“I don’t have much to gain from hanging out with Hagrid” and “I don’t care about Hagrid’s well-being” are radically different statements, and the former doesn’t imply the latter.
“I remember Mr. Hagrid holding you when you were a baby,” she said. “I think he would be very happy to know.”
At the moment, Hagrid probably has zero friends, as I imagine he’s too intimidated by Dumbledore to think of him as a friend instead of a father-figure/employer/crazy old wizard, and I doubt Ron would have befriended him without Harry as a bridge.* The amount of effort Harry has to expend to brighten up Hagrid’s life is rather low.
Harry is being seduced by Quirrel, and the more friends he has, the harder that will be for Quirrel. But Harry is cutting out everyone he can besides Quirrel, Hermione, and Draco. That’s not a recipe for staying good.
Harry is acting cold but not evil.
When it comes to Hagrid, yes. Combined with the rest of the situation, Harry is definitely acting evil. What’s his something to protect? His hubris. Or, possibly, the three seducers he’s surrounded himself with. Not the simple people he can’t stand to even share a meal with.
How is that not a recipe for evil? What would he have to do to convince you that he’s on the road to hell? He’s definitely got the good intentions.
*Further research suggests the Weasley twins, at least, were friendly with Hagrid.
“Harry doesn’t value real friendship enough” is a legitimate concern. But the solution is not “be friends with Ron and Hagrid and the other people that canon-Harry liked.” The solution is to make better friends with Padme and Anthony and Blaise and Neville and various other people who actually share interests with him. (I’d also like to see some chapters that showcased him actually hanging out with the Weasely twins instead of referring to other times when they hung out. If Harry feels bad about teasing Neville I’m not sure what kind of pranks they pull that he doesn’t feel bad about).
Would it benefit Harry to try and be friends with people who aren’t interesting to him from the get-go? Well, yeah. But seriously, that’s a lot of work. Just making friends with people you start off liking can be a lot of work.
Now, right now none of that is even really an option, because the whole point is that Harry feels incredibly isolated. He isn’t sure he can trust Dumbledore, he’s pretty sure he can’t trust Quirrel about most things, he doesn’t want to burden his existing friends with the stuff he’s going through, on top of it simply not being safe to tell anyone. And he doesn’t want to risk getting close to new people right now because it wouldn’t be safe for them either.
Which is exactly where Quirrel wants him. And that’s bad, and he needs to get out of this situation. But if you were up against Quirrel, you’d probably be exactly where he wanted you to be too.
But the solution is not “be friends with Ron and Hagrid and the other people that canon-Harry liked.”
I’m shooting for “Be friendly towards,” not “Be friends with.” At the very least, Harry could stop by Hagrid’s hut and ask him to tell some stories about James and Lily.
I mean, Harry is apparently so inept at dealing with other people that he doesn’t realize indifference is often more wounding than disliking someone.
various other people who actually share interests with him.
That’s how Harry got into this mess- in his mind, the only important students at Hogwarts are himself, Draco, and Hermione, and the only important professor is Quirrel. Heck, when you take into account his skewed morality it looks like the only person that shares interests with him is Quirrel (because of Azkaban).
Which is exactly where Quirrel wants him. And that’s bad, and he needs to get out of this situation. But if you were up against Quirrel, you’d probably be exactly where he wanted you to be too.
I share very few weakness with Harry. I imagine Quirrel is clever enough to figure out my weaknesses and attack them, but I’m not sure he’d succeed; I know several effective defenses against seduction. I am over twice as old as Harry, and so there is no guarantee the same was true of me at Harry’s age- but I would be as comfortable giving a fictional 10 year old me that ability as I would be giving a fictional 10 year old me Harry’s repertoire of read books.
If I think of Harry as a real person in a real situation, I basically agree with you.
