Hermione Granger Versus the Methods of Rationality

It's always difficult, I think, to broach the subject of flaws within Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the scientifically-focused Harry Potter fanfic that seems to have taken the Internet by storm. Regardless of the intent (and that, folks, is a phrase you're going to be hearing a lot more in this article) Eliezer Yudkowsky exudes an aura of almost unassailable wisdom. That, perhaps, is part of the problem: it's easy to fall into the trap, ironically, of not thinking critically about this text in part because the presentation suggests a reading of the text that accept Rationalist!Harry as both author surrogate and sole voice of reason.

I actually talked about this issue over a year ago in a frankly pretty shitty article that nevertheless made some good points. Let me try to isolate them here quickly:

...[R]ead the conversation with McGonagall after Harry accidentally causes a shop keeper to remember what are implied to be rather traumatic memories. Note the way the conversation transforms into a lecture on pessimism and accurate predictions of the future. It's fascinating stuff, to be sure, but narratively it means that even though we are told that Harry feels bad, his behavior is reinforced because A. he's temporarily transformed into the mouthpiece of rationality and B. he still gets what he bloody well wants in the end!

Harry needs to lose here--he needs to be wrong here--because these early chapters grant him too much infallibility. He wins so often that we assume that he is always right. This actually works in direct opposition to the skills that the story is teaching us--after all, as long as we can comfortably rely upon Harry as a guide, we don't have to analyze his actions from a standpoint of rational skepticism.  

... 

I think, if nothing else, this demonstrates the fact that the narrative and the themes or purposes of a work have to be carefully set into balance, and it's very easy for one to get in the way of the other if they are not carefully arranged. It also shows that the transmission of ideas cannot rely upon an understanding of the ideas themselves alone. Communication is, by its nature, interdisciplinary, and understanding narrative from a liberal arts perspective can help even a staunchly scientific piece of writing.

 I stand by that assertion, incidentally. I think the text often works at cross-purposes with itself, because while the conscious meaning of the text promotes one attitude, the unconscious response encourages another. Texts train their readers how to read them, and this text has a recurring difficulty in telegraphing its intentions. And while you could, I suppose, simply shrug your shoulders and assert that people should be clever enough to listen only to the conscious meaning, frankly I would consider that an unartful and lazy response. If you're going to write, you may as well do it with a whole rather than a halved ass.

This is why Yudkowski's response to some recent plot events rubbed me in rather the wrong way. If you're caught up on the story you can probably guess what I'm talking about: (spoilers, obviously, from hereon out--not that I should have to say that at this point)

Hermione Granger is dead, and people aren't happy.

Which is to be expected, of course, when a beloved character dies. The issue here, however, is that many of the reactions I've seen are not what I'll call immersive reactions. I.E., they are not reactions that involve people saying, "This character that I love is dead, and it hits me hard emotionally!"

They are metatextual reactions: "This character that I love is dead, and it's a sexist choice!"

Metatextual reactions, of course, are not bad at all. It's a good sign of critical reading. However, when you have a bunch of (largely female, I think) readers responding to a major emotional moment in your story by calling you a sexist asshole... well, that suggests to me that there's been a major disconnect between the story you're attempting to tell and the story that people are reading.

So, I want to try to unpack, at least somewhat, why this was a foreseeable problem if you are aware of feminist pop media criticism, and why Yudkowski's reply was more than a little ham-fisted.

The first big problem, of course, that needs to be tackled is Yudkowski's suggestion that it is "unfair" to analyze an unfinished text. This is... well, I guess I can see how from a Formalist perspective this is accurate--after all, a Formalist criticism, as I've said before, BEGINS AT THE BEGINNING and ENDS AT THE END, as God ordains, forever and ever and ever Amen. It's a fine way of working because it allows you to examine how a theme develops and possibly turns on its head by the end of a narrative. But it is not accurate to how people react to a text. You do not read a text feeling completely neutral about it until the end, when you pass judgment. You do not read a text ignoring the theme until the end, when you pass judgment. For goodness sake, this is why people stop reading books or leave movie theaters.

