I am unfortunately the opposite of the invited subset; I only just now saw this for the first time since reading it quickly when you wrote it and elected to strong downvote (I feel apologetic).
I straightforwardly like a lot of what comes “below the fold” in this essay, but …
the woman is out to manipulate Jacen into becoming a different sort of person
is underselling it; I think it’s pretty contextually important, actually, that she’s out to manipulate him into becoming evil and also that she straightforwardly succeeds.
I don’t want to be Hermione-Granger-esque incapable of engaging with and drawing benefit from stuff that’s morally gray, but I think if one asks the question “is this particular community too Hermione-failure-mode or too HJPEV-failure-mode,” the answer is pretty clearly the latter. There was something very weird about scrolling the comments looking for someone to have made this point already, in substantive fashion, and only finding AnthonyC sort of halfheartedly gesturing at it and then kind of backing away.
(Tsvi made sort-of similar points in more depth, but didn’t make the point that this is explicitly, canonically, textually, and unsubtly enemy action that is intended by the author to have been read as step one of a process which succeeds at destroying the protagonist and results in thousands-if-not-millions of avoidable deaths and a slide into fascism … because Tsvi hasn’t read the book.)
I’m not sure what to make of the version of the essay that just … excludes the reference. People sure do get mad at my punch bug essay for a weird failure to get past the fact that it contains the word “punch” in the title, and I do feel like I’m a little bit doing the same thing at you here.
(I reiterate that a lot of the stuff below the fold seems great; as yams points out, nearly every major religion tries to teach something like this lesson. Which. Religions not necessarily not another example of the thing I’m trying to gesture at, here, but consensus counts for something.)
But I also feel like I’m not entirely doing the complain-about-punching thing at you, here. Like, I sort of want to gesture at “remember when we all got Brent wrong” and “remember when a lot of us got SBF wrong” and “remember how Hermione didn’t get Quirrell wrong” and “████████ ████ █████████ ██ █████ ███████ ████ ███████ █████” and even “remember how ‘learning how to lose’ was in fact a good and solid lesson that Harry needed to learn, and yet it had been intentionally promoted to his attention above all of the other good and solid lessons that he needed to learn because it was in the intersection of good-lesson and also would-make-him-pliable-and-manipulable, which it in fact did.”
Something something, I wish there was more suspicion-on-priors, both in you and in the LW readerbase, that did not necessarily turn into suspicion-on-posteriors, like I think it’s fine to squint at something plucked from the land of the gray and be like “yes, okay, I endorse and shall keep this, never mind its origins.”
But the fact that the essay didn’t really contain a gesture in that direction, and the fact that the about-as-unsubtle-as-it-gets origins of the insight gave approximately no pause to any reader willing to comment made me wish it were sitting at 100-150 points instead of 200, so I tried to move it in that direction.
(I do think it ought to be at 100-150 points. I do not think it ought to be at zero points.)
I again feel apologetic. I apologize if this comment is useless. But I felt the need to stand up for something like “bad things are bad, actually. Even if they have silver linings. Even if you learn from them.”
There’s a kind of cat-coupling that happens in reverse, where instead of a negative modifier attached to a neutral noun bleeding over to tinge the noun with negativity, spending a bunch of time practicing finding the positives in things that are Just Bad, Actually, really does seem to me to cause people and communities to become worse and worse at noticing the parts that are Just Bad, Actually. And I don’t think that’s, like. Not this community’s Hamming problem, or at least a strong contender.
I don’t think that the Thing we were all talking ourselves into here is actually bad. But I think it should be noticed, when one starts out with “so, I was thinking about how the good guy was successfully broken by the bad guy and realizing that the bad guy was saying a lot of cool stuff, actually...”
(I’ll note that I, too, have gotten a lot of local gains over the past ~2y by going in the opposite direction, as you note above.)
I am unfortunately the opposite of the invited subset; I only just now saw this for the first time since reading it quickly when you wrote it and elected to strong downvote (I feel apologetic).
I straightforwardly like a lot of what comes “below the fold” in this essay, but …
is underselling it; I think it’s pretty contextually important, actually, that she’s out to manipulate him into becoming evil and also that she straightforwardly succeeds.
I don’t want to be Hermione-Granger-esque incapable of engaging with and drawing benefit from stuff that’s morally gray, but I think if one asks the question “is this particular community too Hermione-failure-mode or too HJPEV-failure-mode,” the answer is pretty clearly the latter. There was something very weird about scrolling the comments looking for someone to have made this point already, in substantive fashion, and only finding AnthonyC sort of halfheartedly gesturing at it and then kind of backing away.
(Tsvi made sort-of similar points in more depth, but didn’t make the point that this is explicitly, canonically, textually, and unsubtly enemy action that is intended by the author to have been read as step one of a process which succeeds at destroying the protagonist and results in thousands-if-not-millions of avoidable deaths and a slide into fascism … because Tsvi hasn’t read the book.)
I’m not sure what to make of the version of the essay that just … excludes the reference. People sure do get mad at my punch bug essay for a weird failure to get past the fact that it contains the word “punch” in the title, and I do feel like I’m a little bit doing the same thing at you here.
(I reiterate that a lot of the stuff below the fold seems great; as yams points out, nearly every major religion tries to teach something like this lesson. Which. Religions not necessarily not another example of the thing I’m trying to gesture at, here, but consensus counts for something.)
But I also feel like I’m not entirely doing the complain-about-punching thing at you, here. Like, I sort of want to gesture at “remember when we all got Brent wrong” and “remember when a lot of us got SBF wrong” and “remember how Hermione didn’t get Quirrell wrong” and “████████ ████ █████████ ██ █████ ███████ ████ ███████ █████” and even “remember how ‘learning how to lose’ was in fact a good and solid lesson that Harry needed to learn, and yet it had been intentionally promoted to his attention above all of the other good and solid lessons that he needed to learn because it was in the intersection of good-lesson and also would-make-him-pliable-and-manipulable, which it in fact did.”
Something something, I wish there was more suspicion-on-priors, both in you and in the LW readerbase, that did not necessarily turn into suspicion-on-posteriors, like I think it’s fine to squint at something plucked from the land of the gray and be like “yes, okay, I endorse and shall keep this, never mind its origins.”
But the fact that the essay didn’t really contain a gesture in that direction, and the fact that the about-as-unsubtle-as-it-gets origins of the insight gave approximately no pause to any reader willing to comment made me wish it were sitting at 100-150 points instead of 200, so I tried to move it in that direction.
(I do think it ought to be at 100-150 points. I do not think it ought to be at zero points.)
I again feel apologetic. I apologize if this comment is useless. But I felt the need to stand up for something like “bad things are bad, actually. Even if they have silver linings. Even if you learn from them.”
There’s a kind of cat-coupling that happens in reverse, where instead of a negative modifier attached to a neutral noun bleeding over to tinge the noun with negativity, spending a bunch of time practicing finding the positives in things that are Just Bad, Actually, really does seem to me to cause people and communities to become worse and worse at noticing the parts that are Just Bad, Actually. And I don’t think that’s, like. Not this community’s Hamming problem, or at least a strong contender.
I don’t think that the Thing we were all talking ourselves into here is actually bad. But I think it should be noticed, when one starts out with “so, I was thinking about how the good guy was successfully broken by the bad guy and realizing that the bad guy was saying a lot of cool stuff, actually...”
(I’ll note that I, too, have gotten a lot of local gains over the past ~2y by going in the opposite direction, as you note above.)