This is both an incredible strawman and not at all relevant to what’s even being discussed. The article you linked to discusses that average human male is strength is higher than average human female strength. That’s accurate and utterly irrelevant to the characterizations in question.
Heck, I’ll even spot you that average male IQ is higher than average female IQ and that male standard deviation is higher than female standard deviation of IQ so there are more very intelligent males than there are very intelligent females.
Still wouldn’t matter.
We are talking about A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn’t get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously.
If you think your comment is at all relevant to any of these issues, I’d be very much interested in hearing an explanation.
My observation that a significant amount of mind-killing has and is occurring in this thread has not changed, and in fact has been reinforced. In particular, I see that there’s a great deal of back-and-forth happening, but very few unusually pertinent or clear-headed arguments have been put forth, by either side. I haven’t seen a single argument which I would describe as “well-articulated”; it’s all just anecdotal data and branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching point. (Example: Someone brought up Hermione’s canonical proficiency with the Protean Charm, which realistically speaking has nothing to do with feminism.) Moreover, based on the amount of back-and-forth I’ve seen here I assign an extremely low probability to anyone’s mind getting changed based on something said in this thread. That last point is a particularly important warning flag that some sort of mind-killing is going on, because when no updates are occurring, almost certainly some subtext is involved that’s either irrelevant to or actively interferes with epistemic rationality. Further evidence in favor of mind-killing is supplied by the fact that this discussion centers around feminism, which is widely known to be a hotly controversial topic.
The reason I chose to reply to this comment in particular is because it exemplifies some of the mind-killing that I’m talking about (and most emphatically not because I’m trying to single you out; plenty of other commenters on this thread exhibit significant mind-killing—it’s just that yours was the most visible example that I could see):
A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn’t get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously
Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, “What does this have to do with feminism?” If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it’s particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione’s death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn’t about that, either, I would think of something else. “Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times. So immediately we see that this quote’s relation to feminism is tenuous at best. So why bring it up? Does the fact that Hermione is a female character have more immediate relevancy to her death than the fact that, say, she was inadequately prepared? Is her gender somehow more pertinent to the fact that she didn’t get an intelligence boost than the fact that she was already extremely intelligent canonically? Why connect it to gender, of all things? The relationship is minimal and forced at best!Why??
Well, from my perspective, the answer to that question is not because it’s actually relevant in some deep, meaningful sense. Rather, it’s because, for better or for worse, this is a discussion about feminism, a vastly polarizing and controversial topic. And when discussing vastly polarizing or controversial topics, arguments become soldiers. People search and scrabble for any piece of information they can think of that has any connection to the topic at all, no matter how weak. Hermione’s lack of intelligence boost is taken and forcibly connected to her gender, as opposed to a myriad of other things that are much more relevant. Or, to use an earlier example: her skill with Protean Charms in canon is brought up as evidence of how Rowling treats her genders more fairly than does Eliezer. But when you look at it with a neutral eye...
Protean Charms? Character intelligence boosts? Seriously? Is that the best you can come up with?
Strongly disagree- to the point where I’d point out that I think you are being uncharitable to pretty much everyone here (both those arguing that there is a problem from a feminist standpoint and those who are arguing there isn’t one). In particular, the comment about the Protean charm was made by CAE_jones here in a comment that was using it as an example of what canon Hermione could do at the same time pointing out limitations of canon Hermione and pointing out that she was the time much older.
Power boosts matter in this context because it is one of the fundamental changes in the fanfic is to give people power boosts. That really should be self-explanatory and no one (either for or against there being issues here) seems to disagree with that. So the nature and plausibility of the power boosts matters, and it is a reasonable response to concerns about Hermione not getting a boost to outline why giving her a boost would be difficulty.
As for the paragraph in question that you think isn’t connected at all to gender, there may be serious illusions of transparency going on here, so let me spell out the concern explicitly: Hermione is the only major female character in the work (with Minerva the next) - the next two down are Tracy and Daphne who make for hilarious comic relief. That’s the context where what happens matters.