Yet, Yudkowski presents this basic, totally predictable and frankly quite human reaction as not just a question of fairness or unfairness but almost as some strange, alien reaction unique to Feminist critics:

There is, I think, a very great divergence between feminists who try to be fair, and feminists who do not try to be fair. 

Attacking someone who cannot defend themselves, even in possible worlds where they possess a defense, is not fair. 

Authors of unfinished stories cannot defend themselves in the possible worlds where your accusation is unfair.

Let me be frank.

This is a shitty response to criticism.

And it's also kind of a sexist response to criticism.

It's part of a long tradition of white, straight, cismales dividing activists (frequently feminists) into two camps: good activists and bad activists. It is no coincidence that the good activists are those whose message is most appealing to said white, straight, cismales. It's a good way of breeding division within a movement and stifling radicalism--after all, the stigma of being grouped in with The Bad Camp is a powerful swayer of behaviors, considering how much humans want to be accepted rather than persecuted. And, of course, Yudkowski here could easily have used the word "readers" and conveyed largely the same point, but he did not. He defaulted to "feminists," and regardless of the intent, the result is a singling out of feminism as a movement and an establishment of Good and Bad camps that others may use to tar and label literally anyone who has a problem with HPMOR from a feminist standpoint.

I'm sorry, were we talking about unfairness? Somehow, a male author singling out readers with a sociological stance that frequently elicits responses ranging from insults and harassment all the way up to physical and sexual assault as being particularly prone towards Bad Camp behaviors does not, to me, fit under the definition of "fairness," or "good forethought," or "really any kind of self awareness whatsoever." Regardless of the intent, this is punching downward. It is a weapon in the hands of misogynists--who, and I know this will come as a staggering shock, aren't exactly unheard of in the Hard Sciences and Atheist circles.

This is a concern, to me, largely because there ARE a number of problems with the text on a Feminist level, and Yudkowski effectively addresses none in his post here. He has, however, established a field of discourse where first a feminist theorist must prove her fairness and goodness before she can even begin to discuss the text itself!

I, however, will not be doing that, because sod that. The reason I'm bringing all this up is not to establish my own fairness, but to establish that Yudkowski fucked up here, wittingly or otherwise, and it makes the whole wider conversation a whole lot more difficult to have.

What is that wider conversation?

Well, let's start with the issue of Theme. On the one hand, I think Yudkowski is right to assert that MacGonnagal has a tight thematic arc. I really do agree with that assertion! Seeing the whole thing come together was actually pretty cool, because it was quite well plotted.

Well... mostly.

There's two problems with this defense, though.

First, just because a theme is present and coherent does not make that theme defensible from other critical standpoints. Like, it might make perfect sense thematically for MacGonnagal to go from a stern disciplinarian to a more flexible thinker, but if that arc is fundamentally a story of how she learned that Rationalist!Harry Ubermensch Potter was right about everything all along, that's not exactly going to make her a better character in the eyes of a feminist critic--nor should it!

This is an opposition as old as these two forms of criticism. Formalism--the New Criticism that sought to find deep themes in everything--always positioned itself as fundamentally universal and above such petty things as the status of non-white, non-straight, non-men in texts. Feminist theory, queer theory, colonial and race theory... this stuff all emerges in part as a critique of that purported universality, and the message frequently boils down to this idea: "If the champions of your themes are always straight, white, upper middle class, cismen, and every other narrative arc in the story bends around them, then you DON'T really have a universal experience or truth, do you? You have a narrow perspective that tells readers outside that narrow band that they should just be more like those straight white uppermiddleclass cismen."

So, saying that the theme was planned from the start, even from the perspective of whether or not MacGonnagal achieves agency in the text (which can be debated, of course), does not automatically remove any complaint of feminist criticism.

For example, a feminist might question why, exactly, MacGonnagal's character arc requires her to become rigid to the point of disaster, when other characters are quite openly altered for various purposes.

