Full disclosure: I stopped reading HPMoR in the middle of Chapter 53. When I was researching my comment, I looked at the immediate context of the initial definition of “heroic responsibility” and reviewed Harry’s rationality test of McGonagall in Chapter 6.
I would have given Harry a three-step plan: inform McGonagall, monitor situation, escalate if not resolved. Based on McGonagall’s characterization in the part of the story I read, barring some drastic idiot-balling since I quit, she’s willing to take Harry seriously enough to act based on the information he provides; unless the bullies are somehow so devious as to be capable of evading both Harry and McGonagall’s surveillance—and note that, with McGonagall taking point, they wouldn’t know that they need to hide from Harry—this plan would have a reasonable chance of working with much less effort from Harry (and much less probability of misfiring) than any finger-snapping shenanigans. Not to mention that, if Harry read the situation wrong, this would give him a chance to be set straight. Not to mention that, if McGonagall makes a serious effort to crack down on bullying, the effect is likely to persist for far longer than Harry’s term.
On the subject of psychology: really, what made me so emphatic in my denouncing “heroic responsibility” was [edit: my awareness of] the large percentage of adults (~10-18%) subject to anxiety disorders of one kind or another—including me. One of the most difficult problems for such people is how to restrain their instinct to blame themselves—how to avoid blaming themselves for events out of their control. When Harry says, “whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault” to such persons, he is saying, “blame yourself for everything” … and that makes his suggestion completely useless to guide their behavior.
I would have given Harry a three-step plan: inform McGonagall, monitor situation, escalate if not resolved.
Your three step plan seems much more effective than Harry’s shenannigans and also serves as an excellent example of heroic responsibility. Normal ‘responsibility’ in that situation is to do nothing or at most take step one.
Heroic responsibility doesn’t mean do it yourself through personal power and awesomeness. It means using whatever resources are available to cause the desired thing to occur (unless the cost of doing so is deemed too high relative to the benefit). Institutions, norms and powerful people are valuable resources.
I’m realizing that my attitude towards heroic responsibility is heavily driven by the anxiety-disorder perspective, but telling me that I am responsible for x doesn’t tell me that I am allowed to delegate x to someone else, and—especially in contexts like Harry’s decision (and Swimmer’s decision in the OP) - doesn’t tell me whether “those nominally responsible can’t do x” or “those nominally responsible don’t know that they should do x”. Harry’s idea of heroic responsibility led him to conflate these states of affairs re: McGonagall, and the point of advice is to make people do better, not to win philosophy arguments.
When I came up with the three-point plan I gave to you, I did not do so by asking, “what would be the best way to stop this bullying?” I did so by asking myself, “if McGonagall is the person best placed to stop bullying, but official school action might only drive bullying underground without stopping it, what should I do?” I asked myself this because subsidiarity includes something that heroic responsibility does not: the idea that some people are more responsible—better placed, better trained, better equipped, etc. - than others for any given problem, and that, unless the primary responsibility-holder cannot do the job, those farther away should give support instead of acting on their own.
(Actually, thinking about localism suggested a modification to my Step 1: brief the prefects on the situation in addition to briefing McGonagall. That said, I don’t know if that would be a good idea in this case—again, I stopped reading twenty chapters before.)
I asked myself this because subsidiarity includes something that heroic responsibility does not: the idea that some people are more responsible—better placed, better trained, better equipped, etc. - than others for any given problem, and that, unless the primary responsibility-holder cannot do the job, those farther away should give support instead of acting on their own.
I agree with all of this except the part where you say that heroic responsibility does not include this. As wedrifid noted in the grandparent of this comment, heroic responsibility means using the resources available in order to achieve the desired result. In the context of HPMoR, Harry is responding to this remark by Hermione:
“I would’ve done the responsible thing and told Professor McGonagall and let her take care of it,” Hermione said promptly.
Again, as wedrifid noted above, this is step one and only step one. Taking that step alone, however, is not heroic responsibility. I agree that Harry’s method of dealing with the situation was far from optimal; however, his general point I agree with completely. Here is his response:
“You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe,” Harry Potter said. “Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she’s not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn’t an excuse, someone else being in charge isn’t an excuse, even trying your best isn’t an excuse. There just aren’t any excuses, you’ve got to get the job done no matter what.”
Notice that nowhere in this definition is the notion of running to an authority figure precluded! Harry himself didn’t consider it because he’s used to occupying the mindset that “adults are useless”. But if we ignore what Harry actually did and just look at what he said, I’m not seeing anything here that disagrees with anything you said. Perhaps I’m missing something. If so, could you elaborate?
