Yet Hermione and McGonnogal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.
Hermione is the most admirable character in HPMOR, and it looks like McGonagal could soon join her at the top. If their portrayal is an affront to feminism, it’s feminism that has the problem, not HPMOR.
Don’t worry, Headmaster,” said the boy. “I haven’t gotten my wires crossed. I know that I’m supposed to learn goodness from Hermione and Fawkes, not from Professor Quirrell and you.
Hermione is the most admirable character in HPMOR, and it looks like McGonagal could soon join her at the top. If their portrayal is an affront to feminism, it’s feminism that has the problem, not HPMOR.
This isn’t an argument, but a conclusion. It also misses the primary issues at hand here. Hermione might be a very impressive character in any other story, but her total accomplishment set when compared to the primary male character is much smaller. Hermione fights bullies (with Harry’s help). Harry’s equivalent accomplishment: rescuing a prisoner from the most secure prison in the world. Harry, finds a way to kill an avatar of death. Hermione is killed by a troll, without even saving someone’s life to show for it. Etc. The problem here is not feminism.
But let’s take your example as is, because it demonstrates another point. When Hermione fought bullies, that actually brought about a lasting change in Hogwarts. Compare the good of that accomplishment to the good of setting free one prisoner from Azkaban, the one most likely, capable, and intent on wreaking destruction in the world.
Who has done more good? I don’t think that’s a slam dunk win for Harry, and could be a devastating loss.
In a similar way, recall that Hermione won the first battle of the generals because neither Harry nor Draco knew how to effectively organize a group of people to a shared goal. Also, if Harry is supposed to learn goodness from Hermione, isn’t that a rather huge power, determining whether the world gets one more Voldemort, or one more Dumbledore? Influence of others is power to do good as well. Similarly, it’s McGonagall who actually runs Hogwarts and sets an example for students, not Dumbledore.
Hermione had a lasting power for good. Harry is “exceptionally good at killing things”. If you want something killed, you want Harry on your side. Or Quirrell. Or Voldemort. Or Dumbledore. If you wanted a leader to delegate authority to run an organization to build something good instead of destroy something evil, you want Hermione without question. Same for McGonagall.
The main change between HPMOR and canon is the hugely increased power, intelligence, capability, and potential for evil of the protagonist, who yes, we assume has a penis. If your mind pattern matches this as an affront to women everywhere, you have a problem.
So to the first part, lasting amount of good from a long-term consequentialist standpoint isn’t the same as how much impact someone has. And if one is trying to think of long-term issues then Harry has also discovered how to destroy otherwise unkillable creatures, and has set Draco Malfoy on the path to redemption. Even if Harry dies tomorrow, the total utility of there being one less dementor in the world will add up a lot over the long term. (In canon dementors can reproduce, but I strongly suspect this isn’t the case in HPMOR.)
The main change between HPMOR and canon is the hugely increased power, intelligence, capability, and potential for evil of the protagonist, who yes, we assume has a penis.
This isn’t the only change. There’s also a massive increase in power, intelligence and capability of the antagonist, who, yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Dumbledore’s genre awareness and awareness of the cost of his actions to others, and his general power level (using Time Turners), who yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Draco Malfoy’s manipulative skill, who yes, we assume has a penis.
Moreover, while some female characters have become more interesting (Daphne and Tracy are obvious examples), they still are orders of magnitude less important. And there have been other possible options which could have been interesting. For example, rather than just having Petunia as a helpless housewife, while her husband is a professor, Eliezer could have had written something where she was also an academic, or a successful businesswoman, or a lot.
If your mind pattern matches this as an affront to women everywhere, you have a problem.
I’m not sure if this is a strawman or a genuine failure on my part (and possibly others who are concerned) to explain our concerns. No one anywhere in either this discussion thread or the previous HPMOR discussion thread has made the argument “that this is a general affront to women everywhere”. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t believe that. (Introspecting quickly, it is possible that my stated and actual beliefs don’t align. However, if I did think that it was such an affront I douubt, I would have used as my interesting icebreaker fact last Friday that I had cosplayed as a character from a Harry Potter fanfic, and then used that as a way of getting an opportunity to tell people to read Methods of Rationality.)
