= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Spurlock comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (696)
Regarding #2, I don't think either of those examples come up particularly in any of the main sequences, though they have been posted on (try the search bar on the right). As for the sequences, they are ridiculously intimidating at first glance, but worthwhile. My recommendation is just to dive in one post at a time (Mysterious Questions to Mysterious Answers is a good starting point, with plenty of real life examples), and not let the sheer volume scare you off. Don't make it a project, just take each post as something to read on its own.
Thank you Spurlock, that was helpful.
To expand on my previous idea: This is speculation not based on any direct evidence in the text, but I think the secret held in the Potion Book is the recipe for the potion Lily used to turn her sister beautiful. EY points out several times how Transfigurations are dangerous, points out that this is why there are still fat people etc., and Petunia herself describes the process as very long (sick for a month). So it might be possible that the potion uses Dark Magic or some other terrible secret was involved in its creation.
I'm not sure that people who actually live in the wizarding world care about appearance in quite the same way that muggles do. Wizards seem to be content to be extremely beautiful or extremely ugly.
The original books seemed to have a reasonable amount of teenage drama about looks.
I'd have to reread-- how much of the angsting was from teenagers who grew up among muggles?
Do the adult wizards seem calmer about their looks than adult muggles?
ETA: I didn't mean muggles, I meant humans in the real world.
The weirdest thing about the HP books is that they're insanely popular while portraying a world in which people (you and everyone you've ever known) are consistently viewed as inferior.
I don't have any reason to think this is a bad thing, but it's very strange considering the usual human preference for self-congratulation.
By reading about high-status people, you pretend you're high-status too. Fiction is escapist. Nobody empathizes with the Muggles in HP - they identify with Harry, or Hermione, or Ron or another Wizard.
How common is it for fiction to be about high status people who visibly despise people like the reader?
I agree that you're accurately describing the experience of reading HP.
In medieval fantasy it is very nearly ubiquitous.That is, similar to Harry Potter in as much as the evil folks abuse the peasants while the good guys condescend. Any 'people like the reader' who get treated with respect tend to be those that more or less don't act like people like the reader.
Hello, my name is John Galt and if you have ever used the emergency room in a hospital, please go die in a fire.
I'm honestly not sure whether that's a fair reading of Atlas Shrugged.
I recently heard from a woman whose mother died in a fire how infuriating "die in a fire" is. Perhaps it would be kinder to retire it at least until people no longer die in fires.
By that standard, we should purge our speaking of any and all allusions to traumatic death, i.e. the overwhelming majority of death. I would judge this to be an unreasonable standard; trigger warnings are a good thing when possible, but they are not practical for casual, conversational speech.
This particular case may also be a form of unusually high sensitivity, unless the loss was recent (or particularly traumatic for other reasons, e.g. happened during childhood or the woman nearly died in the fire herself). I lost the majority of my family to various forms of cancer, and nearly everyone I know has had at least one such event, but I still remember "I hope the bastard gets bowel cancer" or similar phrases being a fairly common choice for an extremely venomous insult, and it wouldn't cause so much as a raised eyebrow unless someone's relative were in the process of dying of cancer, or had very recently done so.
I don't remember offhand either.
I wonder, though, if the Malfoys are magically beautiful.
I think Lockroy's smile may be mentioned as magically assisted.