This is the problem, ultimately, with Yudkowski's veiled assertion that his choices with MacGonnagal and Hermione were, in fact, out of his control:

J. K. Rowling created certain roles and assigned them genders.  The story of HPMOR is built around the parallel-universe versions of those roles, and those roles (with one exception) retain whichever genders they had in canon.  HPMOR is not deliberately feminist literature.  S.P.H.E.W. is ultimately there because it is what Hermione Granger would do in that situation, not to balance gender scales.

This is nothing short of complete and utter nonsense.

Yudkowski happily has manipulated and altered characters as he saw fit. He altered everyone from Quirrell to Dumbledore to Snape to Sirius Black to Peter Pettigrew when the story, in one way or another, called for it.

S.P.H.E.W. is ultimately there because Elizer Yudkowski wished for it to be there, not because it was mysteriously preordained in the stars that it should be so, or because J.K. Rowling tied his hands. In fact, placing the blame (I mean, he says he isn't placing the blame, but let's be honest, he totally is) on Rowling is somewhat disingenuous considering the actual source material. There is nothing in the world to say that Harry Potter should, with the proper application of Oxford Professors, turn into a rationalist supergenius, but there is likewise nothing in the world to say that, should an author wish it, Hermione Granger should grow to meet Harry Potter. In fact, it seems incredible to me that she and Draco Malfoy should be put on equal terms, when Draco shows none of her ingenuity, wit, determination, and raw problemsolving ladygrit in the source material! And yet, in this text, she is the third wheel in the wonderful communion that is Harry//Draco. Not to say that I don't ship it of course but LOOK WE'RE GETTING SIDETRACKED HERE The point is that giving Harry the opportunity so constantly to win, then giving Hermione a chance to shine only to end up turning it into another game move between Harry and his opponent, is...

Well, it sucks.

It feels like bait and switch.

And worse, the message seems to be that ultimately, the voices of sexism in the story were correct: there is no role for Hermione to be her own hero. She is always the child watched from a distanced by cool, intellectual Harry, the logical male who sees beyond the girl's silly concerns.

For gibberflipping fuck's sake, Yudkowsky fabricated an entire core plot point--the Interdict of Merlin--because it suited him, but we are to accept at face value this statement:

I am building off J. K. Rowling’s canon, in which, as Professor Quirrell observes in Ch. 70, “It is futile to count the witches among Ministers of Magic and other such ordinary folk leading ordinary existences, when Grindelwald and Dumbledore and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named were all men.”

What utter nonsense! There is a vast, unexplored range of open space here, and Yudkowski apparently cannot imagine anything other than these three men! I would normally have been quite charitable here and pointed out that this assertion comes from an evil character, BUT YUDKOWSKI IS AGREEING WITH HIM! And then he goes on to graciously assert that we should not blame Rowling for this state of affairs.

Well, no, we should not, because in canon, Voldemort's most feared lieutenant was a woman, a woman who, upon breaking out of Azkaban, immediately starts hexing everything in sight, cackling all the while...

...A woman who, in Yudkowski's world, is reduced to a barely-sapient, brainwashed girl and subjected to repeated rape at the hands of Voldemort's other followers.

In canon, MacGonnagal fights furiously for her students' well-being, even if it means refusing them the freedom they wish for, and frequently comes across as an extremely clever, extremely capable woman, a highly worthy successor to Albus Dumbledore...

...While in Yudkowski's world, any disagreement she might have with Harry Ubermensch Potter is portrayed as being the result of her own stubbornness, lack of insight, and inability to keep up with Dumbledore and Harry in their manbrilliance.

In canon, Ginny and Luna are heroic characters who are fundamental both to the victory of the main trio, and are fundamental to Harry's struggle to maintain his own sanity and his own humanity...

...While in Yudkowski's world, Luna is just a punchline in a single joke and Ginny is Sir Not Appearing In This Film.

In canon, Hermione Granger is the smartest witch of her year, an equal with Harry and Ron, part of a trio of three powerful young mages who ultimately save the world...

...While in Yudkowski's world, her ultimate role is to become Harry's friend so that she can die.

And she dies in order to motivate Harry to action.