Indeed, I asked the question a couple of months ago of whether the rational thing to do would be to stop Harry then, before it was too late, though I had a different mechanism for his corruption in mind. Mechanism aside, it was pretty clear at that point that he had placed himself firmly on the isolate’s path; we’re just reading about his first stumbling steps on that path now.
But the thing is, Harry is the main character in a rationalist bildungsroman, and we’ve already seen that literary tropes have power in his world.
And given the author’s stated-at-length beliefs about the relationship between rationality and moral behavior, I expect that—whether it’s true of the real world or not—a constraining principle of this bildungsroman will be that a sufficiently powerful optimizer can preserve morality (in the human sense) given an adequate commitment to rationality, even in the absence of social entanglement.
And the related (and true in the real world) general principle that social entanglement works just as well to enforce immoral-but-conventional ideas as for moral ones (and is therefore unreliable as a moral guide) has already appeared several times.
In other words: I agree with you that in the real world social entanglement is a more reliable path to morality than individual rationality, at least for the overwhelming majority of people. But HP:MOR would derail a good deal of its literary thrust if Harry adopted that route.
In still other words: what you are championing here is the Hufflepuff yoga, and I agree with you that it’s a reliable way to avoid singular evil (though it makes one more vulnerable to certain kinds of collective evil). Dumbledore champions the Gryffindor yoga, which canon!Harry practices but MOR!Harry rejects. Quirrel champions the Slytherin yoga, about which much has been written.
Harry could usefully collaborate with Hagrid, but Hermione or Draco may need to point that out. Hagrid has had limited access to practicing his magic, so provides something of a control to his classmates, to test whether magical strength is an increasing function of magical use, if magical strength is easily measured—Dumbledore seemed to be able to sense it.
Hermione challenged by Fawkes, may see improving the performance of everyone in the class as the effective way of working harder. Asking Harry “Why are we different?” and based on “Great artists steal”, what existing techniques should we look at could be both effective for both of them.
I’m sorry, but “Hagrid is lonely” is not a concern worth five seconds of thought when Harry could be working on getting rid of dementors or Azkaban or Death Eaters or death.
Harry trusts Quirrell less now than ever before, and he spent much of the chapter before this one rhapsodizing about Hermione’s exceptional moral behavior, which definitely sounds to me like it could be his something to protect.
What would he have to do to convince you that he’s on the road to hell?
Anything evil? I’m still a little dubious of Harry’s judgment of late (though it seems to be recovering), but I’m really surprised you’re worried about his intentions.
Pish posh. That’s what Harry tells himself, but what do his actions say? He’s doubled down in favor of Quirrell. His self-reported unease is meaningless because the stakes are on the table and Quirrell is setting up the next round. Harry’s resistance to bailing on one of his plans is proportional to the difficulty faced, and so next time around he will be even more in Quirrell’s camp then he is now.
I’m still a little dubious of Harry’s judgment of late (though it seems to be recovering), but I’m really surprised you’re worried about his intentions.
I’m worried about his intentions because they suggest his morality is ill-tuned to the problems he faces. They will allow him to excuse himself all the way down to the bottom.
I’m sorry, but “Hagrid is lonely” is not a concern worth five seconds of thought when Harry could be working on getting rid of dementors or Azkaban or Death Eaters or death.
This is a nonsensical statement. It’s not as if Harry was using up those five seconds, or five minutes for any of those concerns.
I sometimes feel like there’s a fallacy that’s similar to privileging the hypothesis, only in the moral domain. Hogwarts is full of people who’d find it awesome if Harry Potter gave them some of his personal attention. Before he was confined to Hogwarts, he could have gone out to visit all kinds of people who are in really horrible straits but would remember for the rest of their lives that The Boy Who Lived cared enough to stop over and take the day to talk to them.
We don’t think Harry was “being a little jerk” because he didn’t previously go to the effort of visiting those people. Why should we think that he’s being jerkish when he’s offered a similar chance and explicitly turns it down, when we didn’t mind him implicitly turning down a thousand such chances before?
