The text says Harry does not feel respected by his parents and provides numerous examples of Harry’s arrogance, grandiosity, etc. What more do you want?
a) Narcissism may not apply to children
b) there’s other ways to interpret the text than the one you presenting.
c) you’re not presenting text that runs contrary to your theory
d) that there are other causes for a person and a parent not to respect their children than narcissism
Many human children start their lives being incredibly self-centered. One element of the process of maturation is tempering that. Harry starts off being pretty arrogant, but quickly, thanks to Quirrell, learns to lose. He genuinely cares about people, not so their reflection shines on him, but for their own sake. That’s anti-narcisistic.
Most of your examples have many anti-examples that simply show that Harry is sometimes clueless about “people stuff” and is an eleven year old boy.
Petunia isn’t a narcissist. She genuinely cares about her son. Several times you conflate the wishes of both parents or of Michael and assign them to Petunia alone.
To keep this on track with Less Wrong’s stated goals, my permeability to flour reference may not have been the most accurate reference. But you need to define “narcissist” first and then stand by that definition even if the text doesn’t support Harry and Petunia doing it.
I’m not going to re-read the whole thread to see if you’re actually coming up with justifications to support you argument after the fact. But it does feel like you’re not going to be convinced your theory is wrong, no matter what evidence is presented.
Ask yourself this: What evidence from the text would it take to change your mind?
Two, you’re also falling into the arguments/soldiers problem. You’re unwilling to concede your theory has even the tiniest weakness...even when the author of the text himself says your theory is wrong.
What you really want to do is:
1) Refine the qualities of narcissism. Your 13 qualities have a lot of overlap. There’s maybe 5 unique qualities there. Let’s shorten to 3:
Grandiose sense of self-importance.
Becomes furious if criticized
Does not recognize the feelings of others
2) Decide what proportion of behavior needs to be for a person to be consider narcissist. 70/30? 90/10?
3) Pick 5 characters, including Harry and assign them a status of Narcissist / Not narcissist.
4) Ask 3 people for each category to read HPMOR and find examples of this characters being
a)grandiose or humble
b) responds to criticism with anger or acceptance
c) empathizes or not
5) With blinding, tally up the results and compare to your ratio of N / not N behaviors for each character then see how the results compare to your predictions.
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.
The text says Harry does not feel respected by his parents and provides numerous examples of Harry’s arrogance, grandiosity, etc. What more do you want?
An acknowledgement that
a) Narcissism may not apply to children b) there’s other ways to interpret the text than the one you presenting. c) you’re not presenting text that runs contrary to your theory d) that there are other causes for a person and a parent not to respect their children than narcissism
Many human children start their lives being incredibly self-centered. One element of the process of maturation is tempering that. Harry starts off being pretty arrogant, but quickly, thanks to Quirrell, learns to lose. He genuinely cares about people, not so their reflection shines on him, but for their own sake. That’s anti-narcisistic.
Most of your examples have many anti-examples that simply show that Harry is sometimes clueless about “people stuff” and is an eleven year old boy.
Petunia isn’t a narcissist. She genuinely cares about her son. Several times you conflate the wishes of both parents or of Michael and assign them to Petunia alone.
To keep this on track with Less Wrong’s stated goals, my permeability to flour reference may not have been the most accurate reference. But you need to define “narcissist” first and then stand by that definition even if the text doesn’t support Harry and Petunia doing it.
I’m not going to re-read the whole thread to see if you’re actually coming up with justifications to support you argument after the fact. But it does feel like you’re not going to be convinced your theory is wrong, no matter what evidence is presented.
Ask yourself this: What evidence from the text would it take to change your mind?
Two, you’re also falling into the arguments/soldiers problem. You’re unwilling to concede your theory has even the tiniest weakness...even when the author of the text himself says your theory is wrong.
What you really want to do is:
1) Refine the qualities of narcissism. Your 13 qualities have a lot of overlap. There’s maybe 5 unique qualities there. Let’s shorten to 3: Grandiose sense of self-importance. Becomes furious if criticized Does not recognize the feelings of others
2) Decide what proportion of behavior needs to be for a person to be consider narcissist. 70/30? 90/10?
3) Pick 5 characters, including Harry and assign them a status of Narcissist / Not narcissist.
4) Ask 3 people for each category to read HPMOR and find examples of this characters being a)grandiose or humble b) responds to criticism with anger or acceptance c) empathizes or not
5) With blinding, tally up the results and compare to your ratio of N / not N behaviors for each character then see how the results compare to your predictions.
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.