It is a wrong question, because reality is never that simple and clear cut and no rationalist should expect it to be. And as with all wrong questions, the thing you should do to resolve the confusion is to take a step back and ask yourself what is actually happening in factual terms:
A more accurate way to describe emotion, much like personality, is in terms of multiple dimensions. One dimension is intensity of emotion. Another dimension is the type of experience it offers. Love and hate both have strong intensity and in that sense they are similar, but they are totally opposite in the way they make you feel. They are also totally opposite in terms of the effect it has on your preferences: Thinking well vs. thinking poorly of someone (ignoring the fact that there are multiple types of hate and love, and the 9999 other added complexities).
Ordinary people notice that hate and love are totally the opposite in several meaningful ways, and say as much. Then along comes a contrarian who wants to show how clever he is, and he picks up on the one way that love and hate are similar and which can make them go well together: The intensity of emotion towards someone or something. And so the contrarian states that really love and hate are the same and indifference is the opposite of both (somehow), which can cause people who aren't any good at mapping complex subjects along multiple axi in their head to throw out their useful heuristic and award status to the contrarian for his fake wisdom.
I'm a bit disappointed that Eliezer fell for the number one danger of rationalists everywhere: Too much eagerness to throw out common sense in favour of cleverness.
(Eliezer if you are reading this: You are awesome and HPMOR is awesome. Please keep writing it and don't get discouraged by this criticism)
I'm surprised how strongly you're reacting to this, given that you seem to be aware that the whole "emotions having opposites" system is really just a word game anyway.
Why is it important that you prioritise the "effect on preferences" axis and Eliezer prioritises the "intensity" axis, except insofar as it is a bit embarrassing to see an intelligent person presenting one of these as wisdom? Perhaps Eliezer simply considers apathy to be a more dangerous affliction than hatred, and is thus trying to shift his readers' priorities...
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: