That’s comprehensive. I agree, my argument is non-rigorous and hinges on a qualitative assessment of an entire story. Other people might not agree with my assessment because I’m relying on my (fallible, biased) pattern-matching capabilities to recall examples from the story; other people will tend to remember different examples more clearly. I also agree that it’s not clear where the line is between “narcissist” and “not narcissist”; there appears to be a wide indeterminate area where the evidence is not clear. What you propose would answer the question much more rigorously.
Evidence to get me to change my mind would include examples of the following: 1. Petunia listening to a worry/concern of Harry’s and then acting to make Harry feel better 2. Harry expecting that he will probably fail at “world optimization” 3. Harry seeking out association with Ron or similarly-average students 4. Harry being told he is average at something important to him and feeling OK about that 5. Harry accepting rules he sees as unreasonable without trying to “get creative” to get around them 6. Harry being open about his goals with others, and avoiding people who he is afraid of being honest with 7. Harry helping others with no expectation of reward
On re-reading this list, it looks like being less narcissistic would be bad for Harry as well as bad for most others in-Universe. I still think Harry is narcissistic and Petunia may be narcissistic, and that this skews the rate of narcissism among HPMOR readers. But, I’m not clear about what changes, if any, people should make based on this information. My standard advice of “get an advanced technical degree from a top school, then build something useful” is orthogonal to narcissism, and there’s no reason-driven way to derive “should” judgments from scientific facts.
That’s comprehensive. I agree, my argument is non-rigorous and hinges on a qualitative assessment of an entire story. Other people might not agree with my assessment because I’m relying on my (fallible, biased) pattern-matching capabilities to recall examples from the story; other people will tend to remember different examples more clearly. I also agree that it’s not clear where the line is between “narcissist” and “not narcissist”; there appears to be a wide indeterminate area where the evidence is not clear. What you propose would answer the question much more rigorously.
Evidence to get me to change my mind would include examples of the following: 1. Petunia listening to a worry/concern of Harry’s and then acting to make Harry feel better 2. Harry expecting that he will probably fail at “world optimization” 3. Harry seeking out association with Ron or similarly-average students 4. Harry being told he is average at something important to him and feeling OK about that 5. Harry accepting rules he sees as unreasonable without trying to “get creative” to get around them 6. Harry being open about his goals with others, and avoiding people who he is afraid of being honest with 7. Harry helping others with no expectation of reward
On re-reading this list, it looks like being less narcissistic would be bad for Harry as well as bad for most others in-Universe. I still think Harry is narcissistic and Petunia may be narcissistic, and that this skews the rate of narcissism among HPMOR readers. But, I’m not clear about what changes, if any, people should make based on this information. My standard advice of “get an advanced technical degree from a top school, then build something useful” is orthogonal to narcissism, and there’s no reason-driven way to derive “should” judgments from scientific facts.