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

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

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Comment author: anonym 29 May 2010 08:00:10AM 2 points [-]

Me too, though I had many of those same misgivings while reading the book. The difference between me and everybody else in my peer group -- who loved Ender's Game -- is that I first read it as an adult, and they all read it first as teenagers or before.

To gather some actual data, I'm curious how many people there are here who first read it as a young teenager and didn't love it, or first read it as an adult and did love it.

Comment author: grendelkhan 29 April 2011 03:08:29PM 1 point [-]

I read it in middle school, and, though I know there's a tendency to see my earlier self as having the benefit of hindsight, I swear that while I really enjoyed the cathartic nerd-violence, I also had an awareness that there was something creepy and wrong with the whole thing, even if I couldn't put my finger on it. I was both attracted to and horrified by the book. I had a faint sense that feeling that self-righteous is a very dangerous sign.

I then largely forgot about it (it seems to have strongly influenced a lot of people who read it at that age, but not me) until I reached adulthood and stumbled on criticism from Kessel and Radford, whereupon it all fell into place and I congratulated myself on having seen that there was at least something there to criticize.