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That article was indeed brilliant. However;
I think this is no longer true. The show has gone out of his way to expose Penny as a jerkass, a bully, a freeloader, a professional failure, and an otherwise despicable, pathetic person. Leonard, however, remains incredibly nice and virtuous, and you get a stronger and stronger feeling that he could be doing much better.
I think that may be your own interpretation of the show depicting a few flaws.
I have only watched a few episodes (something about the show irritates me intensely), but I had the impression that Penny was your stock normal character / foil / straight (wo)man and indeed a bit out of Leonard's league. Browsing the Wikipedia and BBT entries for Penny, they give me the same impression - a basically good normal character who in several respects is superior to 'the boys'. And certainly not an all-around 'despicable, pathetic person'.
You obviously didn't get to the part where she spoke of her past as a bully in high school (and I mean the seriously violent kind of bully, not just the steal your lunch money and make fun of you kind) and where she stole clothes from one of those donation containers.
Or the part where she chides Leonard for selflessly and spontaneously helping her with college, alleging that she wants to be her own person and win on her own merit,; she gets a B minus for her work... only it turns out she had Amy and Bernadette do that for her.
In the same episode, she justifies her exploitation of Leonard as "that's his job as my boyfriend, right? to make me happy"; her friends ask "what is your job then, as girlfriend?" "to let him make me happy", she replies without missing a beat.
Let's just say that there's been character development. She's not out of Leo's league: it's the opposite, he just fails to realize it.
With a tiny adjustment, this is actually a quite standard, old fashioned view of a heterosexual relationship, which largely resonates with me.
I'd exchange "make her happy" for "help and encourage her in her pursuit of happiness", but other that, I'd say it's about right. I remember reading that Men are from Mars marriage counselor author years ago, and was rather ideologically offended that he basically painted a man's job as taking care of a woman, and a woman's job to let him. But that seems about right to me these days.
I did some brief internet searches for traditional marriage vows, just as a point of reference to a difference in gender roles, and was surprised that the first half dozen were gender symmetric. WIkpedia had a section on the vows in the Book of Common Prayer, and how they've changed over time.
I for one went through the exact opposite trajectory.
A couple is an association of equals whose goal is to satisfy each of the parties' values through love.
My values say that women are not children to be catered to or made happy by men. They are our equals, and we help and cater to each other, and we both let each other do that.
If, however, what satisfies your values is to be the altruistic party in the relationship, and the girl be the egoistic party, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong; suit yourself.
In both cases, you're applying normative standards to what you think the world should be like. I've found that relationships got easier, and life got better, when I started to focus on what the world is, instead of what I thought it should be.
When were relationships working? When was I happy? When was my partner happy?
You like the word "equal", but I don't see it applying to any discernible metric. Certainly no actual observation. When I started to actually pay attention to what was happening, I noticed that men and women are in general different in their wants, needs, desires, and satisfactions.
I once had much the same attitude that you had. Life got easier when I stopped acting on how life should be, and started acting more on how life is. I still have a ways to go in that regard.
It is amusing to see you call me "the altruistic party". I'm actually ideologically egoistic, and a fan of Stirner. Selfishness isn't about not making others happy, it's about doing what* you* want. That's what it is to "suit yourself".
Well, then we'd be getting into a debate of Fake Altruism And Fake Selfishness And Fake Morality.
Thing is, if women from a specific generation or cultural backgound have been raised in such a way that their values are satisfied by a couple of assymetric power and function, and you think being with girls like that would satisfy your values, go ahead.
I for one find that "happiness" is far less important than "satisfying my values". Since Celestia isn't there to do that for me, I'll need to work harder to at least get an approximation. But, yeah, duty and justice figure higher in my totem pole than joy or happiness or even peace, and it's not a choice I've made.
As for how the world is, I haven't really figured it out yet; people are mostly an enigma to me (a deliberate one, since most people are far less willing/driven to talk or even think about their goals, motivations, desires, and feelings than I am, which causes me no end of frustration and grief). And studying PUA and other "hard-nosed", "pragmatic" sources is helping, but not much, and is costing me a lot in idealism, and motivation.