She is not his equal, the companion that sticks with him through everything and helps him right up until the end to defeat his opponent.

She is, at the end of the day, a plot device, to be used and discarded as Harry goes on alone.

And perhaps that will change. Perhaps I am being "Unfair." But I don't think that the last few chapters of this story will suddenly redeem the other characters that Yudkowski has treated so poorly.

Nor do I believe that the presence of the other SPHEW members truly balances out the other issues with the portrayal of women in the text. They are jokes. They are the comic relief squad. Like it or not, they are not there to be serious heroes or to have any potential of rising beyond their rather shallow characterization, because HPMOR is ultimately about the triumph of rationality, and Yudkowski does not see fit to elevate these characters, to bring them into his ideal mindset.

The theme of the tale and its presentation is fundamentally at odds with a feminist reading of the text, and to suggest that the text is that way simply because it is realistic or it is how the characters would act is an unsatisfying, disingenuous answer. For the latter, it should be clear by now that there is no action of the characters outside the scope of the will of the writer--if he makes choices to manipulate the text elsewhere, he could make choices to manipulate here. For the former... well, I'll let you ponder on that. Perhaps you can see, without too much prompting, why asserting that the lack of Rational women that can come close to the male ubermenschen in the story is realistic would come across as just a leeeettle eensie weensie bit sexist.

I stand by my conclusion in my other shitty article. Rationalism as a doctrine is not, in and of itself, able to make up for a fundamental lack of understanding of other disciplines.

Ultimately, I cannot get behind any sentiment that scolds and chides and derides readers for reacting to a text. It's one thing to say that some strategies within feminist criticism are bad. It's quite another to say that some feminists are bad, solely because they are mildly frustrated (read, again, the post Yudkowski singles out--how uncharitable is that post being, truly? Does it really deserve the reaction it gets). And I think it's important to recognize where a text fails. This, for many readers, was such a moment of failure, and it behooves us as critics and authors to try to understand why there was a communication breakdown, and how other elements of this text led, cumulatively, to a reading that caused this reaction.

And I mean really...

When you kill off a character that to a whole lot of women is a symbol of female strength and intelligence...

You're really gonna play it like you can't understand why some people get upset?

Now now, Hermione, let's not get personal here.

Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

AI and the Magic Paintbrush

This'll be relevant in a few paragraphs, I swear.

I am discovering that when Elizer Yudkowski, the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and LessWrong1, tells me I should be scared of something, there are actually two levels of terror that I have to access. This is because it's not difficult for me to distance myself from problems of AI--after all, the likelihood that I'm going to be designing a pet friendly artificial intelligence in my basement is pretty slim. So, when he says "I don't talk about this idea, because most people are too frightened by it to react with the proper curiosity and interest," I can easily pick curiosity, because I've got nothing on the line.

I have to get to a state where I can actually be legitimately frightened--where I have chips in the game. Otherwise, all I'm doing is finding a solution that masks the act of fleeing from a problem in the guise of intellectual curiosity. It is very easy for me to say, "Wow, what an interesting problem," then immediately put the problem out of my mind. It would look like I'm reacting appropriately to something scary, but really I'm just disengaging.

This article is a very good example of that, actually. The basic gist is: if we create an AI, it might want to study humans. And the way you study things is frequently to make better and better models of your subject.

So, what happens if the AI accidentally creates models of humans so good that they become sapient?

And then what happens if the AI decides to start deleting old backup copies of these sapient simulations?

It's an intriguing thought that a lot of AI researchers, according to Yudowski, anyway, would handwave out of existence--they would say the problem would take care of itself, because the AI will be smart enough to recognize what was happening and keep it from happening, or that certain limitations would naturally prevent the creation of fully simulated consciousnesses. Of course, there's no way of really knowing that ahead of time, and I'm not sure how an AI would actually recognize that it was creating sentient cyberhumans while it's still in the process of figuring out how sentient humans work. And once it has them, they're there, and both the AI, and humanity, has to figure out what we do with a bunch of simulated beings trapped within the mind of another artificial being.

