An important part of HPMoR is that a substantial fraction of Harry’s earlier behavior is later revealed to be unhelpful and prideful and to have overall made the world substantially worse. I think a good chunk of Harry’s most arrogant/defiant behavior is at least partially intended as a warning, not as an example to follow.
I also think Harry currently reads quite different from your protagonist. I don’t expect to see sentences like “Harry strongly believed in X”. Instead I expect to just see what consideration Harry’s beliefs generate, and then separately Harry often talks to other characters in the world about his beliefs, but in those contexts he has natural in-story reasons to explain the relevant concepts (like, he truly has things to gain by and it makes sense that he would explain the scientific method to Malfoy, and it makes sense that he explains various biases to Hermione while they are trying to research how magic works). I think a key thing that bothers me about the current version is that it feels like the sentences that explain the concepts are not naturally thoughts that the character would think at that time. It feels similar to one of those standard bad fantasy-novel opening scene where one character for some reason explains how the whole world works to another character that presumably knows all this (“Oh hello Bartholomew, my brother and third cousin who I met while we were galloping across the fields of Galeia during the first annual summer festival that we celebrate every year to appease the big sun gods. It is good to see you this morning”).
An important part of HPMoR is that a substantial fraction of Harry’s earlier behavior is later revealed to be unhelpful and prideful and to have overall made the world substantially worse.
This was not my impression. I recall rationality mistakes he makes, and somewhere near the end, an overall takeaway that’s somewhat like “you generally won’t apply rationality properly unless you’ve also gotten practical experience”. But all of those indicate that his rationality wasn’t enough. I don’t recall any revelation indicating that he was going into the wrong direction, was too arrogant, or anything of the sort.
Maybe the one exception is that he was too rude to Dumbledore specifically, but this seems too narrow to warrant that overall description.
The whole initial scene with Neville where he protects him from the bullies and uses the pies and the time turner is pretty quickly revealed to be a pretty rash and irrational things to do that hurt Neville more than it helped him
The whole initial confrontation with Snape is something Harry later reflects on as super reckless and rash that gave up both a lot of his strategic advantage in the form of the time turner, and very needlessly escalated a conflict for the sake of his own pride
A lot of Harry’s harshest and most arrogant tendencies are revealed to be the result of Tom Riddle’s mind being imprinted on him. That’s why he is so paranoid about losing people, and find it’s hard to trust people, and lies to people a good amount.
The whole thing where he lied to Malfoy about how he related to Hermione blows up in his face
In the last chapter he realizes that he likely would have destroyed the whole universe by doing something dumb like reverting vow of secrecy for magic, opening up the world to crazy things like people transfiguring a single up-quark. At least Harry’s take at the end of the book is that if Quirrel hadn’t forced him to take a vow not to risk destroying the world, he would have likely almost immediately done so.
The whole ark with Hermione is primarily about Harry learning how to healthily relate to other people in a non-controlling way. The last chapter makes this pretty clear.
That chapter where Dumbledore tries to get Harry to understand the need to be strategic and that losing Hermione isn’t worth losing the whole war over, and Harry responds with a bunch of dumb stuff about “replacement cost” and tells Dumbledore how he is an idiot I think is pretty clearly trying to show a bunch of facets of irrationality and arrogance in Harry.
More broadly, I think Dumbledore as a character is first portrayed as kind of an antithesis to Harry with little merit, but is later revealed to have been the primary positive force in the whole story, I think in parts to show the need for the kinds of virtues that Dumbledore has, in contrast and addition to the virtues that Harry has.
To be clear, overall the book is not like “all of these cognitive patterns have no merits”. I think the book tries to say that Harry has a lot of important components that are necessary to actually do important things, but that he is frequently reckless and clueless about how to apply them, and frequently bumps into both other people and the world in ways that is quite dangerous and reckless.
This seems to be a consistent (and not really surprising) point of criticism. I’ll soon try rewriting the first chapter somewhat to see if I can make a version which works better. Though I suspect that the book is inevitably going to have somewhat of a preachy feeling, in part simply because I’m not as good of a writer as EY.