Neither Hermione nor Harry dispute that they have a responsibility to protect the victims of bullying. There may be people who would have denied that, but none of them are involved in the conversation. What they are arguing over is what their responsibility requires of them, not the existence of a responsibility. In other words, they are arguing over what to do.
Human beings are not perfect Bayesian calculators. When you present a human being with criteria for success, they do not proceed to optimize perfectly over the universe of all possible strategies. The task “write a poem” is less constrained than the task “write an Elizabethan sonnet”, and in all likelihood the best poem is not an Elizabethan sonnet, but that doesn’t mean that you will get a better poem out of a sixth-grader by asking for any poem than by giving them something to work with. The passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Eliezer Yudkowsy quoted back during the Overcoming Bias days, “Original Seeing”, gave an example of this: the student couldn’t think of anything to say in a five-hundred word essay about the United States, Bozeman, or the main street of Bozeman, but produced a five-thousand word essay about the front facade of the Opera House. Therefore, when I evaluate “heroic responsibility”, I do not evaluate it as a proposition which is either true or false, but as a meme which either produces superior or inferior results—I judge it by instrumental, not epistemic, standards.
Looking at the example in the fanfic and the example in the OP, as a means to inspire superior strategic behavior, it sucks. It tells people to work harder, not smarter. It tells people to fix things, but it doesn’t tell them how to fix things—and if you tell a human being (as opposed to a perfect Bayesian calculator) to fix something, it sounds like you’re telling them to fix it themselves because that is what it sounds like from a literary perspective. “You’ve got to get the job done no matter what” is not what the hero says when they want people to vote in the next school board election—it’s what the hero says when they want people to run for the school board in the next election, or to protest for fifteen days straight outside the meeting place of the school board to pressure them into changing their behavior, or something else on that level of commitment. And if you want people to make optimal decisions, you need to give them better guidance than that to allocating their resources.
That’s the part I’m not getting. All Harry is saying is that you should consider yourself responsible for the actions you take, and that delegating that responsibility to someone else isn’t a good idea. Delegating responsibility, however, is not the same as delegating tasks. Delegating a particular task to someone else might well be the correct action in some contexts, but you’re not supposed to use that as an excuse to say, “Because I delegated the task of handling this situation to someone else, I am no longer responsible for the outcome of this situation.” This advice doesn’t tell people how to fix things, true, but that’s not the point—it tells people how to get into the right mindset to fix things. In other words, it’s not object-level advice; it’s meta-level advice, and obviously if you treat it as the former instead of the latter you’re going to come to the conclusion that it sucks.
Sometimes, to solve a problem, you have to work harder. Other times, you have to work smarter. Sometimes, you have to do both. “Heroic responsibility” isn’t saying anything that contradicts that. In the context of the conversation in HPMoR, I do not agree with either Hermione or Harry; both of them are overlooking a lot of things. But those are object-level considerations. Once you look at the bigger picture—the level on which Harry’s advice about heroic responsibility actually applies—I don’t think you’ll find him saying anything that runs counter to what you’re saying. If anything, I’d say he’s actually agreeing with you!
Humans are not perfectly rational agents—far from it. System 1 often takes precedence over System 2. Sometimes, to get people going, you need to re-frame the situation in a way that makes both systems “get it”. The virtue of “heroic responsibility”, i.e. “no matter what happens, you should consider yourself responsible”, seems like a good way to get that across.
That’s an interesting question. I’ll try to answer it here.
“You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe,” Harry Potter said. “Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she’s not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn’t an excuse, someone else being in charge isn’t an excuse, even trying your best isn’t an excuse. There just aren’t any excuses, you’ve got to get the job done no matter what.”
This seems to imply that no matter whatever happens, you should hold yourself responsible in the end. If you take a randomly selected person, which of the following two cases do you think will be more likely to cause that person to think really hard about how to solve a problem?
They are told to solve the problem.
They are told that they must solve the problem, and if they fail for any reason, it’s their fault.
Personally, I would find the second case far more pressing and far more likely to cause me to actually think, rather than just take the minimum number of steps required of me in order to fulfill the “role” of a problem-solver, and I suspect that this would be true of many other people here as well. Certainly I would imagine it’s true of many effective altruists, for instance. It’s possible I’m committing a typical mind fallacy here, but I don’t think so.