Which, yeah, I can see how that would be a problem, but not for me personally, right? I'm not an AI researcher. I'm pretty sure that for us artists and writers there's not a lot to worry about. After all, we don't have to deal with the hard realities of AI, we can comfortably speculate and fantasize about the intriguing future that awaits us without worrying too much about solving the problems ourselves. We're never going to get so exact a fictional simulation that our own creations start thinking for themselves! And besides, artists are smart, we'll know if that's what's happening and stop ourselves before we go to far. There are just fundamental limitations to our simulations that would prevent the creation of an actual secondary consciousness in our own minds.

Huh.

Why does that sound familiar?

There's a story I remember reading as a child (which Google tells me was probably "Liang and the Magic Paintbrush"), a picture book about a boy who can paint pictures so real they spring to life, and so he deliberately paints flaws in his form. The Emperor hears tell of the boy's strange powers and commissions the artist to paint a great dragon. The boy does, but leaves one eye unfinished, blank.

The emperor doesn't like this.

You can probably imagine what kind of ending the story has. It's not a happy ending.

I didn't really understand this story as a child, and I'm not sure I quite grasp the intended metaphor now, but boy, I can think of a pretty intriguing new reading.

Think about it like this:

As artists (used here to include writers, dancers, &c.--creators of aesthetic works) we often simulate characters, audiences, Ideal Readers, even semi-abstracted emotional ideas as part of our works. I think this is true even of abstract artists--expressionists, poets, dancers, maybe even chefs--albeit to a lesser extent than to realists. There's still a mental model of audience and experience that you're trying to convey--a simulation that attempts to accurately map behavior.

In the most extreme cases of this modeling, we have writers discussing their characters in self-determining terms. The character does, in essence, what it wants and the writer is along for the ride. Which isn't to say the simulation has free will. Think of it in terms of the classic philosophical problem of omniscience: because we are an omniscient observer, we know what the characters would do based on our modeling of their personality, and so while the characters aren't literally walking around making decisions, we see the path that they would weave through a fictional narrative.

Basically, although ultimately I (or more accurately, my mental simulation) am winding the characters up and noting what paths they naturally wobble along due to the particular physics of their setting and personality, they still feel quite real. So intense is this experience that I personally have a lot of trouble subjecting characters to pain, because I feel to much empathy for these simulations, despite the fact that they don't have subjective experiences.

At least, they don't yet.

There's going to be a point in possibly the very near future when we start actually augmenting our intelligence. How long do you think before we start simulating simple people--actual subjectively aware life forms--within our own swelled heads?

If you are an artist, you should be feeling sheer terror right now. Imagine what it will be like to write stories or draw portraits when you might accidentally create a real being just by thinking too hard about your subject.

You will essentially have become mentally pregnant with a fully grown adult that cannot escape the confines of your mind.

Oh, but it gets worse!

See, there's nothing currently that says a sociopath can't be an artist, and that a sociopathic artist can't get the same kind of brain augmentation that the rest of us can.

Ever wanted to just... blow up the world? Well in the future, you might be able to blow up fully realized simulated worlds with sentient beings--genocide as stress relief.

It's enough to make you give up art forever... or give up augmentation.

But that's a path I don't really find interesting or productive. The benefits of upgrading everyone's brains are just too damn weighty to be counterbalanced by this totally hypothetical, fictional, and possibly straight up idiotic media theorist's fears. Remember, this isn't my field. I could be totally off base here--dreaming up nightmares that could never manifest in real life.

No, this isn't a problem we can run from, as alarming as it is. Maybe the solution is to put hard limits in our own brains along the lines that Yudowski suggests for sentient AI--something that can recognize when a being might be created and stop it from being created. We need to leave flaws in our form so that the dragon doesn't spring to life. That seems like, at the very least, a useful metaphor for describing the problem. And really, one of the lessons of that magic paintbrush tale is that art can and perhaps even should accept flaws. Remember, artists are liars, and art derives the greater part of its power from lies--sometimes lies as simple as the careful manipulation of a shadow, or a single unfinished eye.