To state it more explicitly problem is that this is a set of not great role models. My guess is that close to half the readers of HPMR, or certainly a large fraction, are female, and likely pretty young, which makes them impressionable. So, subtle (or not so subtle) differences in what male and female protagonists can do are important. And if some young girl gets pushed slightly over the edge by this into not becoming a chemist or a biologist, or just becoming interested in rationality, we all lose. Moreover, if part of the goal of the story is to get people as a whole interested in rationality and Less Wrong, then for women of all ages, having a substantially weaker female lead is going to make it harder for them to identify with the characters, and all the more so, when that weaker female is (apparently) killed off without even saving anyone in the process.
There’s a lot of room for legitimate concerns without thinking that this is an affront to women everywhere.
To state it more explicitly problem is that this is a set of not great role models.
If the issue is the set of role models, I submit that Hermione is the best role model in the book.
You can’t model yourself after Harry, redo your birth, and have a superhuman dark side to call on. Similarly, you can’t choose to have a university professor as a parent, who can serve as a role model to you in scientific method, and fully support your efforts in studying science. You can’t trade in your two dentist parents, who think your intelligence is “cute’, for parents who will respect and support your gifts.
But you can be diligent, hard working, honest, caring, and brave. You can do what is right. Though you won’t be as smart as Hermione, she is the best role model the book has to offer.
having a substantially weaker female lead is going to make it harder for them to identify with the characters,
Because it’s much easier to identify with a 10 year old with a superhuman dark side who wants minions and a sparkly throne. Much healthier too.
Role models in fictional works are by nature characters who are interesting more than they are perfect role models. No one wants to read a story about a character who is perfectly good, goes to classes every day, and never gets in trouble. The nature of role models is more subtle than simply being good. For a young child, they aren’t someone with magical talent, but they can still identify with characters with magical talent, and that’s easier when the character is of the same gender. (I remember at last year’s Vericon there was a panel on feminism and science-fiction and fantasy, and every single female author on the panel, including Tamora Pierce, expressed how much frustration they had growing up with the depiction of female characters, not just that they weren’t protagonists, but that when they were a side-kick or a secondary protagonist, how utterly boring they would be. This is a very old set of problems.)
That’s assuming that Draco’s half-year of interacting with his new friend can’t be countervailed by his subsequent several years of interacting with his loving-but-evil father. I would barely rate that as a possibility, much less an obvious assumption.
The question of Draco does have interesting is-HPMOR-feminist implications, though. Suppose we swapped the genders of Draco and Hermione, both of whom just had many of their often-similar arcs cut short for very-similar reasons. Now, Herman is the one who maintains his convictions in the face of an overwhelming villainous threat, and so the villain is forced to murder him via a plot using the third most perfect killing machine in nature, properly prepared using sabotage and magical upgrades because otherwise the troll would have lost. Now, Draca is the one who gets taken out of the action by half-a-plot (a plot which depends on Draca making rash egotistical mistakes), but she survives under her father’s thumb because ending her influence on Harry doesn’t even take killing her. Did the story just become more gender-equal, or less?
And if some young girl gets pushed slightly over the edge by this into not becoming a chemist or a biologist, or just becoming interested in rationality, we all lose.
I hope I understand your model correctly as “p(girl scientist | no HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | current HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | feminist HPMoR)”.
I wouldn’t call it “feminist HPMoR”- as I’ve said before, there’s a big difference between a feminist tract and simply taking into account certain concerns that might be described as feminist. But yes, I agree that’s an accurate summary of the model (heck I wouldn’t have gone and told a 16 year old girl to read it this weekend if that weren’t my model).
My guess is that close to half the readers of HPMR, or certainly a large fraction, are female, and likely pretty young, which makes them impressionable.
Primarily anecdotal and a function of who I know who is reading it, along with the fact that in general fanfic is a heavily female media form, with a lot of young people. From my personal sample, I’d say that about 60% of readers I know are male, but since I’m friends with substantially more men than women, that suggests that that percentage (tentatively) should be correct towards 50⁄50.
rescuing a prisoner from the most secure prison in the world.
demonstrating that, unlike Hermione, he can’t distinguish dangerous quests with high potential pay-offs from dangerous quests that will make the world worse even if he succeeds.
demonstrating that, unlike Hermione, he can’t distinguish dangerous quests with high potential pay-offs from dangerous quests that will make the world worse even if he succeeds.
Which is true, but also completely missing the point. What matters to a large extent is the scale of things. Harry does big stuff. Sometimes that results in what may end up as massive screw ups, but his total scale of what he is impacting is much larger.