“Hogwarts is full of people who’d find it awesome if Harry Potter gave them some of his personal attention.”
Harry has given lots of people his personal attention, which he justified by the fact it would help them—Neville, whom he pranked, Padma Patil, whom he pranked, Gregory Goyle, whom he pranked, Lesath Lestrange who he pranked others for… Even his own past self he pranked.
So why not Hagrid? I don’t see this really being about Harry time-budgeting, it’s more about the fact that he can’t be simply nice to people—McGonnaggal would likely have achieved better results if she had asked Harry to devise an elaborate prank that would have dubiously potentially helped Hagrid in some ambiguous way.
McGonnaggal would likely have achieved better results if she had asked Harry to devise an elaborate prank that would have dubiously potentially helped Hagrid in some ambiguous way.
Why should we think that he’s being jerkish when he’s offered a similar chance and explicitly turns it down, when we didn’t mind him implicitly turning down a thousand such chances before?
Because most humans don’t utility-maximize like Harry, and so their implicit choices don’t predict what they’ll do when faced with an explicit choice. And when one is considering whether to befriend or ally with someone, it’s the explicit choices that would matter from then on; one would no longer be anonymous to them.
But actually befriending Hagrid is a decision that would take up a considerable amount of Harry’s time.
Harry’s only human, he can’t devote all of his free time to saving the world. He needs intellectual and emotional cooldown time. But Harry’s also an introvert. Spending social time with people he doesn’t relate to is not cooldown time for him, it’s something he’d need cooling down from. That being the case, being friends with Hagrid would eat into Harry’s productivity time. It’s a transparently bad move, and he doesn’t have to spend five seconds considering it in much the same way that a competent chess player does not spend five seconds considering whether to checkmate himself.
Harry also stated, quite reasonably, that he was concerned about being linked to the past events of the Chamber of Secrets, and being revealed as a Parselmouth.
But Harry is cutting out everyone he can besides Quirrel, Hermione, and Draco.
What about Neville? They seem to spend serious time together and have a strong connection. Hopefully this will be more apparent in the future (a la chapter 67)
Maybe even the Weasley twins? With the new chapters he may even be approaching Cedric Diggory—though it could be more of a cameo.
Apparently, according to the last chapter, Hermione + Draco were enough to keep him grounded. (And Neville + Cedric will help too, I imagine.)
I was also amused by reading between the lines here:
There was a long pause as the snake-head swayed, staring at Harry; again no detectable emotion came through, and Harry wondered what Professor Quirrell could be thinking that would take Professor Quirrell that long to think.
Friendship 1 Quirrel 0. I think this might be Harry’s first victory over him, and he doesn’t realize it.
At the moment, Hagrid probably has zero friends, as I imagine he’s too intimidated by Dumbledore to think of him as a friend instead of a father-figure/employer/crazy old wizard, and I doubt Ron would have befriended him without Harry as a bridge.* The amount of effort Harry has to expend to brighten up Hagrid’s life is rather low.
Harry is being seduced by Quirrel, and the more friends he has, the harder that will be for Quirrel. But Harry is cutting out everyone he can besides Quirrel, Hermione, and Draco. That’s not a recipe for staying good.
When it comes to Hagrid, yes. Combined with the rest of the situation, Harry is definitely acting evil. What’s his something to protect? His hubris. Or, possibly, the three seducers he’s surrounded himself with. Not the simple people he can’t stand to even share a meal with.
How is that not a recipe for evil? What would he have to do to convince you that he’s on the road to hell? He’s definitely got the good intentions.
*Further research suggests the Weasley twins, at least, were friendly with Hagrid.
“Harry doesn’t value real friendship enough” is a legitimate concern. But the solution is not “be friends with Ron and Hagrid and the other people that canon-Harry liked.” The solution is to make better friends with Padme and Anthony and Blaise and Neville and various other people who actually share interests with him. (I’d also like to see some chapters that showcased him actually hanging out with the Weasely twins instead of referring to other times when they hung out. If Harry feels bad about teasing Neville I’m not sure what kind of pranks they pull that he doesn’t feel bad about).