As for me, satisfying me is more important than satisfying my values. As I said, I'm ideologically egoistic.
Oh yes it is. To the extent that you're a slave to duty, it's because you choose to be one.
That's the thing. People are quite predictable. In fact, you probably already know the predictive models, but are choosing instead to use your normative models to predict the world, or just as bad and much the same, modeling other people as if they have the same motivations that you do.
I haven't delved much into the PUA literature, but my impression is that it focuses more on acquiring and controlling women than enjoying them once you have them. I don't think that's pragmatism, I think it's missing the point.
If it's costing you some idealism, it's doing something useful. But if it's costing you motivation, that's not so helpful.
Would it really be so horrible if women are not what you think they "should" be? Would they be so horrible? A lot of things are not what you think women should be. Is a chair horrible for not being your ideal woman? A car? A spoon? You find uses for all of them, don't you?
Look at the unwomen for what they are - are they so horrible? Entirely lacking in charm, beauty, warmth, intelligence? Maybe women don't exist, and only unwomen do. What then? Time to throw yourself off a bridge?
The world is a wonderful place, and unwomen are among the most wonderful things in it. The world is a wonderful place, once you decide to live in it, instead of bemoaning that it isn't what you think it should be.
... This sentence confuses me. Does the expression "I don't know any other way to live" sound familiar to you?
I've tried that. It just gets me depressed, and doesn't improve my predictive abilities at all; rather than make wrong predictions, I find myself unable to make any predictions.
It's for this kind of insight that I frequent this community. Well-said. I knew something was bugging me. In trope terms, tt's basically like wanting to take over the world, and not knowing what to do with it once you actually do win.
I can't follow your chain of reasoning... It's not a matter of them being women, that's secondary to my needs. I wouldn't mind a guy if being together with that person helped me fulfil my values (which don't include "your romantic partner has to be of the opposite sex").
How can the world be wonderful if it isn't what I think it ought to be? The only way around that is to redefine my understanding of what it ought to be.
Otherwise, thank you for your post, this is being very interesting for me.
Should it? If this is an allusion, it's going right past me.
I wasn't trying to get at your sexual orientation with "unwomen". That was meant to refer to "women who are unlike your ideal of what a woman and partner should be". I think unwomen can be perfectly wonderful, and in fact, more wonderful than your ideal women. And even if they weren't, unwomen have the merit of actually existing.
That's half of it. There was something additional that I was trying to get at. They have a whiff of incompetent egoists about them. They seem to look for powers against and over women, instead of powers for what they want with women. It's just a game they're playing against women, and they "win" when they get control. But as you say, they don't give a lot of thought to what to do with a woman once they have control.
That one really makes laugh. I mean that in a friendly way. You have an ideal in your mind that doesn't correspond to the world, so you conclude that the world isn't wonderful. You've set yourself a very tough standard for you being happy with the world. Your oughts don't seem very conducive to your happiness. Why don't you set them aside for a second, look at the world, and see what it has going for it in an unought way?
There are other ways. For my part, I don't think that the world has a duty to be anything, and it sure as hell doesn't have a duty to correspond to my moral preferences.
The WP article did mention the bullying but immediately excuses it as she didn't understand the suffering she caused and later tried to make amends. (I don't recall either article mentioning your other 2 examples.) This is what I mean by your perspective perhaps differing from everyone else's and the creators'.
Everyone has a perspective that differs somewhat from everyone else's. Perspectives are taken from points that exist in a continuous, multi-demensional space, with directions and optics that are also points in vast spaces. There simply isn't a perspective that is equal to another.
But, see, it doesn't matter how different any perspective is from another, what matters is the evidence available, and whether your understanding can be made understandable to others based on that evidence. This perspective is known as "Death of the Author", check it out.
As for Penny, that she didn't understand the suffering she caused is what's the most damning to me. She didn't even realize her victims were human. They were in the outgroup, and so they somehow didn't count. And that is simply a particular instance of the more general problem with TBBT.