On the other hand, you yourself have said that your attitude toward this whole thing is heavily driven by the fact that you have anxiety disorder, and if that’s the case, then I agree that blaming yourself is entirely the wrong way to go about doing things. That being said, the whole point of having something called “heroic responsibility” is to get people to actually put in some effort as opposed to just playing the role of someone who’s perceived as putting in effort. If you are able to do that without resorting to holding yourself responsible for the outcomes of situations, then by all means continue to do so. However, I would be hesitant to label advice intended to motivate and galvanize as “useless”, especially when using evidence taken from a subset of all people (those with anxiety disorders) to make a general claim (the notion of “heroic responsibility” is useless).
I think I see what you’re getting at. If I understand you rightly, what “heroic responsibility” is intended to affect is the behavior of people such as [trigger warning: child abuse, rape] Mike McQueary during the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, who stumbled upon Sandusky in the act, reported it to his superiors (and, possibly, the police), and failed to take further action when nothing significant came of it. [/trigger warning] McQueary followed the ‘proper’ procedure, but he should not have relied upon it being sufficient to do the job. He had sufficient firsthand evidence to justify much more dramatic action than what he did.
Given that, I can see why you object to my “useless”. But when I consider the case above, I think what McQueary was lacking was the same thing that Hermione was lacking in HPMoR: a sense of when the system might fail.
Most of the time, it’s better to trust the system than it is to trust your ability to outthink the system. The system usually has access to much, much more information than you do; the system usually has people with much, much better training than you have; the system usually has resources that are much, much more abundant than you can draw on. In the vast majority of situations I would expect McQueary or Hermione to encounter—defective equipment, scheduling conflicts, truancy, etc. - I think they would do far worse by taking matters into their own hands than by calling upon the system to handle it. In all likelihood, prior to the events in question, their experiences all supported the idea that the system is sound. So what they needed to know was not that they were somehow more responsible to those in the line of fire than they previously realized, but that in these particular cases they should not trust the system. Both of them had access to enough data to draw that conclusion*, but they did not.
If they had, you would not need to tell them that they had a responsibility. Any decent human being would feel that immediately. What they needed was the sense that the circumstances were extraordinary and awareness of the extraordinary actions that they could take. And if you want to do better than chance at sensing extraordinary circumstances when they really are extraordinary and better than chance at planning extraordinary action that is effective, determination is nice, but preparation and education are a whole lot better.
* The reasons differ: McQueary shouldn’t have trusted it because:
One cannot rely on any organization to act against any of its members unless that member is either low-status or has acted against the preferences of its leadership.
In some situations, one’s perceptions—even speculative, gut-feeling, this-feels-not-right perceptions—produce sufficiently reliable Bayesian evidence to overwhelm the combined force of a strong negative prior on whether an event could happen and the absence of supporting evidence from others in the group that said event could happen.
...while Hermione shouldn’t have trusted it because:
Past students like James Potter got away with much because they were well-regarded.
Present employees like Snape got away with much because they were an established part of the system.
Again, you’re right about the advice being poor – in the way you mention – but I also think it’s great advice if you consider it’s target the idea that the consequences are irrelevant if you’ve done the ‘right’ thing. If you’ve done the ‘right’ thing but the consequences are still bad, then you should probably reconsider what you’re doing. When aiming at this target, ‘heroic responsibility’ is just the additional responsibility of considering whether the ‘right’ thing to do is really right (i.e. will really work).
...
And now that I’m thinking about this heroic responsibility idea again, I feel a little more strongly how it’s a trap – it is. Nothing can save you from potential devastation at the loss of something or someone important to you. Simply shouldering responsibility for everything you care about won’t actually help. It’s definitely a practical necessity that groups of people carefully divide and delegate important responsibilities. But even that’s not enough! Nothing’s enough. So we can’t and shouldn’t be content with the responsibilities we’re expected to meet.
I subscribe to the idea that virtue ethics is how humans should generally implement good (ha) consequentialist ethics. But we can’t escape the fact that no amount of Virtue is a complete and perfect means of achieving all our desired ends! We’re responsible for which virtues we hold as much as we are of learning and practicing them.
You are analyzing “heroic responsibility” as a philosophical construct. I am analyzing it as [an ideological mantra]. Considering the story, there’s no reason for Harry to have meant it as the former, given that it is entirely redundant with the pre-existing philosophical construct of consequentialism, and every reason for him to have meant it as the latter, given that it explains why he must act differently than Hermione proposes.
[Note: the phrase “an ideological mantra” appears here because I’m not sure what phrase should appear here. Let me know if what I mean requires elaboration.]
I think you might be over-analyzing the story; which is fine actually, as I’m enjoying doing the same.
I have no evidence that Eliezer considered it so, but I just think Harry was explaining consequentialism to Hermione, without introducing it as a term.
