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.
This is my first attempt at starting a casual conversation on LW where people don't have to worry about winning or losing points, and can just relax and have social fun together.
So, Big Bang Theory. That series got me wondering. It seems to be about "geeks", and not the basement-dwelling variety either; they're highly successful and accomplished professionals, each in their own field. One of them has been an astronaut, even. And yet, everything they ever accomplish amounts to absolutely nothing in terms of social recognition or even in terms of personal happiness. And the thing is, it doesn't even get better for their "normal" counterparts, who are just as miserable and petty.
Consider, then; how would being rationalists would affect the characters on this show? The writing of the show relies a lot on laughing at people rather than with them; would rationalist characters subvert that? And how would that rationalist outlook express itself given their personalities? (After all, notice how amazingly different from each other Yudkowsky, Hanson, and Alicorn are, just to name a few; they emphasize rather different things, and take different approaches to both truth-testing and problem-solving).
Note: this discussion does not need to be about rationalism. It can be a casual, normal discussion about the series. Relax and enjoy yourselves.
But the reason I brought up that series is that its characters are excellent examples of high intelligence hampered by immense irrationality. The apex of this is represented by Dr. Sheldon Cooper, who is, essentially, a complete fundamentalist over every single thing in his life; he applies this attitude to everything, right down to people's favorite flavor of pudding: Raj is "axiomatically wrong" to prefer tapioca, because the best pudding is chocolate. Period. This attitude makes him a far, far worse scientist than he thinks, as he refuses to even consider any criticism of his methods or results.