As for her making amends, she only did so reluctantly and because her friends (with whom she has more of a servant-master relationship, and who had been bullied when they were younger) urged her to. As far as I could tell from reading her non-verbal language, she didn't actually feel the slightest remorse, shame, or guilt. She's stuck between the pre-conventional and conventional stages of moral development, and never made it to post-conventional.
So in other words you're bloviating at us: you adopt a relativistic point of view that there is neither right nor wrong and all that matters is what you can persuade others of? "Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say."
Then I have no interest in what you have to say, and stand by my summary of the general consensus as represented on Wikipedia and the Big Bang wiki: Penny is not a monster in the eyes of the audience and creators, nor is she intended to be.
That isn't exactly true. Instead people should expect what he says to be true if the incentives (including risks of punishment) are such that it is in his best interest to tell the truth. Which, as it turns out, is approximately the rule of thumb I use when listening to any human. That most often I expect the falsehoods to be the result of instinctive hypocrisy than self aware intent to deceive is not significant.
I find that sort of mentality to be amazingly depressing. If the world were like that, why get out of the bed in the morning?
Because I can't cook bacon from in bed. Bacon is delicious!
There is no rule "If I understand something about the world that differs from a simple ideology then I must make myself sad". So I don't do that.
As a matter of fact, that's wrong when it comes to knowledge about humans; your expectations about a human (or rather, the signalling thereof) will change how said human behaves. Your beliefs (or rather, others' perception thereof) change reality. If you expect someone to be good, they may well feel compelled to meet that expectation. If you expect people to respect you and find you atractive, all alse being equal, they will be more likely to find you respectable and attractive.
And if you expect people to be selfish assholes whose kindness is nothing more than a complex deception of themselves and each other, and they pick up on that, you're more likely to get a treatment that fits that description.
It seems you have "detected" relativism and reacted strongly. However, I do not think Rational_Brony is pushing relativism. Instead, I think he is trying to rule as inadmissible the out-of-show statements by the creators of the show. That is not compatible with thoroughgoing relativism.
Either way, I think it's stupid and leads to low-quality discussions, ideas, and conclusions. If it's relativism, the discussions are meaningless, and if it's refusal to draw on out-of-universe material, it's shooting oneself in the kneecaps with a shotgun.
Aren't you a fan of hyperboles? I don't think he takes creator feedback as automatically inadmissible, so much that he treats it as unreliable; they may lie, they may be instinctively hypocritical, they may not have thought about the harm they did (like Penny), or they may be mistaken on their own work because it was informed by subconscious or interiorized compulsions that they don't know of.
Privilege and sexism are a common source of that sort of dissonance; a work by a sexist will apply unfair double standards to women without the author, who is suffering from privilege blindness, noticing the insanity of what they are saying.
I don't see anything in RationalBrony's comments which adopts anything like your suggestion of taking out-of-universe material as an unreliable source and cross-checking it against other materials, previous statements etc. - as makes sense, since this is perfectly ordinary pre-Death-of-the-Author literary criticism & scholarship! (This is, in fact, the exact method I aspire to in my own Evangelion research & criticism.) Let me quote from the Wikipedia article on "Death of the Author":
I don't know how much plainer a denial of your suggestion one could get! Hyperbole nothing.
So RationalBrony is either so incompetent that he thinks the exact opposite of the actual view he is claiming to espouse, or you're simply being way too charitable and forcing a sensible view onto someone who is not.
Short answer; please read this article so you can update your priors and learn more about mine (you seem to confuse my position with the more absurd forms of post-modernism, which should confuse you because why would someone with those beliefs want to have anything to do with a fiercely modernist community such as Lesswrong). It's a well-written, fun article, and I think you'd enjoy it. Please have a look.
Couldn't you have linked to that in the first place?
Yes, I should have. There seems to have been an illusion of transparency going on, and I could have averted it if I hadn't been so myopic, as you said. Sorry.
I am not, to my knowledge, denying the importance of objectivity, and you're providing a very good example of reaching a different conclusion from the author on what meaning can be derived from the author's product.
