The funny thing is, I read HPMOR and got to this part in Chapter Six:
"Mr. Potter..." [McGonagall]'s voice trailed off. Then she sighed, and knelt down beside him. "Mr. Potter," she said, gently now, "it's not your responsibility to take care of the students at Hogwarts. It's mine. I won't let anything bad happen to you or anyone else. Hogwarts is the safest place for magical children in all the wizarding world, and Madam Pomfrey has a full healer's office. You won't need a healer's kit at all, let alone a five-Galleon one."
"But I do!" Harry burst out. "Nowhere is perfectly safe! And what if my parents have a heart attack or get in an accident when I go home for Christmas--Madam Pomfrey won't be there, I'll need a healer's kit of my own--"
"What in Merlin's name..." Professor McGonagall said. She stood up, and looked down at Harry in an expression torn between annoyance and concern. "There's no need to think about such terrible things, Mr. Potter!"
Harry's expression twisted up into bitterness, hearing that. "Yes there is! If you don't think, you don't just get hurt yourself, you end up hurting other people!"
Professor McGonagall opened her mouth, then closed it. The witch rubbed the bridge of her nose, looking thoughtful. "Mr. Potter... if I were to offer to listen to you for a while... is there anything you'd like to talk to me about?"
"About what?"
"About why you're convinced you must always be on your guard against terrible things happening to you." Harry stared at her in puzzlement. That was a self-evident axiom. "Well..." Harry said slowly. He tried to organise his thoughts. How could he explain himself to a Professor-witch, when she didn't even know the basics?
And then he and the story spend a great deal of time defending Harry's point of view as completely rational. They explicitly confront and dismiss the possibility that he was abused as a child, and have Harry slowly wear McGonagall down and prove himself a better judge of reality than her.
Which is, frankly, nonsense. God knows my area of specialty is the psychological damage that happens when you raise baby geniuses in isolation; and I can absolutely say that the ideal response is not for that child to become a wholly self-sufficient automaton who has worked out the ideal response to every disaster. That doesn't get you a functional adult; that gets you a rigid, isolated, paranoid person whose ability to cope with the world depends heavily on the world's adherence to a model they can comprehend and predict. (Which... kind of sounds like Yudkowsky of late)
The lack of emotional realism is because hyperrealism tends to completely ignore the bonds of familiarity, trust, affection, and love between people; it dismisses emotion as irrational and doesn't understand that we need minds other than ours; we need to be more than the sole guiding intelligence of the universe. We're dependent on being heard and seen by other people, and having them take action because they view our internal lives as meaningful and important. Harry of MPMOR reads like "someone who spent his first eleven years locked in a cellar" because he's responding to the emotional trauma of having parents who didn't validate his emotions and provide him with coping mechanisms to handle his fears and anxieties. His damage is, in fact, the result of the kind of hyper-realistic worldview he espouses. The problem isn't fundamentally that he's "too smart", smarter than his parents; it's that he was taught that to be empathized with, he had to be absolutely logically correct, and to have any effect on the world, he had to be more competent than the adults around him.
As soon as I realized that Yudkowsky has no idea about any of this, I stopped reading.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-10-02 06:47 am (UTC)And then he and the story spend a great deal of time defending Harry's point of view as completely rational. They explicitly confront and dismiss the possibility that he was abused as a child, and have Harry slowly wear McGonagall down and prove himself a better judge of reality than her.
Which is, frankly, nonsense. God knows my area of specialty is the psychological damage that happens when you raise baby geniuses in isolation; and I can absolutely say that the ideal response is not for that child to become a wholly self-sufficient automaton who has worked out the ideal response to every disaster. That doesn't get you a functional adult; that gets you a rigid, isolated, paranoid person whose ability to cope with the world depends heavily on the world's adherence to a model they can comprehend and predict. (Which... kind of sounds like Yudkowsky of late)
The lack of emotional realism is because hyperrealism tends to completely ignore the bonds of familiarity, trust, affection, and love between people; it dismisses emotion as irrational and doesn't understand that we need minds other than ours; we need to be more than the sole guiding intelligence of the universe. We're dependent on being heard and seen by other people, and having them take action because they view our internal lives as meaningful and important. Harry of MPMOR reads like "someone who spent his first eleven years locked in a cellar" because he's responding to the emotional trauma of having parents who didn't validate his emotions and provide him with coping mechanisms to handle his fears and anxieties. His damage is, in fact, the result of the kind of hyper-realistic worldview he espouses. The problem isn't fundamentally that he's "too smart", smarter than his parents; it's that he was taught that to be empathized with, he had to be absolutely logically correct, and to have any effect on the world, he had to be more competent than the adults around him.
As soon as I realized that Yudkowsky has no idea about any of this, I stopped reading.