Just to be clear, the name of the story in question is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which was based off of a series of seven books also titled with the name “Harry Potter”. The name of the story is not “Hermione Granger and the Methods of Rationality”. If it were, then yes, I would expect to see her impact be the larger one.
Just to be clear, the name of the story in question is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which was based off of a series of seven books also titled with the name “Harry Potter”. The name of the story is not “Hermione Granger and the Methods of Rationality”. If it were, then yes, I would expect to see her impact be the larger one.
In the original though, Hermione does big stuff. It is her Time-Turner that saves things in book 3. And throughout the series (with the exception of book 7 where Rowling took a somewhat anti-rationalist stance), it almost always Hermione that figures out what the big plot is or the like. Part of why Hermione in fact looks so much weaker here is because she was the most rational character in the original, and increasing Harry’s skill set while doing much less to hers makes her look less impressive.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Hermione wasn’t powered up at all.
a basic theory of MoR is that all the characters get automatic intelligence upgrades, except for Hermione who doesn’t need it and starts out as exactly similar to her canon self as I could manage, thus putting everyone on an equal footing for the first time.
Without diminishing the arguments of the feminist side, I think that’s pretty damn impressive.
If someone wrote a book where all the #Gender1′s were Stalins, each responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, and all the #Gender2′s were ordinary people who didn’t do much, I think that would be an anti-#Gender1 story, even though it’s the #Gender1′s who do big stuff.
It might be anti-both. If you insinuate that everyone of gender 1 is liable to become a genocidal dictator, that’s an insult to people of gender 1. If you insinuate that no one of gender 2 is liable to do anything substantial, that’s an insult to people of gender 2. Neither insult ceases to be insulting merely because you said something bad about the other people too.
It’s not about whether the story is pro-women or anti-women. It’s about whether the story reiterates common tropes that reinforce stereotyped roles for women and men that are harmful to one or both.
Some people do not prefer the role traditionally assigned to them. The existence of strong stereotyped roles makes it harder to do anything else. That seems sufficient to establish harm.
Yes, it is. One of the premises in the simple syllogism is implied and is sufficiently obvious as to make a claim that it is not an argument disingenuous. It would be plausible that someone could reject the argument and reject the premise. It is not plausible to claim that it is not an argument at all.
It also misses the primary issues at hand here.
It misses the issues that you consider primary. But to me it seems to touch on the essential issue: Feminist memes are incompatible with HPMoR and feminism would be much improved by becoming more like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.
It would be plausible that someone could reject the argument and reject the premise. It is not plausible to claim that it is not an argument at all.
Ok. So help me out here, what is the premise I was missing?
But to me it seems to touch on the essential issue: Feminist memes are incompatible with HPMoR and feminism would be much improved by becoming more like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.
If you phrase the “essential issue”, that way, then I agree denotationaly but disagree connotationaly. Sure there are bad feminist memes (this shouldn’t be surprising, almost every movement has bad memes), and there are definite trends in feminism which are outright awful. There’s a heavy anti-science attitude in a large part of the feminist movement, and feminism in many forms almost raises identity politics to a weird combination of an art form and a religion. Lots of things could benefit from being more like HPMoR. But that doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t also benefit from some aspects of feminism, it doesn’t mean that the (by and large) healthy memes in feminism are incompatible, and it doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t benefit by taking those ideas into account.
(Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue. It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.)
The only time I’ve been (or at least noticed being) mass-downvoted, it was immediately after having some slight involvement in a discussion of feminism or PUAistry or something of the kind, and making some comments on what, for want of better terminology, I’ll call the pro-women side. I just went looking to see if I could find the incident in question to check my facts; I didn’t (though I didn’t spend ages looking) but did turn up a remark from someone else that they’d seen that happen. I think there is very good evidence for at least one LW participant who has made a habit of punishing people for feministish opinions by this sort of mass-downvoting.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
It seems to me that this isn’t “controversy” but outright abuse, and the kind of abuse that merits severe sanctions, because (1) it poisons the environment for everyone and (2) it seems like an attempt at coercive manipulation and coercive manipulation is generally harmful. I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”...
I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”
As far as I know that feature isn’t implemented. It would certainly be something that could be implemented if it turned out to be sufficiently desired. This would catch lazy mass-downvoters and force dedicated mass-downvoters to use a little more effort and patience.