The thing is, Penny's behavior is the available evidence. The majority of the viewers may see it and evaluate it in roughly similar ways. The authors may or may not agree with them; they have their own perspective; for example, Alan Moore understood Rorschach as a psychopath, but a large part of the leadership finds him admirable. It's not a case of one being wrong and the other being right, it's a case of them using different criteria in distinguishing information from noise, and giving different weights and values to different evidence. What any single individual can do is explain what evidence and what methods they used to reach their conclusions, and leave it to others to see whether their selection of evidence and interpretation thereof is defensible.
Works of fiction are not natural phenomena; they are people's behaviour. Completely different explanations and evaluations can make sense of the evidence just as well as each other, and have just as much predictive power as each other. Is Sheldon autistic? Is he irrational and conducting his science and his life following the thought patterns of a religious fundamentalist because he was raised in an environment of religious fundamentalists? Is he a selfish, petty, mean, malevolent prick full of hubris because he is insecure about his high intelligence and his worth as a human being? Is he unaware of the harmfulness of his actions, or is he willfully oblivious? Is more than one of these explanations true at the same time? Which of them are true at what time?
You can't really tell. All you can say is; "it seems reasonable to pose this hypothesis in the light of the available evidence". Whether this hypothesis is commonly adhered to by the fandom, or even the creators, is rather irrelevant. I say even the creators because the fun thing about moral issues is that they aren't noticed until someone points them out; you can write a bad person, but, if you share the monster's values, you won't notice that, and you won't intend to write them as a monster. It comes to the difference of values between you and me.
Once I've stated my case, what can be said objectively is that my interpretation of evidence and my evaluation of the caracter is or isn't valid according to the evidence I've claimed to have noticed and the value system I've claimed to have used.
I never said Penny was an inhumane monster. I'm just saying she's utterly mediocre morally as well as in every other sense. The sort of person that would have gone all the way in Milgram's experiment; she's only part of the worse two-thirds of humanity. That hardly makes her a monster. At least, not more of a monster than most people. The sort of person that does evil not because she's got more cruel compulsions than average, or because she deliberately ignores others' feelings, but because she doesn't think to think about what she's doing and what motivates it and doesn't think to think about how others feel.
Unfortunately, save for Leonard (and to a lesser extent Wolowitz, Bernadette, and Amy), this is a problem that affects the entire cast, and probably the cast of any black comedy; it's called Comedic Sociopathy. Check it out.
No, seriously, do it.
Why doesn't it matter? The article you linked doesn't it seem to explain this aside from asserting that "Books are meant to be read, not written." Barthes himself appears to have thought the point of focusing on the reader's (or, in this case, viewer's) reaction rather than the author's intent was to promote ideological goals which I do not share-- "to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law." While God is not exactly popular on LessWrong and opinions on the law vary, science and reason are surely things we care about. Why endorse a theory of criticism whose purpose is to reject them?
Genetic Fallacy; it's not because something was born for bad reasons that the thing is bad itself. That, and the statement seems more like a hyperbolic, intellectual-hipster version of "against authority". Seeing as we know that scientists treating their trade socially and irrationally rather than epistemologically and rationally, and using "reason" the way the classic-version "rationalists" (such as Descartes) did as a way of telling the world "I'm right, you're all wrong, shut up and listen", his mistake can seem more understandable.
As an amateur writer, keeping this notion in mind, that, whatever I intended to do, the reader will interpret my work from the evidence it provides, and that, if they are morally advanced enough, than they may accurately judge me (or, technically, "the narration") as well as the characters and events, in ways I couldn't have foreseen, has taught me to be very prudent in the way I present things.
Show Don't Tell goes along the same lines; instead of telling the reader that character X is a good person or that place Y is scary, you provide them evidence from which they are free to deduce that character X is good or place Y is scray. Even then, the way you select the evidence to present may well lead them to say "the narration is trying very hard to make character X look like a good person, but in fact they're not that good, because the implications of their actions are X, Y, Z".
For example, a "no Endor Holocaust" situation; if the film hadn't shown the party at Endor, the viewer might have been in his right to understand that the planet and its inhabitants were killed in the Death Star's explosion, and judged the protagonists for it.
Or, the way "300" selects the facts that it shows, tells a lot about the values and political leanings of the writers, even though they swear and insist that they're just writing entertainment.