Progressivism was already utterly dominant in the 1960s. It was utterly dominant in the 1900s. What changed was how important it thought "civil rights" where. This did not happen due to popular sentiment but changing moral fashion among intellectual elites in general. Not only did popular sentiment not change much because of activism, neither did intellectual moral fashion, it was changed as a side effect of where Ivy League opinions where a few decades before.

Now sure those opinions might have shifted because of activism, but that was a different generation of activists than the ones that where picked by the media and education industry as symbols for their new prescription for society.

I agree with the "undifferentiated gossiping mass" bit.

Any specific example has a corresponding counterexample. Padma Patil, for example, gets nonzero development and, IIRC, perspective time, which could go a ways to counter "undifferentiated gossiping mass" - but a male character on about her tier of importance, like Blaise Zabini, gets to enact plot and is more distinct as a single person than she is. Even Ron, who is of negligible relevance, has a named skill that differentiates him from the background. Does Padma? As far as I can recall Padma is just sort of generically informedly bright. Hermione's intelligence, gratuitous perfect recall, and magical prowess can go a ways to counter "female characters are less competent" - but the most competent characters, even if you don't count the protagonist, are all male.

Erm... a basic law of MoR is that people gain maturity/competence in proportion to how much hell they've been through. This creates a power balance problem where Harry, as main character, has been to Azkaban and Hermione hasn't, and fighting bullies isn't quite enough to make up for that. However, I would indeed maintain as a literary matter that this Hermione has been through more hell than the quoted canon!Hermione and is visibly more powerful and competent. Methods!Hermione doesn't flee in tears if Ron calls her a nightmare, though she would've at the start of the year. She probably wouldn't even notice.

Re: Flamel and his open-secret-recipe for the Philosopher's Stone.

Here's a quote from chapter 61:

His strongest road to life is the Philosopher’s Stone, which Flamel assures me that not even Voldemort could create on his own

And yet, the recipe is openly available for everyone to see. If anyone could reproduce the stone from the recipe, it would be the very intelligent, rational(and very interested in immortality) Voldemort.

So, how do we reconcile these two facts?

One option is, of course, the published, known recipe is a fake. The stone is real but Flamel lied to everyone about the recipe. That's certainly a plausible - if boring - explanation of the facts. The other plausible explanation is as Harry says - maybe the stone is a fake. Maybe Flamel is immortal because of Horcruxes and he invented the stone as a way to keep people off the trail of his phylacteries. Maybe Flamel isn't immortal at all, maybe he pulls of a Batman Begins Ra's Al Ghul style of immortality. Any of a dozen options is possible.

However, if we take things at face value, I think we can end up with a more interesting conclusion - I think this might be our first piece of evidence(it's not very good evidence, but evidence nonetheless) that the Interdict of Merlin is an actual, real magical effect, rather than just a cultural thing or a legend. The reason people can't reproduce the stone is because the Interdict obscures some part of the recipe.

I guess this is testable - do we know if Flamel had any apprentices to whom he tried to personally explain how to make the Stone?

I'm bothered by Harry's "recovered memory" of Voldemort killing his mother. Firstly we are told, at the time of its first narration, that Harry almost-notices that something is wrong with it. Secondly, the recover-memories-from-before-you-were-verbal thing seems, I don't know, kind of off. It's the sort of thing that would be possible if popular conceptions of how memory is stored were true. And thirdly, while I can see James trying to hold off Voldemort - and incidentally, he can't even dodge the very first AK that Voldemort casts? Isn't he an experienced combat wizard?- why doesn't Lily use the moments thus bought to snatch Harry and Apparate out of there? Really, it should be very hard to kill an adult wizard who knows you're there. The scene seems engineered for maximum emotional impact rather than combat realism.

On the other hand, it's hard to see how a false memory would be useful. If it is false, who benefits thereby, and who had the chance to implant it?

I agree and it is extremely fun to watch happen to a character. All Harry's private scenarios of how to take over magical Britain in five minutes are a perfect example of his main character flaw: arrogance, or, his dismissiveness of the realities of politics as superfluous, "people stuff." It should be clear to the reader, anyway, that liberal use of Imperius would NOT be sufficient to take over the government, at least not for any meaningful length of time. Harry is making the same type of error that led to Voldermort's original failure, that is, modeling people as being simpler and dumber than they are, likely due to his own sense of superiority.

Totally unrelated, but I wanted to mention somewhere (and didn't think it worth making a new comment) that I laughed harder at "I once arrested a young Japanese who tried a similar trick. He found out the hard way that his shadow replica technique was no match for this eye of mine." than I have at anything in recent memory. (It is a Naruto reference.)

I'm a little surprised that HJPEV didn't immediately update his probabilities regarding Quirrell's motives in Azkaban with the new knowledge from Moody that "You've got to mean it. You've got to want someone dead, and not for the greater good, either.", which would seem to discredit the Defense Professor's excuse that "a curse which cannot be blocked and must be dodged is an indispensable tactic."

Expecting small children to give a solemn vow filled with patriotic propaganda every weekday morning that they can't even begin to know the ramifications of, OR ELSE, sounds like something you'd find in a totalitarian state.

That's all. There is nothing more to think about while voting. If you think there should be more things to consider while voting, please explain what and why.

• "This comment deserves to be at +5, not +40. The voting is totally out of proportion and I would prefer it were encouraged to a +39 degree than a +40 degree."
• "The parent is at +8 while this comment is at +1. It is an undesirable thing for there to be such a difference in karma between these two comments because the reply is at least as good as its parent. I am going to upvote the reply."

I certainly support the heuristic: Upvote = "LessWrong discussions should have more of this." In fact, I've been advocating it for long enough that when I first advocating that interpretation it provoked controversy in as much as some considered it too cynical compared to more pure ideals along the lines of votes being obliged to mean "the point in this comment is rationally coherent". That said, it isn't quite the only consideration that it is reasonable to take in to account and I apply both of the heuristics mentioned above from time to time.

This opens up a new aspect of downvoting, which I've just now tried out, and will describe in the interest of full disclosure: you can "swim up" the chain of comment parents until you find one that is at -3, and by downvoting that cause the entire downthread discussion to be effectively censored.

Swimming upthread is something I do quite often in the course of trying to understand what sparked a particular controversy - I'm often dismayed to see that these are tangents that had nothing to do with the original question being investigated and not a whole lot to do with rationality.

This comment by Wei Dai was the trigger for my looking to use this tactic (it felt like it belonged in a low-overall-value discussion of the kind I'd like to see less of), showing up at the top of Recent comments.

No less than eight levels above was this comment by wedrifid, sitting at -3, with a total of 38 children comments. Downvoting it (without the slightest qualm, given the first non-quoted words were a rhetorical "How dare you" that I strongly prefer not to see around here) did in fact cause Wei Dai's comment to disappear from Recent. (Here's the starting point of the whole subthread.)

So, that's one (possibly unexpected) consequence of the new rule. Good? Bad? I haven't formed an opinion yet.

(Some disclaimers: I have no particular antipathy toward either Wei Dai or wedrifid, nor did I allow myself to develop a particular attachment to either "side" in that particular controversy, given that the appearance of "sides" at all didn't strike me as particularly productive. I'm aware that my commenting on this may negate the censorship consequences on this particular discussion, but it seemed to me that bringing this out in the open had greater expected value than just quietly censoring one subthread and retaining the power to do it again on other occasions.)