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gwern comments on The Sword of Good - Less Wrong
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Why does Hirou trust the Sword of Good? How does he know that it's Friendly?
I didn't get that from the story. All those fantasy books he's read, and he only now ponders whether something is good just because the author labeled it "Good"? He only now considers how immoral the actions of many fantasy heroes would be were they real? I remember being bothered by Aragorn's divine right to lead when I was eight and my Dad was reading Lord of the Rings to me.
As your acknowledgments show, pondering whether it could really be moral to kill "bad guys" so willy-nilly is common in fantasy circles. One of the Austin Powers movies used this to humorous effect with a little vignette about how one of the henchmen killed by Powers had a loving family and had just celebrated his retirement surrounded by loving friends.
Maybe these thoughts never occur to many fantasy readers, but I don't think that we're talking about some vanishingly rare perspicacity here.
Maybe someone who's developed a rigorous theory of friendliness :).
I guess I'm just surprised to see an allegory from you in which someone solves Friendliness by applying thirty seconds of his at-best-slightly-above-average moral intuition. I did not get the impression that Hirou was any kind of moral savant. And I had thought that even a moral savant, on your view, couldn't reliably make such a decision in thirty seconds.
I think you're being a little optimistic here in thinking your skepticism is at all general.
Why was Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream so critically well-received and still read? (If you haven't read it, it's much like Eliezer's story except without the sane hero.) Because it demonstrated that most readers weren't critical, that they'd been reading fantasy stories for literally decades without cottoning onto how well the same stories justified genocide and fascism!
I thought the point of The Iron Dream was that Hitler's novel (the story is set in an alternate world where Hitler became a pulp writer) was the nastiest sort of inappropriate fantasy.