I’m curious incidentally, if you read the initial link to fridging to see why the death matters.
branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching poin
Branching, multifacted conversations happen all the time. Less Wrong and (internet conversations in general) are not exactly known for focusing on narrow issues. I don’t see this as evidence of mindkilling but rather what would be perfectly normal conversation on any side topic that in this case because of the type of topic one sees as evidence of mindkilling.
I do find it curious though that you think that everyone here is mindkilled, whereas, one of the people here who you think is mindkilled doesn’t think pretty much anyone here is except one of the very late stragglers. This makes me wonder if we’ve actually adopted the notion of politics-is-the-mindkiller too strongly here, where even polite conversations that don’t necessarily lead to updating are automatically labeled mindkilling if they involve politics. We may have a problem of confirmation bias for mindkilling, which if true is sort of funny and sad.
“Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times.
You seem to have this idea that if an idea is most immediately relevent to topics other than X, it cannot also be sufficiently relevant towards X to count in a discussion of X.
You seem to have this idea that if an idea is most immediately relevent to topics other than X, it cannot also be sufficiently relevant towards X to count in a discussion of X.
I don’t know where you are getting this from.
I don’t see where you’re getting this reading from. My full quote is here:
Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, “What does this have to do with feminism?” If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it’s particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione’s death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn’t about that, either, I would think of something else. “Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times.
The point here is not that an idea should be disqualified if it is more immediately relevant to topics other than the intended one; it is that it should be disqualified if, when shown to someone out of context, the correct context is not readily deducible from the quote itself—or, in other words, if multiple different contexts leap to mind upon seeing it, none of which are the intended context. That’s what it means for something to be a “stretch”. I’m not seeing why you interpreted my words in the rather strange way you did.
To be honest I’m not sure whether its relevant since I don’t understand why you consider that aspect of MoR problematic. To help me understand could you answer the following questions:
1) Would you consider the relative power levels of the characters in MoR problematic on their own (without reference to canon).
2) Would you consider an independent work that realistically portrayed the relative abilities of men and women problematic?
3) What if it realistically dealt with the consequences of those differences, including that their lesser strength makes it easier for villains to stuff women into fridges.
You really do seem to like downvoting people you disagree with. Interesting. How mindkilled are you? And you didn’t provide the question explanation.
I’m not sure what you mean by question 1. But assuming you mean, something like “If HPMoR existed in in a world without Harry Potter, would the gender issues be problematic” the answer would be yes, because all the other important male characters are substantially more resourceful than the female ones, and because of Hermione’s death and the events surrounding it.
Question 2- No. Please don’t be stupid.
Question 3- Are you seriously trying to implicitly argue that the literal on average physical difference between human males and human females is at all relevant here? Because it seems like you are trying to make such a connection. That’s both silly (for reasons I already explained to you), and stupid for other reasons: villains in stories have things like wands and guns. They don’t need to physically stuff someone into a fridge while they are fighting back. If you think I’m misinterpreting your third point, I’d be interested in hearing an explanation, but frankly, I assign a very high probability that you are hopelessly mindkilled, which is unfortunate because everyone else in this conversation was having a nice, interesting conversation. I thought that skeptical_lurker brought up some very good points as did Nancy.
That is a delightfully awful question. The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there’s no hope of an accurate answer if you include the presupposition that the person being asked is actually somewhat mindkilled.
I’m not sure. At least twice before I’ve gotten that question or a variant of it thrown to me and it helped strongly reevaluate my attitude on the issue in question. Possibly I’m generalizing from one example too much?
Actually, I was probably being too literal about the question because the logical paradox struck me as funny.
I will blame an ambiguity which I think is built into English. “How mindkilled are you?” can imply that you’re mindkilled in some sense which is stable over a period of time, or it can imply that you were mindkilled recently but have a capacity to come out of it.
Are you seriously trying to implicitly argue that the literal on average physical difference between human males and human females is at all relevant here?
Yes, it certainly is for how this trope applies in the real world, as well as the resulting evolved associated feelings in humans. And since you are making your case with reference to the distribution of tropes in other literature, I thought this was very relevant.
That’s both silly (for reasons I already explained to you)
Really, where?
I thought that skeptical_lurker brought up some very good points as did Nancy.
What you mean is that they disagreed with you without questioning your basic premise.