I’m unsure if it’s connected in any obvious way, but to me the quoted conversation between Harry and Hermione is reminiscent of other conversations between the two characters about heroism generally. In that context, it’s obviously a poor ‘ideological mantra’ as it was targeted towards Hermione. Given what I remember of the story, it worked pretty well for her.
I confess, it would make sense to me if Harry was unfamiliar with metaethics and his speech about “heroic responsibility” was an example of him reinventing the idea. If that is the case, it would explain why his presentation is as sloppy as it is.
I’m realizing that my attitude towards heroic responsibility is heavily driven by the anxiety-disorder perspective,
Surprisingly, so is mine, yet we’ve arrived at entirely different philosophical conclusions. Perfectionistic, intelligent idealist with visceral aversions to injustice walk a fine line when it comes to managing anxiety and the potential for either burn out or helpless existential dispair. To remain sane and effectively harness my passion and energy I had to learn a few critical lessons:
Over-responsibility is not ‘responsible’. It is right there next to ‘completely negligent’ inside the class ‘irresponsible’.
Trusting that if you do what the proximate social institution suggests you ‘should’ do then it will take care of problems is absurd. Those cursed with either weaker than normal hypocrisy skills or otherwise lacking the privelidge to maintain a sheltered existence will quickly become distressed from constant disappointment.
For all that the local social institutions fall drastically short of ideals—and even fall short of what we are supposed to pretend to believe of them—they are still what happens to be present in the universe that is and so are a relevant source of power. Finding ways to get what you want (for yourself or others) by using the system is a highly useful skill.
You do not (necessarily) need to fix the system in order to fix a problem that is important to you. You also don’t (necessarily) need to subvert it.
‘Hermione’ style ‘responsibility’ would be a recipe for insanity if I chose to keep it. I had to abandon it at about the same age she is in the story. It is based on premises that just don’t hold in this universe.
but telling me that I am responsible for x doesn’t tell me that I am allowed to delegate x to someone else
‘Responsibility’ of the kind you can tell others they have is almost always fundamentally different in kind to the ‘responsibility’ word as used in ‘heroic responsibility’. It’s a difference that results in frequent accidental equivocation and accidental miscommunicaiton across inferential distances. This is one rather large problem with ‘heroic responsibility’ as a jargon term. Those who have something to learn about the concept are unlikely to because ‘responsibility’ comes riddled with normative social power connotations.
, and—especially in contexts like Harry’s decision (and Swimmer’s decision in the OP) - doesn’t tell me whether “those nominally responsible can’t do x” or “those nominally responsible don’t know that they should do x”.
That’s technically true. Heroic responsibility is completely orthogonal to either of those concerns.
I asked myself this because subsidiarity includes something that heroic responsibility does not: the idea that some people are more responsible—better placed, better trained, better equipped, etc. - than others for any given problem, and that, unless the primary responsibility-holder cannot do the job, those farther away should give support instead of acting on their own.
Expected value maximisation isn’t for everyone. Without supplementing it with an awfully well developed epistemology people will sometimes be worse off than with just following whichever list of ‘shoulds’ they have been prescribed.
I may have addressed the bulk of what you’re getting at in another comment; the short form of my reply is, “In the cases which ‘heroic responsibility’ is supposed to address, inaction rarely comes because an individual does not feel responsible, but because they don’t know when the system may fail and don’t know what to do when it might.”
I may have addressed the bulk of what you’re getting at in another comment; the short form of my reply is, “In the cases which ‘heroic responsibility’ is supposed to address, inaction rarely comes because an individual does not feel responsible, but because they don’t know when the system may fail and don’t know what to do when it might.”
Short form reply: That seems false. Perhaps you have a different notion of precisely what heroic responsibility is supposed to address?
As I read HPMoR (and I’ve read all of it), a lot of the reason why Harry specifically distrusts the relevant authority figures is that they are routinely surprised by the various horrible events that happen and seem unwilling to accept responsibility for anything they don’t already expect. McGonagall definitely improves on this point in the story tho.
In the story, the advice Harry gives Hermione seems appropriate. Your example would be much better for anyone inclined to anxiety about satisfying arbitrary constraints (i.e. being responsible for arbitrary outcomes) – and probably for anyone, period, if for no other reason than it’s easier to edit an existing idea than generate an entirely new one.
@wedrifid’s correct your plan is better than Harry’s in the story, but I think Harry’s point – and it’s one I agree with – is that even having a plan, and following it, doesn’t absolve oneself – and to oneself, if no one else – of coming up with a better plan, or improvising, or delegating some or all of the plan, if that’s what’s needed to stop kids from being bullied or an evil villain from destroying the world (or whatever).