How do we set up those limits? Hell if I know. But it's something we're going to have to worry about in the future, I think. And in the mean time I'll be thinking very carefully before killing off any fictional characters.

After all, for all I know I may already have blood on my hands.

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

1 I can never quite figure out whether LessWrong is an identity, a collective, or just a website full of articles. It might be all three, and it seems to be used differently in different situations. Fucking transhumanists.

The Madness to the Methods

I hate being right in ways that aren't demonstrable. See, after an event, I can claim the predictive power of a prophet if I so choose, and it's really impossible to prove me right or wrong.

Of course, you can safely bet on the latter option because of the idea of the Greater Miracle. Think about it like this:

• Is it more miraculous that I broke the flow of time and predicted the future psychically
• Or is it more miraculous that I lied, misremembered, or was tricked somehow into thinking I broke the flow of time

Option 2 doesn't seem that incredible, let alone miraculous.

Basically, when we put things in those terms we are evaluating what is the greater miracle, and then discarding that option as being much more unlikely.

This idea comes from philosopher Simon Blackburn in his excellent volume Think, and all credit for the very clever method of evaluation goes to him. It's an idea, however, that would certainly be at home with a certain fanfiction that I've mentioned on here before: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. For those not familiar with the story, the idea is that instead of being raised in the abusive conditions of the Dursley household, Harry was instead raised by his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Michael Verres, an Oxford scientist. Harry, when put in this environment, turns into a bit of a frightening genius, and a champion for rational, scientific analysis of the world.

And then he is told that he is a wizard.

Hilarity, naturally, ensues.

Interestingly, some of the early plot might be thought of as related to Blackburn's idea of the greater miracle, and, in some ways, a critique of that model's limitations. See, Blackburn's idea works for related accounts but weird stuff happens when you're directly confronted with evidence of a miracle. Then, you have to think:

• Is it more miraculous that I have just witnessed something that overturns my understanding of the laws of physics?
• Or is it more miraculous that I have been deceived?
• Or there is a still physics-compatible mechanism at work that is invisible to me?

See, things start to get complex when you're the one standing there and watching the miraculous occurrence, and Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres decides to do what a good scientist should do when confronted with such extraordinary proof of an extraordinary claim.

He decides to study it further.

Now, as for me, I'm not actually claiming psychic prescience, I'm just claiming that I called out some of the problems with a certain text a few months ago, to myself and to some of my friends. I mean, you still have only my word that I predicted it, but it's not quite the miracle that a full on psychic vision would be. Still, I can't help but crow a bit now that I have seeming confirmation that my critiques were right, in the form of an author's revisions.

The text I critiqued is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Yes, there was, in fact, a point to all that blather at the beginning.

See, I wanted to give you a sense of how HPMOR works. It's actually very similar, in some ways, to how I try to write my blog articles: it serves as both an entertainment piece and a tool for teaching critical analysis. So, you can read one of my articles as just an analysis of a work, or you can read it as a description of a methodology that allows YOU to do similar sorts of analysis on other works.

Similarly, HPMOR can be read both as a critique of of the original series and its mechanisms and a vehicle for author LessWrong to pass on the methodology of his analysis--teaching by doing, and sometimes by just having his lead character come right out and explaining particular concepts. This story is, in fact, one of the inspirations for my claim that fanfiction and critical essays occupy overlapping space in discourse. It remains, along with a handful of other fics, remakes, spin offs, and deconstructions, a favorite example of this overlapping territory for me.

Yet, that territory comes with some problems, problems that stem from the sometimes contradictory pull between the story and the message.

See, Rational!Harry is not a perfect hero. However, he is often the vehicle through which the reader comes to understand rationalist ideas, so he's also our teacher. This sets up a bizarre narrative paradox: we need to think like a rationalist to judge Harry's actions and ideas, but we are in the process of learning to be a rationalist. We don't have the requisite expertise to judge Harry's own expertise. (Incidentally, this idea that novices are incapable of judging whether someone is an expert seems to be supported by recent studies, which is why I bring it up, but I'll be damned if I can find any actual journal articles to link to. If someone could link in the comments, I'd be much obliged.)