This is both an incredible strawman and not at all relevant to what’s even being discussed. The article you linked to discusses that average human male is strength is higher than average human female strength. That’s accurate and utterly irrelevant to the characterizations in question.
Heck, I’ll even spot you that average male IQ is higher than average female IQ and that male standard deviation is higher than female standard deviation of IQ so there are more very intelligent males than there are very intelligent females.
Still wouldn’t matter.
We are talking about A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn’t get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously.
If you think your comment is at all relevant to any of these issues, I’d be very much interested in hearing an explanation.
*sigh*
My observation that a significant amount of mind-killing has and is occurring in this thread has not changed, and in fact has been reinforced. In particular, I see that there’s a great deal of back-and-forth happening, but very few unusually pertinent or clear-headed arguments have been put forth, by either side. I haven’t seen a single argument which I would describe as “well-articulated”; it’s all just anecdotal data and branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching point. (Example: Someone brought up Hermione’s canonical proficiency with the Protean Charm, which realistically speaking has nothing to do with feminism.) Moreover, based on the amount of back-and-forth I’ve seen here I assign an extremely low probability to anyone’s mind getting changed based on something said in this thread. That last point is a particularly important warning flag that some sort of mind-killing is going on, because when no updates are occurring, almost certainly some subtext is involved that’s either irrelevant to or actively interferes with epistemic rationality. Further evidence in favor of mind-killing is supplied by the fact that this discussion centers around feminism, which is widely known to be a hotly controversial topic.
The reason I chose to reply to this comment in particular is because it exemplifies some of the mind-killing that I’m talking about (and most emphatically not because I’m trying to single you out; plenty of other commenters on this thread exhibit significant mind-killing—it’s just that yours was the most visible example that I could see):
Immediately upon reading this, my first thought was, “What does this have to do with feminism?” If you took this quote and showed it to me out of context (while telling me it was about HPMoR), I would think that the surrounding discussion would most likely have centered around intelligence boosts and why it’s particularly difficult to boost canonically already-intelligent characters. If you then told me that this quote was not about the above, I would immediately think that it was about, say, Hermione’s death and how it could have been avoided had she been a more flexible thinker. If you told me that it wasn’t about that, either, I would think of something else. “Feminism” as the main topic of discussion, I feel, wouldn’t occur to me until I had repeatedly tried to guess the answer around six or seven times. So immediately we see that this quote’s relation to feminism is tenuous at best. So why bring it up? Does the fact that Hermione is a female character have more immediate relevancy to her death than the fact that, say, she was inadequately prepared? Is her gender somehow more pertinent to the fact that she didn’t get an intelligence boost than the fact that she was already extremely intelligent canonically? Why connect it to gender, of all things? The relationship is minimal and forced at best! Why??
Well, from my perspective, the answer to that question is not because it’s actually relevant in some deep, meaningful sense. Rather, it’s because, for better or for worse, this is a discussion about feminism, a vastly polarizing and controversial topic. And when discussing vastly polarizing or controversial topics, arguments become soldiers. People search and scrabble for any piece of information they can think of that has any connection to the topic at all, no matter how weak. Hermione’s lack of intelligence boost is taken and forcibly connected to her gender, as opposed to a myriad of other things that are much more relevant. Or, to use an earlier example: her skill with Protean Charms in canon is brought up as evidence of how Rowling treats her genders more fairly than does Eliezer. But when you look at it with a neutral eye...
Protean Charms? Character intelligence boosts? Seriously? Is that the best you can come up with?
Yeah. Super mind-killed.
Strongly disagree- to the point where I’d point out that I think you are being uncharitable to pretty much everyone here (both those arguing that there is a problem from a feminist standpoint and those who are arguing there isn’t one). In particular, the comment about the Protean charm was made by CAE_jones here in a comment that was using it as an example of what canon Hermione could do at the same time pointing out limitations of canon Hermione and pointing out that she was the time much older.
Power boosts matter in this context because it is one of the fundamental changes in the fanfic is to give people power boosts. That really should be self-explanatory and no one (either for or against there being issues here) seems to disagree with that. So the nature and plausibility of the power boosts matters, and it is a reasonable response to concerns about Hermione not getting a boost to outline why giving her a boost would be difficulty.