Would it benefit Harry to try and be friends with people who aren’t interesting to him from the get-go? Well, yeah. But seriously, that’s a lot of work. Just making friends with people you start off liking can be a lot of work.
Now, right now none of that is even really an option, because the whole point is that Harry feels incredibly isolated. He isn’t sure he can trust Dumbledore, he’s pretty sure he can’t trust Quirrel about most things, he doesn’t want to burden his existing friends with the stuff he’s going through, on top of it simply not being safe to tell anyone. And he doesn’t want to risk getting close to new people right now because it wouldn’t be safe for them either.
Which is exactly where Quirrel wants him. And that’s bad, and he needs to get out of this situation. But if you were up against Quirrel, you’d probably be exactly where he wanted you to be too.
I’m shooting for “Be friendly towards,” not “Be friends with.” At the very least, Harry could stop by Hagrid’s hut and ask him to tell some stories about James and Lily.
I mean, Harry is apparently so inept at dealing with other people that he doesn’t realize indifference is often more wounding than disliking someone.
That’s how Harry got into this mess- in his mind, the only important students at Hogwarts are himself, Draco, and Hermione, and the only important professor is Quirrel. Heck, when you take into account his skewed morality it looks like the only person that shares interests with him is Quirrel (because of Azkaban).
I share very few weakness with Harry. I imagine Quirrel is clever enough to figure out my weaknesses and attack them, but I’m not sure he’d succeed; I know several effective defenses against seduction. I am over twice as old as Harry, and so there is no guarantee the same was true of me at Harry’s age- but I would be as comfortable giving a fictional 10 year old me that ability as I would be giving a fictional 10 year old me Harry’s repertoire of read books.
If I think of Harry as a real person in a real situation, I basically agree with you.
Indeed, I asked the question a couple of months ago of whether the rational thing to do would be to stop Harry then, before it was too late, though I had a different mechanism for his corruption in mind. Mechanism aside, it was pretty clear at that point that he had placed himself firmly on the isolate’s path; we’re just reading about his first stumbling steps on that path now.
But the thing is, Harry is the main character in a rationalist bildungsroman, and we’ve already seen that literary tropes have power in his world.
And given the author’s stated-at-length beliefs about the relationship between rationality and moral behavior, I expect that—whether it’s true of the real world or not—a constraining principle of this bildungsroman will be that a sufficiently powerful optimizer can preserve morality (in the human sense) given an adequate commitment to rationality, even in the absence of social entanglement.
And the related (and true in the real world) general principle that social entanglement works just as well to enforce immoral-but-conventional ideas as for moral ones (and is therefore unreliable as a moral guide) has already appeared several times.
In other words: I agree with you that in the real world social entanglement is a more reliable path to morality than individual rationality, at least for the overwhelming majority of people. But HP:MOR would derail a good deal of its literary thrust if Harry adopted that route.
In still other words: what you are championing here is the Hufflepuff yoga, and I agree with you that it’s a reliable way to avoid singular evil (though it makes one more vulnerable to certain kinds of collective evil). Dumbledore champions the Gryffindor yoga, which canon!Harry practices but MOR!Harry rejects. Quirrel champions the Slytherin yoga, about which much has been written.
But MOR!Harry is a Ravenclaw.
Harry could usefully collaborate with Hagrid, but Hermione or Draco may need to point that out. Hagrid has had limited access to practicing his magic, so provides something of a control to his classmates, to test whether magical strength is an increasing function of magical use, if magical strength is easily measured—Dumbledore seemed to be able to sense it. Hermione challenged by Fawkes, may see improving the performance of everyone in the class as the effective way of working harder. Asking Harry “Why are we different?” and based on “Great artists steal”, what existing techniques should we look at could be both effective for both of them.