Another way to consider the conversation in the story is that Hermione initially represents virtue ethics:
“I would’ve done the responsible thing and told Professor McGonagall and let her take care of it,” Hermione said promptly.
Harry counters with a rendition of consequentialist ethics.
If I believed you to be a virtue ethicist, I might say that you must be mindful of your audience when dispensing advice. If I believed you to be a deontologist, I might say that you should tailor your advice to the needs of the listener. Believing you to be a consequentialist, I will say that advice is only good if it produces better outcomes than the alternatives.
Of course, you know this. So why do you argue that Harry’s speech about heroic responsibility is good advice?
No, I haven’t answered my own question. In what way was Harry’s monologue about consequentialist ethics superior to telling Hermione why McGonagall couldn’t be counted upon?
Full disclosure: I stopped reading HPMoR in the middle of Chapter 53. When I was researching my comment, I looked at the immediate context of the initial definition of “heroic responsibility” and reviewed Harry’s rationality test of McGonagall in Chapter 6.
I would have given Harry a three-step plan: inform McGonagall, monitor situation, escalate if not resolved. Based on McGonagall’s characterization in the part of the story I read, barring some drastic idiot-balling since I quit, she’s willing to take Harry seriously enough to act based on the information he provides; unless the bullies are somehow so devious as to be capable of evading both Harry and McGonagall’s surveillance—and note that, with McGonagall taking point, they wouldn’t know that they need to hide from Harry—this plan would have a reasonable chance of working with much less effort from Harry (and much less probability of misfiring) than any finger-snapping shenanigans. Not to mention that, if Harry read the situation wrong, this would give him a chance to be set straight. Not to mention that, if McGonagall makes a serious effort to crack down on bullying, the effect is likely to persist for far longer than Harry’s term.
On the subject of psychology: really, what made me so emphatic in my denouncing “heroic responsibility” was [edit: my awareness of] the large percentage of adults (~10-18%) subject to anxiety disorders of one kind or another—including me. One of the most difficult problems for such people is how to restrain their instinct to blame themselves—how to avoid blaming themselves for events out of their control. When Harry says, “whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault” to such persons, he is saying, “blame yourself for everything” … and that makes his suggestion completely useless to guide their behavior.
Your three step plan seems much more effective than Harry’s shenannigans and also serves as an excellent example of heroic responsibility. Normal ‘responsibility’ in that situation is to do nothing or at most take step one.
Heroic responsibility doesn’t mean do it yourself through personal power and awesomeness. It means using whatever resources are available to cause the desired thing to occur (unless the cost of doing so is deemed too high relative to the benefit). Institutions, norms and powerful people are valuable resources.
I’m realizing that my attitude towards heroic responsibility is heavily driven by the anxiety-disorder perspective, but telling me that I am responsible for x doesn’t tell me that I am allowed to delegate x to someone else, and—especially in contexts like Harry’s decision (and Swimmer’s decision in the OP) - doesn’t tell me whether “those nominally responsible can’t do x” or “those nominally responsible don’t know that they should do x”. Harry’s idea of heroic responsibility led him to conflate these states of affairs re: McGonagall, and the point of advice is to make people do better, not to win philosophy arguments.
When I came up with the three-point plan I gave to you, I did not do so by asking, “what would be the best way to stop this bullying?” I did so by asking myself, “if McGonagall is the person best placed to stop bullying, but official school action might only drive bullying underground without stopping it, what should I do?” I asked myself this because subsidiarity includes something that heroic responsibility does not: the idea that some people are more responsible—better placed, better trained, better equipped, etc. - than others for any given problem, and that, unless the primary responsibility-holder cannot do the job, those farther away should give support instead of acting on their own.
(Actually, thinking about localism suggested a modification to my Step 1: brief the prefects on the situation in addition to briefing McGonagall. That said, I don’t know if that would be a good idea in this case—again, I stopped reading twenty chapters before.)
I agree with all of this except the part where you say that heroic responsibility does not include this. As wedrifid noted in the grandparent of this comment, heroic responsibility means using the resources available in order to achieve the desired result. In the context of HPMoR, Harry is responding to this remark by Hermione:
Again, as wedrifid noted above, this is step one and only step one. Taking that step alone, however, is not heroic responsibility. I agree that Harry’s method of dealing with the situation was far from optimal; however, his general point I agree with completely. Here is his response:
Notice that nowhere in this definition is the notion of running to an authority figure precluded! Harry himself didn’t consider it because he’s used to occupying the mindset that “adults are useless”. But if we ignore what Harry actually did and just look at what he said, I’m not seeing anything here that disagrees with anything you said. Perhaps I’m missing something. If so, could you elaborate?
