to harm with a nonconformist action than to help -- consider how many times in a day you could kill someone if you suddenly wanted to. So a reflexive bias to have a higher standard of evidence for harmful action than harmful inaction has its uses.

So when someone is using hypotheticals to prove "people are stupid", they're not proving that in quite the way they think. Should we really play along with them?

Quirrell's tale of "I played a hero, but it didn't get me political power" doesn't hold up. The "lonely superhero" is just as much a mere storytelling convention as the "zero-casualties superhero". Either Quirrell is leaving something out, or the author is ignoring real-world politics for storytelling convenience.

In real life, successfully fighting societally recognized enemies gets you all kinds of political opportunity. Look at American Presidents Eisenhower, Grant, Taylor, Jackson, Harrison, and Washington. This is true in nondemocracies too: consider the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Marlborough, or Sir Francis Drake.

What gets you loneliness and isolation is being a pioneer.

In real life, heroes go unrewarded exactly and only when their enemies aren't yet regarded as enemies by the rest of society.

The socially isolating thing isn't fighting Nazis when you're an American, it's fighting Nazis when you're a German. Being a reformer is isolating.

"The lonely superhero" is just as much a mere literary convention as "the zero-casualties superhero".

Of course, "the lonely superhero" reflects an underlying truth. The real bravery we could use more of from people is the bravery to give up status.

So the deeds we see Batman and Superman perform are mere stand-ins for socially brave deeds that make less good stories but matter far more: the scientist defending an unpopular hypothesis, the leader admitting to his followers he doesn't have an answer, the skilled and intelligent person who chooses to work on something that matters instead of something that makes the most money. Those are the real heroes we need, and they really are lonely.

So just as "the zero-casualties superhero" is a literary figure for "we need people who'll take risks for others", the "the lonely superhero" is a literary figure for "we need people who are willing to be mocked for doing what's right".

But within the context of the story, Quirrell's "I fought the villain but got no respect" is nonsense. Humans don't work that way. We have to assume Quirrell is leaving something out.

Did Dumbledore see through him and undermine him politically at every turn?

Alternatively, perhaps Quirrellmort is as bad at mass politics as he is good at individual violence? There's evidence he's got no clue how to handle 'inspiration' as a motive, though he gets 'greed' and 'fear' just fine.

The time travel is 'easily' explained when you assume an AI has been made to account for magic.

The AI just need to predict what everyone is going to do for the next 6 hours and "create" a new Harry with the correct memories when he is going to use a time-turner. Then 6 hours later the old Harry is instantly destroyed when he uses it.

This also explains why there is a finite bound on how far back information can be sent (6 hours is how far into the future the AI can predict) and why there is an apparent intelligence warning people when they are about to do something wrong with their time-turners (eg. Harry's "Do not mess with time" message and Dumbledore's paradox warning).

Can we add the 'harry_potter' discussion tag to this post?

(Contrary to what the post text says, as of right now this post does not show up on the list of Harry Potter discussion posts.)

I thought the unspeakable secret of the fic is that magic itself comes from an FAI trying to grant wishes while respecting humans' sense of how the world ought to work.

In that case, of course, your FAI must choose to either work within the magic system or to overthrow the old guard and replace it.

The final ending of Lord of the Rings was declared in about chapter 2 of the book - "look, someone puts the ring in the fire, all right?"

"Look, he creates an FAI that can do magic, alright!"