wedrifid comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Unnamed 27 May 2010 12:10AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (866)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 30 June 2010 04:59:35PM -1 points [-]

Personally, I don't even see anything to explain. Billions of people are suffering, and at least billions are going to die, and most people are observably doing nothing about it. Harry seems to have good reason to think he's the only one that can do anything, if only because he's the only one (or one of just a few) who noticed and/or cares.

Harry's problem seems to be not that he has decided to do something about it but that he takes pride in feeling guilt over the suffering of everyone (even obscenely evil people). It is on thing to prefer to take over the universe and allow the evil people to live freely in a way that can't hurt others, but it is quite another to be all emo about it. That achieves nothing except allow harry to feel self righteous.

Comment author: EStokes 05 July 2010 05:22:10PM 4 points [-]

IMO he's not all emo about it. He is also aware of his feeling guilty about it and agrees with Neville when he says he's silly. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall him feeling proud of it.