I’m sorry, but “Hagrid is lonely” is not a concern worth five seconds of thought when Harry could be working on getting rid of dementors or Azkaban or Death Eaters or death.
Harry trusts Quirrell less now than ever before, and he spent much of the chapter before this one rhapsodizing about Hermione’s exceptional moral behavior, which definitely sounds to me like it could be his something to protect.
Anything evil? I’m still a little dubious of Harry’s judgment of late (though it seems to be recovering), but I’m really surprised you’re worried about his intentions.
Pish posh. That’s what Harry tells himself, but what do his actions say? He’s doubled down in favor of Quirrell. His self-reported unease is meaningless because the stakes are on the table and Quirrell is setting up the next round. Harry’s resistance to bailing on one of his plans is proportional to the difficulty faced, and so next time around he will be even more in Quirrell’s camp then he is now.
I’m worried about his intentions because they suggest his morality is ill-tuned to the problems he faces. They will allow him to excuse himself all the way down to the bottom.
This is a nonsensical statement. It’s not as if Harry was using up those five seconds, or five minutes for any of those concerns.
Harry was just being a little jerk.
I sometimes feel like there’s a fallacy that’s similar to privileging the hypothesis, only in the moral domain. Hogwarts is full of people who’d find it awesome if Harry Potter gave them some of his personal attention. Before he was confined to Hogwarts, he could have gone out to visit all kinds of people who are in really horrible straits but would remember for the rest of their lives that The Boy Who Lived cared enough to stop over and take the day to talk to them.
We don’t think Harry was “being a little jerk” because he didn’t previously go to the effort of visiting those people. Why should we think that he’s being jerkish when he’s offered a similar chance and explicitly turns it down, when we didn’t mind him implicitly turning down a thousand such chances before?
“Hogwarts is full of people who’d find it awesome if Harry Potter gave them some of his personal attention.”
Harry has given lots of people his personal attention, which he justified by the fact it would help them—Neville, whom he pranked, Padma Patil, whom he pranked, Gregory Goyle, whom he pranked, Lesath Lestrange who he pranked others for… Even his own past self he pranked.
So why not Hagrid? I don’t see this really being about Harry time-budgeting, it’s more about the fact that he can’t be simply nice to people—McGonnaggal would likely have achieved better results if she had asked Harry to devise an elaborate prank that would have dubiously potentially helped Hagrid in some ambiguous way.
Well, you’ve surely got that right.
Because most humans don’t utility-maximize like Harry, and so their implicit choices don’t predict what they’ll do when faced with an explicit choice. And when one is considering whether to befriend or ally with someone, it’s the explicit choices that would matter from then on; one would no longer be anonymous to them.
But actually befriending Hagrid is a decision that would take up a considerable amount of Harry’s time.
Harry’s only human, he can’t devote all of his free time to saving the world. He needs intellectual and emotional cooldown time. But Harry’s also an introvert. Spending social time with people he doesn’t relate to is not cooldown time for him, it’s something he’d need cooling down from. That being the case, being friends with Hagrid would eat into Harry’s productivity time. It’s a transparently bad move, and he doesn’t have to spend five seconds considering it in much the same way that a competent chess player does not spend five seconds considering whether to checkmate himself.
Harry also stated, quite reasonably, that he was concerned about being linked to the past events of the Chamber of Secrets, and being revealed as a Parselmouth.
What about Neville? They seem to spend serious time together and have a strong connection. Hopefully this will be more apparent in the future (a la chapter 67)
Maybe even the Weasley twins? With the new chapters he may even be approaching Cedric Diggory—though it could be more of a cameo.
Apparently, according to the last chapter, Hermione + Draco were enough to keep him grounded. (And Neville + Cedric will help too, I imagine.)
I was also amused by reading between the lines here:
Friendship 1 Quirrel 0. I think this might be Harry’s first victory over him, and he doesn’t realize it.