Neither Hermione nor Harry dispute that they have a responsibility to protect the victims of bullying. There may be people who would have denied that, but none of them are involved in the conversation. What they are arguing over is what their responsibility requires of them, not the existence of a responsibility. In other words, they are arguing over what to do.
Human beings are not perfect Bayesian calculators. When you present a human being with criteria for success, they do not proceed to optimize perfectly over the universe of all possible strategies. The task “write a poem” is less constrained than the task “write an Elizabethan sonnet”, and in all likelihood the best poem is not an Elizabethan sonnet, but that doesn’t mean that you will get a better poem out of a sixth-grader by asking for any poem than by giving them something to work with. The passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Eliezer Yudkowsy quoted back during the Overcoming Bias days, “Original Seeing”, gave an example of this: the student couldn’t think of anything to say in a five-hundred word essay about the United States, Bozeman, or the main street of Bozeman, but produced a five-thousand word essay about the front facade of the Opera House. Therefore, when I evaluate “heroic responsibility”, I do not evaluate it as a proposition which is either true or false, but as a meme which either produces superior or inferior results—I judge it by instrumental, not epistemic, standards.
Looking at the example in the fanfic and the example in the OP, as a means to inspire superior strategic behavior, it sucks. It tells people to work harder, not smarter. It tells people to fix things, but it doesn’t tell them how to fix things—and if you tell a human being (as opposed to a perfect Bayesian calculator) to fix something, it sounds like you’re telling them to fix it themselves because that is what it sounds like from a literary perspective. “You’ve got to get the job done no matter what” is not what the hero says when they want people to vote in the next school board election—it’s what the hero says when they want people to run for the school board in the next election, or to protest for fifteen days straight outside the meeting place of the school board to pressure them into changing their behavior, or something else on that level of commitment. And if you want people to make optimal decisions, you need to give them better guidance than that to allocating their resources.
That’s the part I’m not getting. All Harry is saying is that you should consider yourself responsible for the actions you take, and that delegating that responsibility to someone else isn’t a good idea. Delegating responsibility, however, is not the same as delegating tasks. Delegating a particular task to someone else might well be the correct action in some contexts, but you’re not supposed to use that as an excuse to say, “Because I delegated the task of handling this situation to someone else, I am no longer responsible for the outcome of this situation.” This advice doesn’t tell people how to fix things, true, but that’s not the point—it tells people how to get into the right mindset to fix things. In other words, it’s not object-level advice; it’s meta-level advice, and obviously if you treat it as the former instead of the latter you’re going to come to the conclusion that it sucks.
Sometimes, to solve a problem, you have to work harder. Other times, you have to work smarter. Sometimes, you have to do both. “Heroic responsibility” isn’t saying anything that contradicts that. In the context of the conversation in HPMoR, I do not agree with either Hermione or Harry; both of them are overlooking a lot of things. But those are object-level considerations. Once you look at the bigger picture—the level on which Harry’s advice about heroic responsibility actually applies—I don’t think you’ll find him saying anything that runs counter to what you’re saying. If anything, I’d say he’s actually agreeing with you!
Humans are not perfectly rational agents—far from it. System 1 often takes precedence over System 2. Sometimes, to get people going, you need to re-frame the situation in a way that makes both systems “get it”. The virtue of “heroic responsibility”, i.e. “no matter what happens, you should consider yourself responsible”, seems like a good way to get that across.
s/work harder, not smarter/get more work done, not how to get more work done/
Why do you believe this to be true?
That’s an interesting question. I’ll try to answer it here.
This seems to imply that no matter whatever happens, you should hold yourself responsible in the end. If you take a randomly selected person, which of the following two cases do you think will be more likely to cause that person to think really hard about how to solve a problem?
They are told to solve the problem.
They are told that they must solve the problem, and if they fail for any reason, it’s their fault.
Personally, I would find the second case far more pressing and far more likely to cause me to actually think, rather than just take the minimum number of steps required of me in order to fulfill the “role” of a problem-solver, and I suspect that this would be true of many other people here as well. Certainly I would imagine it’s true of many effective altruists, for instance. It’s possible I’m committing a typical mind fallacy here, but I don’t think so.
On the other hand, you yourself have said that your attitude toward this whole thing is heavily driven by the fact that you have anxiety disorder, and if that’s the case, then I agree that blaming yourself is entirely the wrong way to go about doing things. That being said, the whole point of having something called “heroic responsibility” is to get people to actually put in some effort as opposed to just playing the role of someone who’s perceived as putting in effort. If you are able to do that without resorting to holding yourself responsible for the outcomes of situations, then by all means continue to do so. However, I would be hesitant to label advice intended to motivate and galvanize as “useless”, especially when using evidence taken from a subset of all people (those with anxiety disorders) to make a general claim (the notion of “heroic responsibility” is useless).