This, I suspect, is the reason behind LessWrong's recent decision to revise Harry's win rate in the early chapters--the revision I mentioned earlier. Check out his author notes:

...I figure I’d better get around sooner rather than later to some intended revisions to the earlier chapters…

No!  Don’t panic!  This isn’t a rewrite, just a few revisions. ...  6, 7, and 9 are the main chapters that might require larger revisions, and I expect there to be some controversy.

Today I got to Ch. 5 (again minor alterations only) and am, at this instant, almost done with Ch. 6, which was the first chapter to require major repair.  One section of the chapter had Mood Whiplash – tension rising too quickly, with insufficient warning – which I think I’ve now repaired mostly.  The deeper problem in Ch. 6 is that Harry’s conflict with Professor McGonagall looks too much like a victory – it is a major flaw of Methods that Harry doesn’t lose hard until Ch. 10, so he must at least not win too much before then.  That’s the part I’m working on at this very instant.

Now, what could be so fundamentally flawed about this current structure? Well, without knowing exactly what LessWrong is thinking, might I offer the suggestion that it's creating a situation where Harry is infallible. He's a total ubermensch of a character, in a lot of situations, to the point where it becomes almost more miraculous that Harry should be wrong than the alternative.

If you look at Chapter Six, for example, what you'll find is that Harry behaves, frankly, like a little prick much of the way through. He's rude, domineering, unconscientious, and only briefly shows actual remorse rather than self-rightiousness. Oh, it makes for high drama, to be sure, and is a major step on the way towards Harry's character development, but there's one big problem here:

Harry can perfectly justify everything he does.

In fact, read the conversation with McGonagall after Harry accidentally causes a shop keeper to remember what are implied to be rather traumatic memories. Note the way the conversation transforms into a lecture on pessimism and accurate predictions of the future. It's fascinating stuff, to be sure, but narratively it means that even though we are told that Harry feels bad, his behavior is reinforced because A. he's temporarily transformed into the mouthpiece of rationality and B. he still gets what he bloody well wants in the end!

Harry needs to lose here--he needs to be wrong here--because these early chapters grant him too much infallibility. He wins so often that we assume that he is always right. This actually works in direct opposition to the skills that the story is teaching us--after all, as long as we can comfortably rely upon Harry as a guide, we don't have to analyze his actions from a standpoint of rational skepticism.

It's a problem that, in fact, crops up repeatedly throughout the story. I think the repairs to this chapter will go a long way to alleviate that, but it's something that comes up again and again, in his arguments with Dumbledore, in his victories during the bloated Stanford Prison Experiment arc, and so on. I would not hesitate to describe it as the greatest fundamental structural fault of the text.

Now, that's not to say the fault can't be repaired, as LessWrong is doing with the early chapters. I have never bought into the idea that audiences simply want the hero to win, and the text could be refined significantly by letting Harry lose a little more frequently. Such a change allows the teaching side of the text to function while actually aiding rather than damaging the narrative. After all, a flawless hero, or an invincible hero, is kind of a dull one. And, in Harry's case, kind of an insufferable one. It's rather difficult to persuade yourself of particular ideas when they come from the mouth of someone who is well and truly insufferable, after all, and I think LessWrong is aware of that, based upon his interest in the idea of Harry's friendships and how his choices affect whether or not he is alone.

I think, if nothing else, this demonstrates the fact that the narrative and the themes or purposes of a work have to be carefully set into balance, and it's very easy for one to get in the way of the other if they are not carefully arranged. It also shows that the transmission of ideas cannot rely upon an understanding of the ideas themselves alone. Communication is, by its nature, interdisciplinary, and understanding narrative from a liberal arts perspective can help even a staunchly scientific piece of writing.

Alternately, we could just go with the idea that I'm always right and brilliant and you should just listen to whatever I say, but, you know, that would be quite a miracle.

Incidentally, if you want to bask in my miraculous intellect, you can follow me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper or on Twitter @SamFateKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.