I wasn’t (for the avoidance of doubt) conjecturing that there’s already a nice UI feature where you click a button and it says “wedrifid has downvoted JoshuaZ’s last 20 comments” but, rather, that (1) the information is present in the system somewhere and (2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
(1) the information is present in the system somewhere
It seems somewhat likely based on the first incarnation of the monthly karma feature.
(2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
This part is the unlikely part. A (system) administrator yes, if (1). A moderator, I doubt it.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue.
It couldn’t be me. I had already downvoted most of your feminism politics comments on perceived merit at the time I noticed them in the recent comments thread so cannot downvote further.
It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.
It was briefly intriguing once, three years ago. Now it is tiresome and predictable.
Hermione is the most admirable character in HPMOR, and it looks like McGonagal could soon join her at the top. If their portrayal is an affront to feminism, it’s feminism that has the problem, not HPMOR.
Excellent point.
This isn’t an argument, but a conclusion. It also misses the primary issues at hand here. Hermione might be a very impressive character in any other story, but her total accomplishment set when compared to the primary male character is much smaller. Hermione fights bullies (with Harry’s help). Harry’s equivalent accomplishment: rescuing a prisoner from the most secure prison in the world. Harry, finds a way to kill an avatar of death. Hermione is killed by a troll, without even saving someone’s life to show for it. Etc. The problem here is not feminism.
I said most admirable, not most powerful.
But let’s take your example as is, because it demonstrates another point. When Hermione fought bullies, that actually brought about a lasting change in Hogwarts. Compare the good of that accomplishment to the good of setting free one prisoner from Azkaban, the one most likely, capable, and intent on wreaking destruction in the world.
Who has done more good? I don’t think that’s a slam dunk win for Harry, and could be a devastating loss.
In a similar way, recall that Hermione won the first battle of the generals because neither Harry nor Draco knew how to effectively organize a group of people to a shared goal. Also, if Harry is supposed to learn goodness from Hermione, isn’t that a rather huge power, determining whether the world gets one more Voldemort, or one more Dumbledore? Influence of others is power to do good as well. Similarly, it’s McGonagall who actually runs Hogwarts and sets an example for students, not Dumbledore.
Hermione had a lasting power for good. Harry is “exceptionally good at killing things”. If you want something killed, you want Harry on your side. Or Quirrell. Or Voldemort. Or Dumbledore. If you wanted a leader to delegate authority to run an organization to build something good instead of destroy something evil, you want Hermione without question. Same for McGonagall.
The main change between HPMOR and canon is the hugely increased power, intelligence, capability, and potential for evil of the protagonist, who yes, we assume has a penis. If your mind pattern matches this as an affront to women everywhere, you have a problem.
So to the first part, lasting amount of good from a long-term consequentialist standpoint isn’t the same as how much impact someone has. And if one is trying to think of long-term issues then Harry has also discovered how to destroy otherwise unkillable creatures, and has set Draco Malfoy on the path to redemption. Even if Harry dies tomorrow, the total utility of there being one less dementor in the world will add up a lot over the long term. (In canon dementors can reproduce, but I strongly suspect this isn’t the case in HPMOR.)
This isn’t the only change. There’s also a massive increase in power, intelligence and capability of the antagonist, who, yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Dumbledore’s genre awareness and awareness of the cost of his actions to others, and his general power level (using Time Turners), who yes, we assume has a penis. There’s a massive increase in Draco Malfoy’s manipulative skill, who yes, we assume has a penis.
Moreover, while some female characters have become more interesting (Daphne and Tracy are obvious examples), they still are orders of magnitude less important. And there have been other possible options which could have been interesting. For example, rather than just having Petunia as a helpless housewife, while her husband is a professor, Eliezer could have had written something where she was also an academic, or a successful businesswoman, or a lot.
I’m not sure if this is a strawman or a genuine failure on my part (and possibly others who are concerned) to explain our concerns. No one anywhere in either this discussion thread or the previous HPMOR discussion thread has made the argument “that this is a general affront to women everywhere”. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t believe that. (Introspecting quickly, it is possible that my stated and actual beliefs don’t align. However, if I did think that it was such an affront I douubt, I would have used as my interesting icebreaker fact last Friday that I had cosplayed as a character from a Harry Potter fanfic, and then used that as a way of getting an opportunity to tell people to read Methods of Rationality.)