I think I see what you’re getting at. If I understand you rightly, what “heroic responsibility” is intended to affect is the behavior of people such as [trigger warning: child abuse, rape] Mike McQueary during the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, who stumbled upon Sandusky in the act, reported it to his superiors (and, possibly, the police), and failed to take further action when nothing significant came of it. [/trigger warning] McQueary followed the ‘proper’ procedure, but he should not have relied upon it being sufficient to do the job. He had sufficient firsthand evidence to justify much more dramatic action than what he did.
Given that, I can see why you object to my “useless”. But when I consider the case above, I think what McQueary was lacking was the same thing that Hermione was lacking in HPMoR: a sense of when the system might fail.
Most of the time, it’s better to trust the system than it is to trust your ability to outthink the system. The system usually has access to much, much more information than you do; the system usually has people with much, much better training than you have; the system usually has resources that are much, much more abundant than you can draw on. In the vast majority of situations I would expect McQueary or Hermione to encounter—defective equipment, scheduling conflicts, truancy, etc. - I think they would do far worse by taking matters into their own hands than by calling upon the system to handle it. In all likelihood, prior to the events in question, their experiences all supported the idea that the system is sound. So what they needed to know was not that they were somehow more responsible to those in the line of fire than they previously realized, but that in these particular cases they should not trust the system. Both of them had access to enough data to draw that conclusion*, but they did not.
If they had, you would not need to tell them that they had a responsibility. Any decent human being would feel that immediately. What they needed was the sense that the circumstances were extraordinary and awareness of the extraordinary actions that they could take. And if you want to do better than chance at sensing extraordinary circumstances when they really are extraordinary and better than chance at planning extraordinary action that is effective, determination is nice, but preparation and education are a whole lot better.
* The reasons differ: McQueary shouldn’t have trusted it because:
One cannot rely on any organization to act against any of its members unless that member is either low-status or has acted against the preferences of its leadership.
In some situations, one’s perceptions—even speculative, gut-feeling, this-feels-not-right perceptions—produce sufficiently reliable Bayesian evidence to overwhelm the combined force of a strong negative prior on whether an event could happen and the absence of supporting evidence from others in the group that said event could happen.
...while Hermione shouldn’t have trusted it because:
Past students like James Potter got away with much because they were well-regarded.
Present employees like Snape got away with much because they were an established part of the system.
All right, cool. I think that dissolves most of our disagreement.
Glad to hear it. :)
Again, you’re right about the advice being poor – in the way you mention – but I also think it’s great advice if you consider it’s target the idea that the consequences are irrelevant if you’ve done the ‘right’ thing. If you’ve done the ‘right’ thing but the consequences are still bad, then you should probably reconsider what you’re doing. When aiming at this target, ‘heroic responsibility’ is just the additional responsibility of considering whether the ‘right’ thing to do is really right (i.e. will really work).
...
And now that I’m thinking about this heroic responsibility idea again, I feel a little more strongly how it’s a trap – it is. Nothing can save you from potential devastation at the loss of something or someone important to you. Simply shouldering responsibility for everything you care about won’t actually help. It’s definitely a practical necessity that groups of people carefully divide and delegate important responsibilities. But even that’s not enough! Nothing’s enough. So we can’t and shouldn’t be content with the responsibilities we’re expected to meet.
I subscribe to the idea that virtue ethics is how humans should generally implement good (ha) consequentialist ethics. But we can’t escape the fact that no amount of Virtue is a complete and perfect means of achieving all our desired ends! We’re responsible for which virtues we hold as much as we are of learning and practicing them.
You are analyzing “heroic responsibility” as a philosophical construct. I am analyzing it as [an ideological mantra]. Considering the story, there’s no reason for Harry to have meant it as the former, given that it is entirely redundant with the pre-existing philosophical construct of consequentialism, and every reason for him to have meant it as the latter, given that it explains why he must act differently than Hermione proposes.
[Note: the phrase “an ideological mantra” appears here because I’m not sure what phrase should appear here. Let me know if what I mean requires elaboration.]
I think you might be over-analyzing the story; which is fine actually, as I’m enjoying doing the same.
I have no evidence that Eliezer considered it so, but I just think Harry was explaining consequentialism to Hermione, without introducing it as a term.
