= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern 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)
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.
The death was fairly recent, and took a couple of years. I suppose you could call it dying of a fire rather than in one.
I am really not sure where the limits should be on that sort of speech-- in a public forum of this size, the odds of accidentally stomping on someone's toes go up.