As for the paragraph in question that you think isn’t connected at all to gender, there may be serious illusions of transparency going on here, so let me spell out the concern explicitly: Hermione is the only major female character in the work (with Minerva the next) - the next two down are Tracy and Daphne who make for hilarious comic relief. That’s the context where what happens matters.
I’m curious incidentally, if you read the initial link to fridging to see why the death matters.
Branching, multifacted conversations happen all the time. Less Wrong and (internet conversations in general) are not exactly known for focusing on narrow issues. I don’t see this as evidence of mindkilling but rather what would be perfectly normal conversation on any side topic that in this case because of the type of topic one sees as evidence of mindkilling.
I do find it curious though that you think that everyone here is mindkilled, whereas, one of the people here who you think is mindkilled doesn’t think pretty much anyone here is except one of the very late stragglers. This makes me wonder if we’ve actually adopted the notion of politics-is-the-mindkiller too strongly here, where even polite conversations that don’t necessarily lead to updating are automatically labeled mindkilling if they involve politics. We may have a problem of confirmation bias for mindkilling, which if true is sort of funny and sad.
You seem to have this idea that if an idea is most immediately relevent to topics other than X, it cannot also be sufficiently relevant towards X to count in a discussion of X.
I don’t know where you are getting this from.
I don’t see where you’re getting this reading from. My full quote is here:
The point here is not that an idea should be disqualified if it is more immediately relevant to topics other than the intended one; it is that it should be disqualified if, when shown to someone out of context, the correct context is not readily deducible from the quote itself—or, in other words, if multiple different contexts leap to mind upon seeing it, none of which are the intended context. That’s what it means for something to be a “stretch”. I’m not seeing why you interpreted my words in the rather strange way you did.
To be honest I’m not sure whether its relevant since I don’t understand why you consider that aspect of MoR problematic. To help me understand could you answer the following questions:
1) Would you consider the relative power levels of the characters in MoR problematic on their own (without reference to canon).
2) Would you consider an independent work that realistically portrayed the relative abilities of men and women problematic?
3) What if it realistically dealt with the consequences of those differences, including that their lesser strength makes it easier for villains to stuff women into fridges.
You really do seem to like downvoting people you disagree with. Interesting. How mindkilled are you? And you didn’t provide the question explanation.
I’m not sure what you mean by question 1. But assuming you mean, something like “If HPMoR existed in in a world without Harry Potter, would the gender issues be problematic” the answer would be yes, because all the other important male characters are substantially more resourceful than the female ones, and because of Hermione’s death and the events surrounding it.
Question 2- No. Please don’t be stupid.
Question 3- Are you seriously trying to implicitly argue that the literal on average physical difference between human males and human females is at all relevant here? Because it seems like you are trying to make such a connection. That’s both silly (for reasons I already explained to you), and stupid for other reasons: villains in stories have things like wands and guns. They don’t need to physically stuff someone into a fridge while they are fighting back. If you think I’m misinterpreting your third point, I’d be interested in hearing an explanation, but frankly, I assign a very high probability that you are hopelessly mindkilled, which is unfortunate because everyone else in this conversation was having a nice, interesting conversation. I thought that skeptical_lurker brought up some very good points as did Nancy.
That is a delightfully awful question. The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there’s no hope of an accurate answer if you include the presupposition that the person being asked is actually somewhat mindkilled.
I’m not sure. At least twice before I’ve gotten that question or a variant of it thrown to me and it helped strongly reevaluate my attitude on the issue in question. Possibly I’m generalizing from one example too much?
Actually, I was probably being too literal about the question because the logical paradox struck me as funny.
I will blame an ambiguity which I think is built into English. “How mindkilled are you?” can imply that you’re mindkilled in some sense which is stable over a period of time, or it can imply that you were mindkilled recently but have a capacity to come out of it.
Yes, it certainly is for how this trope applies in the real world, as well as the resulting evolved associated feelings in humans. And since you are making your case with reference to the distribution of tropes in other literature, I thought this was very relevant.
Really, where?
What you mean is that they disagreed with you without questioning your basic premise.