To state it more explicitly problem is that this is a set of not great role models. My guess is that close to half the readers of HPMR, or certainly a large fraction, are female, and likely pretty young, which makes them impressionable. So, subtle (or not so subtle) differences in what male and female protagonists can do are important. And if some young girl gets pushed slightly over the edge by this into not becoming a chemist or a biologist, or just becoming interested in rationality, we all lose. Moreover, if part of the goal of the story is to get people as a whole interested in rationality and Less Wrong, then for women of all ages, having a substantially weaker female lead is going to make it harder for them to identify with the characters, and all the more so, when that weaker female is (apparently) killed off without even saving anyone in the process.
There’s a lot of room for legitimate concerns without thinking that this is an affront to women everywhere.
If the issue is the set of role models, I submit that Hermione is the best role model in the book.
You can’t model yourself after Harry, redo your birth, and have a superhuman dark side to call on. Similarly, you can’t choose to have a university professor as a parent, who can serve as a role model to you in scientific method, and fully support your efforts in studying science. You can’t trade in your two dentist parents, who think your intelligence is “cute’, for parents who will respect and support your gifts.
But you can be diligent, hard working, honest, caring, and brave. You can do what is right. Though you won’t be as smart as Hermione, she is the best role model the book has to offer.
Because it’s much easier to identify with a 10 year old with a superhuman dark side who wants minions and a sparkly throne. Much healthier too.
Role models in fictional works are by nature characters who are interesting more than they are perfect role models. No one wants to read a story about a character who is perfectly good, goes to classes every day, and never gets in trouble. The nature of role models is more subtle than simply being good. For a young child, they aren’t someone with magical talent, but they can still identify with characters with magical talent, and that’s easier when the character is of the same gender. (I remember at last year’s Vericon there was a panel on feminism and science-fiction and fantasy, and every single female author on the panel, including Tamora Pierce, expressed how much frustration they had growing up with the depiction of female characters, not just that they weren’t protagonists, but that when they were a side-kick or a secondary protagonist, how utterly boring they would be. This is a very old set of problems.)
That’s assuming that Draco’s half-year of interacting with his new friend can’t be countervailed by his subsequent several years of interacting with his loving-but-evil father. I would barely rate that as a possibility, much less an obvious assumption.
The question of Draco does have interesting is-HPMOR-feminist implications, though. Suppose we swapped the genders of Draco and Hermione, both of whom just had many of their often-similar arcs cut short for very-similar reasons. Now, Herman is the one who maintains his convictions in the face of an overwhelming villainous threat, and so the villain is forced to murder him via a plot using the third most perfect killing machine in nature, properly prepared using sabotage and magical upgrades because otherwise the troll would have lost. Now, Draca is the one who gets taken out of the action by half-a-plot (a plot which depends on Draca making rash egotistical mistakes), but she survives under her father’s thumb because ending her influence on Harry doesn’t even take killing her. Did the story just become more gender-equal, or less?
I hope I understand your model correctly as “p(girl scientist | no HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | current HPMoR) < p(girl scientist | feminist HPMoR)”.
I wouldn’t call it “feminist HPMoR”- as I’ve said before, there’s a big difference between a feminist tract and simply taking into account certain concerns that might be described as feminist. But yes, I agree that’s an accurate summary of the model (heck I wouldn’t have gone and told a 16 year old girl to read it this weekend if that weren’t my model).
On what do you base this guess?
Primarily anecdotal and a function of who I know who is reading it, along with the fact that in general fanfic is a heavily female media form, with a lot of young people. From my personal sample, I’d say that about 60% of readers I know are male, but since I’m friends with substantially more men than women, that suggests that that percentage (tentatively) should be correct towards 50⁄50.
demonstrating that, unlike Hermione, he can’t distinguish dangerous quests with high potential pay-offs from dangerous quests that will make the world worse even if he succeeds.
Which is true, but also completely missing the point. What matters to a large extent is the scale of things. Harry does big stuff. Sometimes that results in what may end up as massive screw ups, but his total scale of what he is impacting is much larger.
Just to be clear, the name of the story in question is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which was based off of a series of seven books also titled with the name “Harry Potter”. The name of the story is not “Hermione Granger and the Methods of Rationality”. If it were, then yes, I would expect to see her impact be the larger one.
In the original though, Hermione does big stuff. It is her Time-Turner that saves things in book 3. And throughout the series (with the exception of book 7 where Rowling took a somewhat anti-rationalist stance), it almost always Hermione that figures out what the big plot is or the like. Part of why Hermione in fact looks so much weaker here is because she was the most rational character in the original, and increasing Harry’s skill set while doing much less to hers makes her look less impressive.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Hermione wasn’t powered up at all.