An important part of HPMoR is that a substantial fraction of Harry’s earlier behavior is later revealed to be unhelpful and prideful and to have overall made the world substantially worse. I think a good chunk of Harry’s most arrogant/defiant behavior is at least partially intended as a warning, not as an example to follow.
I also think Harry currently reads quite different from your protagonist. I don’t expect to see sentences like “Harry strongly believed in X”. Instead I expect to just see what consideration Harry’s beliefs generate, and then separately Harry often talks to other characters in the world about his beliefs, but in those contexts he has natural in-story reasons to explain the relevant concepts (like, he truly has things to gain by and it makes sense that he would explain the scientific method to Malfoy, and it makes sense that he explains various biases to Hermione while they are trying to research how magic works). I think a key thing that bothers me about the current version is that it feels like the sentences that explain the concepts are not naturally thoughts that the character would think at that time. It feels similar to one of those standard bad fantasy-novel opening scene where one character for some reason explains how the whole world works to another character that presumably knows all this (“Oh hello Bartholomew, my brother and third cousin who I met while we were galloping across the fields of Galeia during the first annual summer festival that we celebrate every year to appease the big sun gods. It is good to see you this morning”).
This was not my impression. I recall rationality mistakes he makes, and somewhere near the end, an overall takeaway that’s somewhat like “you generally won’t apply rationality properly unless you’ve also gotten practical experience”. But all of those indicate that his rationality wasn’t enough. I don’t recall any revelation indicating that he was going into the wrong direction, was too arrogant, or anything of the sort.
Maybe the one exception is that he was too rude to Dumbledore specifically, but this seems too narrow to warrant that overall description.
Could be wrong, of course. Do you have examples?
Yeah, here are some examples in spoiler blocks:
The whole initial scene with Neville where he protects him from the bullies and uses the pies and the time turner is pretty quickly revealed to be a pretty rash and irrational things to do that hurt Neville more than it helped him
The whole initial confrontation with Snape is something Harry later reflects on as super reckless and rash that gave up both a lot of his strategic advantage in the form of the time turner, and very needlessly escalated a conflict for the sake of his own pride
A lot of Harry’s harshest and most arrogant tendencies are revealed to be the result of Tom Riddle’s mind being imprinted on him. That’s why he is so paranoid about losing people, and find it’s hard to trust people, and lies to people a good amount.
The whole thing where he lied to Malfoy about how he related to Hermione blows up in his face
In the last chapter he realizes that he likely would have destroyed the whole universe by doing something dumb like reverting vow of secrecy for magic, opening up the world to crazy things like people transfiguring a single up-quark. At least Harry’s take at the end of the book is that if Quirrel hadn’t forced him to take a vow not to risk destroying the world, he would have likely almost immediately done so.
The whole ark with Hermione is primarily about Harry learning how to healthily relate to other people in a non-controlling way. The last chapter makes this pretty clear.
That chapter where Dumbledore tries to get Harry to understand the need to be strategic and that losing Hermione isn’t worth losing the whole war over, and Harry responds with a bunch of dumb stuff about “replacement cost” and tells Dumbledore how he is an idiot I think is pretty clearly trying to show a bunch of facets of irrationality and arrogance in Harry.
More broadly, I think Dumbledore as a character is first portrayed as kind of an antithesis to Harry with little merit, but is later revealed to have been the primary positive force in the whole story, I think in parts to show the need for the kinds of virtues that Dumbledore has, in contrast and addition to the virtues that Harry has.
To be clear, overall the book is not like “all of these cognitive patterns have no merits”. I think the book tries to say that Harry has a lot of important components that are necessary to actually do important things, but that he is frequently reckless and clueless about how to apply them, and frequently bumps into both other people and the world in ways that is quite dangerous and reckless.
Thanks for taking the effort to write this up. I was definitely wrong.
This seems to be a consistent (and not really surprising) point of criticism. I’ll soon try rewriting the first chapter somewhat to see if I can make a version which works better. Though I suspect that the book is inevitably going to have somewhat of a preachy feeling, in part simply because I’m not as good of a writer as EY.