I’m unsure if it’s connected in any obvious way, but to me the quoted conversation between Harry and Hermione is reminiscent of other conversations between the two characters about heroism generally. In that context, it’s obviously a poor ‘ideological mantra’ as it was targeted towards Hermione. Given what I remember of the story, it worked pretty well for her.
I confess, it would make sense to me if Harry was unfamiliar with metaethics and his speech about “heroic responsibility” was an example of him reinventing the idea. If that is the case, it would explain why his presentation is as sloppy as it is.
Surprisingly, so is mine, yet we’ve arrived at entirely different philosophical conclusions. Perfectionistic, intelligent idealist with visceral aversions to injustice walk a fine line when it comes to managing anxiety and the potential for either burn out or helpless existential dispair. To remain sane and effectively harness my passion and energy I had to learn a few critical lessons:
Over-responsibility is not ‘responsible’. It is right there next to ‘completely negligent’ inside the class ‘irresponsible’.
Trusting that if you do what the proximate social institution suggests you ‘should’ do then it will take care of problems is absurd. Those cursed with either weaker than normal hypocrisy skills or otherwise lacking the privelidge to maintain a sheltered existence will quickly become distressed from constant disappointment.
For all that the local social institutions fall drastically short of ideals—and even fall short of what we are supposed to pretend to believe of them—they are still what happens to be present in the universe that is and so are a relevant source of power. Finding ways to get what you want (for yourself or others) by using the system is a highly useful skill.
You do not (necessarily) need to fix the system in order to fix a problem that is important to you. You also don’t (necessarily) need to subvert it.
‘Hermione’ style ‘responsibility’ would be a recipe for insanity if I chose to keep it. I had to abandon it at about the same age she is in the story. It is based on premises that just don’t hold in this universe.
‘Responsibility’ of the kind you can tell others they have is almost always fundamentally different in kind to the ‘responsibility’ word as used in ‘heroic responsibility’. It’s a difference that results in frequent accidental equivocation and accidental miscommunicaiton across inferential distances. This is one rather large problem with ‘heroic responsibility’ as a jargon term. Those who have something to learn about the concept are unlikely to because ‘responsibility’ comes riddled with normative social power connotations.
That’s technically true. Heroic responsibility is completely orthogonal to either of those concerns.
Expected value maximisation isn’t for everyone. Without supplementing it with an awfully well developed epistemology people will sometimes be worse off than with just following whichever list of ‘shoulds’ they have been prescribed.
I may have addressed the bulk of what you’re getting at in another comment; the short form of my reply is, “In the cases which ‘heroic responsibility’ is supposed to address, inaction rarely comes because an individual does not feel responsible, but because they don’t know when the system may fail and don’t know what to do when it might.”
Short form reply: That seems false. Perhaps you have a different notion of precisely what heroic responsibility is supposed to address?
Is the long form also unclear? If so, could you elaborate on why it doesn’t make sense?
Your mention of anxiety (disorders) reminds me of Yvain’s general point that lots of advice is really terrible for at least some people.
As I read HPMoR (and I’ve read all of it), a lot of the reason why Harry specifically distrusts the relevant authority figures is that they are routinely surprised by the various horrible events that happen and seem unwilling to accept responsibility for anything they don’t already expect. McGonagall definitely improves on this point in the story tho.
In the story, the advice Harry gives Hermione seems appropriate. Your example would be much better for anyone inclined to anxiety about satisfying arbitrary constraints (i.e. being responsible for arbitrary outcomes) – and probably for anyone, period, if for no other reason than it’s easier to edit an existing idea than generate an entirely new one.
@wedrifid’s correct your plan is better than Harry’s in the story, but I think Harry’s point – and it’s one I agree with – is that even having a plan, and following it, doesn’t absolve oneself – and to oneself, if no one else – of coming up with a better plan, or improvising, or delegating some or all of the plan, if that’s what’s needed to stop kids from being bullied or an evil villain from destroying the world (or whatever).
Another way to consider the conversation in the story is that Hermione initially represents virtue ethics:
Harry counters with a rendition of consequentialist ethics.
If I believed you to be a virtue ethicist, I might say that you must be mindful of your audience when dispensing advice. If I believed you to be a deontologist, I might say that you should tailor your advice to the needs of the listener. Believing you to be a consequentialist, I will say that advice is only good if it produces better outcomes than the alternatives.
Of course, you know this. So why do you argue that Harry’s speech about heroic responsibility is good advice?
It seems like you’ve already answered your own question!
No, I haven’t answered my own question. In what way was Harry’s monologue about consequentialist ethics superior to telling Hermione why McGonagall couldn’t be counted upon?