[note: I respect Hufflepuff virtues and endeavor to have/show them, but I’m so deeply Ravenclaw that I don’t fully feel the pain of the confusion when results of such are not ideal. If this is unhelpful, please ignore or moderate away.]
I have two main reactions to this post:
1) the whole point of caricatures with a small number of archetypes is to show that no extreme is really effective without some balance of the others. Naive hufflepuffism (loyalty and other-focus) with no amount of goal-seeking, risk-taking, or strategic decision-making is simply as useless (or harmful) as any of the others taken to an extreme. You don’t have to give up on the value of caring and loyalty in order to see that it’s not sufficient.
2) I think I have to deconstruct “loyalty” a bit before I can accept it as a virtue. To the extent that it’s a motivation to carry on worthwhile relationships through adversity, it’s nothing but admirable. To the extent that it’s unquestioning sublimation of one’s self to an idea or person, its harmful. And I might recommend “fealty” as a better word for that asymmetric, non-strategic abdication of responsibility to make good decisions.
On 2) I agree, but I think this is true of pretty much any “virtue” you could name – ambition, curiosity, kindness, humility, honesty/candor, etc. As you point out, no virtue is sufficient by itself, and no extreme is effective without some balance of the others. (Though I contest the fact that naive hufflepuffism doesn’t already include some goal-seeking; caring about getting shit done is a pretty core Hufflepuff trait, and one Eddie Willers has in spades, though of course it may not be strategic or aimed in a useful direction). The main claim I’m making is that loyalty is a virtue the same way e.g. honesty is – not sufficient in itself, harmful if followed unstrategically and unquestioned, but good to have at all.
Another claim I’m making, though it wasn’t very explicit here, is that there’s not a single “right amount” of loyalty-drive to have. There’s going to be a range where it’s balanced with other traits and adaptive, different people are going to fall in different places on that spectrum, and that’s fine. I have a high enough innate-drive-to-loyalty that I really don’t need to cultivate more of it on purpose; it makes more sense to cultivate traits like ambition and self-efficacy that will help balance it; but I also don’t think I should hammer that drive out of myself.
The main claim I’m making is that loyalty is a virtue the same way e.g. honesty is – not sufficient in itself, harmful if followed unstrategically and unquestioned, but good to have at all.
I wholeheartedly support that claim. It’s generally good, and in normal cases it’s better to have too much than too little. In extreme cases (especially common in fiction and AI mechanism design, and some in politics), the specific failures overwhelm the general goodness. I would only quibble that the line ranges not only across people, but across contexts as well, even for the same individual.
[note: I respect Hufflepuff virtues and endeavor to have/show them, but I’m so deeply Ravenclaw that I don’t fully feel the pain of the confusion when results of such are not ideal. If this is unhelpful, please ignore or moderate away.]
I have two main reactions to this post:
1) the whole point of caricatures with a small number of archetypes is to show that no extreme is really effective without some balance of the others. Naive hufflepuffism (loyalty and other-focus) with no amount of goal-seeking, risk-taking, or strategic decision-making is simply as useless (or harmful) as any of the others taken to an extreme. You don’t have to give up on the value of caring and loyalty in order to see that it’s not sufficient.
2) I think I have to deconstruct “loyalty” a bit before I can accept it as a virtue. To the extent that it’s a motivation to carry on worthwhile relationships through adversity, it’s nothing but admirable. To the extent that it’s unquestioning sublimation of one’s self to an idea or person, its harmful. And I might recommend “fealty” as a better word for that asymmetric, non-strategic abdication of responsibility to make good decisions.
On 2) I agree, but I think this is true of pretty much any “virtue” you could name – ambition, curiosity, kindness, humility, honesty/candor, etc. As you point out, no virtue is sufficient by itself, and no extreme is effective without some balance of the others. (Though I contest the fact that naive hufflepuffism doesn’t already include some goal-seeking; caring about getting shit done is a pretty core Hufflepuff trait, and one Eddie Willers has in spades, though of course it may not be strategic or aimed in a useful direction). The main claim I’m making is that loyalty is a virtue the same way e.g. honesty is – not sufficient in itself, harmful if followed unstrategically and unquestioned, but good to have at all.
Another claim I’m making, though it wasn’t very explicit here, is that there’s not a single “right amount” of loyalty-drive to have. There’s going to be a range where it’s balanced with other traits and adaptive, different people are going to fall in different places on that spectrum, and that’s fine. I have a high enough innate-drive-to-loyalty that I really don’t need to cultivate more of it on purpose; it makes more sense to cultivate traits like ambition and self-efficacy that will help balance it; but I also don’t think I should hammer that drive out of myself.
I wholeheartedly support that claim. It’s generally good, and in normal cases it’s better to have too much than too little. In extreme cases (especially common in fiction and AI mechanism design, and some in politics), the specific failures overwhelm the general goodness. I would only quibble that the line ranges not only across people, but across contexts as well, even for the same individual.