Why are people "put off by rationality"?

I would go even further and point out how Harry's arrogance is good for the story. Here's my approach to this critique:

"You're absolutely right that Harry!HPMOR is arrogant and condescending. It is a clear character flaw, and repeatedly gets in the way of his success. As part of a work of fiction, this is exactly how things should be. All people have flaws, and a story with a character with not flaws wouldn't be interesting to read!

Harry suffers significantly due to this trait, which is precisely what a good author does with their characters.

Later on there is an entire section dedicated to Harry learning "how to lose," and growing to not be quite as blind in this way. If his character didn't have anywhere to develop, it wouldn't be a very good story!"

That's true, but I also think that the culture of LW and the surrounding "rationalist" community is a fairly arrogant culture, and not all rational-thinking cultures are like this (compare the number of scientific papers that say "more research is needed" vs "our paper pretty much settles this issue"). Personally I suspect that a culture less arrogant than the LW "rationalist" community is optimal. For example, Paul Graham nails it IMO... he says controversial stuff and questions establishment views, but does so in thoughtful, evenhanded, polite way.

I agree that in some instances Harry has acted a bit immature and disrespectful. However...

1. I don't think he does it too often. Most of the time I think he's just challenging people's beliefs (justifiably).

2. He's demonstrated that he's an incredibly caring and selfless person, both admirable qualities. He's dedicated to making the world a better place, and is willing to sacrifice himself to do so. Shouldn't that outweigh a little bit of immaturity?

One hint is to not behave like you are higher-status than they believe you to be.

This is a very good idea I wish I were able to follow more often. And since I am not good at learning social skills by copying, an explicit training could be useful.

To be precise, "not behaving higher-status" is relatively easy. The difficult part is to explain an idea contradicting some high-status belief while behaving so. I know it can be done, because I have seen people doing it, but it is so high above my current skill level.

One hint is to not behave like you are higher-status than they believe you to be.

I am not sure about that. Status is a function of perception and, to some degree, negotiation (usually not explicit). Just because someone wants to assign low status to you (e.g. because it would raise their own) does not mean you have to accept it and bend to their expectations.

It's a complex issue but I'd like to make two points.

First, showing high(er) status and being an asshole are very different things. People dislike the latter much more than the former.

Second, keep in mind the overall goals. High status is useful and could perfectly well be part of what you strive for. Normally you do want to convey information AND increase your status without pissing the audience off. By the way, if you're perceived as having sufficiently low status, your information would be perceived as low value. People listen to those they respect.

Well said.

While directly highlighting a deficiency and offering replacement is a straightforward way there are ways of addressing them. They often require more work but can have such benefits as not triggering adverse social mechanisms. One such route is to get really enthusiastic on the wrong idea and carry it on to it's more extreme side where it can be apparent how absurd the idea was in the first place. The original proposer gets to do the error correction and withdrawal. Thus one can be an active force for truth without being brutal about it.

I would argue that for many people their exposure to the concept of rationality is predominantly made up of half rationalists.

Additionally, many people who call themselves 'rationalists' are, in my experience, just using the term to justify their own ideas whatever they are and dismiss those of others as automatically 'irrational'.

I wasn't very satisfied with Eliezer's comment there. He seemed to be missing the point of those complaints. They didn't mind necessarily that Harry acted as he did, but they found it out-of-character that McGonagall would respond to Harry's actions as she did.

yeah that's one of the worst parts of the story for me.

Thanks for the link. I think the idea of status slapdown is (part?) of what I was getting at in 1).

Imagine someone who reads the horoscope every morning, who always trusts their gut feelings and emotions, who's a sincere believer in homeopathy, etc etc (whatever you think an irrational person believes). Such a person would probably strongly rationality, rationalists, and the complex of ideas surrounding rationality, for probably understandable reasons

A bit offtopic to the discussion itself, but trusting your "gut feelings" is rational in certain circumstances (or, in the more precise lingo, in certain conditions System 1 will be faster /and/ more correct than System 2). I actually don't remember whether HPMOR teaches it somewhere (if anybody knows, could you share a link?).

I often use this as a bridge when explaining applied rationality techniques to friends, because it makes the techniques more relatable and gives me a good opening ("I'm totally with you on trusting your gut feelings in situation X, and here're some interesting explanations from psychology research on why it works", using familiar topics to show your System 1 that research can explain life and that research can be interesting!, so then I can continue into "on the other hand it's probably not good to do the same in situation Y, here's some interesting research on why it's so"). It also helps dispel the Straw Vulcan view of rationality.

The point being that advocating for (applied) rationality can sometimes come across as saying "you, being human, have no idea how to make good decisions in an environment populated by humans, wipe everything clean and begin anew", instead of "making decisions is hard, but here're some things you already seem to do right, and here're some things you could get better at".

Such a person would probably strongly [missing verb?] rationality, rationalists, and the complex of ideas surrounding rationality, for probably understandable reasons

Since I kind of like your comment, I'd liked to know how that sentence should have sounded. Strongly dislike, hate, mistrust?

There's a difference between displays of intelligence and excessive displays of intelligence. A working definition could be that it's excessive when its purpose is to show off rather than to communicate the point at hand. (I think we agree here, just sort of thinking out loud and making sure.)

So obviously it's a bad idea to show off. To me the question really is what do you do when you need to communicate something, but doing so will be seen as excessive. What are the best strategies to mitigate the perceived excessiveness?

marks you as a defection risk

That's not how normal people think.

This recent comment is relevant :-)

I am writing this comment because I feel like you were downvoted without a specific explanation as to why, and your post was made in good faith. If I made a post like yours and got downvoted, I would hope someone would be willing to take a karma hit to explain to me their reasoning, so I will do the same.

First, I think your sentence is partially correct. I generally believe that ineffective writing will not polarize people, because ineffective writing does not motivate people to do anything or have any serious opinions on it. Someone who posts something emptyheaded and unuseful will generally get very few upvotes and not generate a large discussion thread. I think that better writing will challenge people's assumptions, or bring interesting topics forward, and then people will have opinions, and opinions are polarized.

However, "Good writing polarizes people" is probably being downvoted because the best writing, at least in the sense of "let's write a fanfic that makes people want to learn more about rationality", would not polarize people and get them to write negative reviews on fanfiction.net. The best writing would cause people to be all like "oh, this is an interesting topic, and this writing is enjoyable to read. Not only will I read more about this topic, I will also continue reading this fanfic." I think that the best writing would somehow convince people that hpmor was awesome, and that they should come to lesswrong, read all the sequences, and then write high-quality comments. So good writing polarizes people is misleading since the best writing converts them.

If your statement is that the best writing polarizes people, I think you can expect to be downvoted because many people think the best writing convinces people, rather than just motivating them to write angry reviews. If it's true that excellent writing convinces people and good writing only polarizes, and you're making a more nuanced point, like that there's an uncanny valley of writing effectivness, this still does not make your comment super helpful, because it seems to me that the next step is "well, how could this be better so instead of just polarizing people, it convinces them" or something.