Without diminishing the arguments of the feminist side, I think that’s pretty damn impressive.
If someone wrote a book where all the #Gender1′s were Stalins, each responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, and all the #Gender2′s were ordinary people who didn’t do much, I think that would be an anti-#Gender1 story, even though it’s the #Gender1′s who do big stuff.
It might be anti-both. If you insinuate that everyone of gender 1 is liable to become a genocidal dictator, that’s an insult to people of gender 1. If you insinuate that no one of gender 2 is liable to do anything substantial, that’s an insult to people of gender 2. Neither insult ceases to be insulting merely because you said something bad about the other people too.
It’s not about whether the story is pro-women or anti-women. It’s about whether the story reiterates common tropes that reinforce stereotyped roles for women and men that are harmful to one or both.
The evidence that the traditional roles are harmful appears to be lacking.
Some people do not prefer the role traditionally assigned to them. The existence of strong stereotyped roles makes it harder to do anything else. That seems sufficient to establish harm.
Yes, it is. One of the premises in the simple syllogism is implied and is sufficiently obvious as to make a claim that it is not an argument disingenuous. It would be plausible that someone could reject the argument and reject the premise. It is not plausible to claim that it is not an argument at all.
It misses the issues that you consider primary. But to me it seems to touch on the essential issue: Feminist memes are incompatible with HPMoR and feminism would be much improved by becoming more like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.
Ok. So help me out here, what is the premise I was missing?
If you phrase the “essential issue”, that way, then I agree denotationaly but disagree connotationaly. Sure there are bad feminist memes (this shouldn’t be surprising, almost every movement has bad memes), and there are definite trends in feminism which are outright awful. There’s a heavy anti-science attitude in a large part of the feminist movement, and feminism in many forms almost raises identity politics to a weird combination of an art form and a religion. Lots of things could benefit from being more like HPMoR. But that doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t also benefit from some aspects of feminism, it doesn’t mean that the (by and large) healthy memes in feminism are incompatible, and it doesn’t mean that HPMoR couldn’t benefit by taking those ideas into account.
(Incidentally, someone in the last few hours apparently went through and downvoted almost everything I’ve written in the last few days, including a bunch of comments completely unrelated to the feminism/HPMoR issue. It is intriguing what provokes controversy here.)
The only time I’ve been (or at least noticed being) mass-downvoted, it was immediately after having some slight involvement in a discussion of feminism or PUAistry or something of the kind, and making some comments on what, for want of better terminology, I’ll call the pro-women side. I just went looking to see if I could find the incident in question to check my facts; I didn’t (though I didn’t spend ages looking) but did turn up a remark from someone else that they’d seen that happen. I think there is very good evidence for at least one LW participant who has made a habit of punishing people for feministish opinions by this sort of mass-downvoting.
Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
It seems to me that this isn’t “controversy” but outright abuse, and the kind of abuse that merits severe sanctions, because (1) it poisons the environment for everyone and (2) it seems like an attempt at coercive manipulation and coercive manipulation is generally harmful. I would guess that the LW moderators can, with at most moderate effort, find the answers to questions of the form “so, who just downvoted 20 of JoshuaZ’s recent comments?”...
As far as I know that feature isn’t implemented. It would certainly be something that could be implemented if it turned out to be sufficiently desired. This would catch lazy mass-downvoters and force dedicated mass-downvoters to use a little more effort and patience.
I wasn’t (for the avoidance of doubt) conjecturing that there’s already a nice UI feature where you click a button and it says “wedrifid has downvoted JoshuaZ’s last 20 comments” but, rather, that (1) the information is present in the system somewhere and (2) there are probably ways for a moderator to get it, even if they’re less convenient than just clicking a button—if they thought it worth the trouble.
It seems somewhat likely based on the first incarnation of the monthly karma feature.
This part is the unlikely part. A (system) administrator yes, if (1). A moderator, I doubt it.
Yeah, you might be right; perhaps the only way of getting at it is querying the database directly.
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
It couldn’t be me. I had already downvoted most of your feminism politics comments on perceived merit at the time I noticed them in the recent comments thread so cannot downvote further.
It was briefly intriguing once, three years ago. Now it is tiresome and predictable.
I applaud your patience and diligence. I couldn’t muster more than a shrug and a “whatever” in my head.
Haters gonna hate.