he [showed up in the comments](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/you-needed-opponents-with-gravitas-worm-the-culture.512650/post-33544933) of a [Worm/Culture crossover fic](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/you-needed-opponents-with-gravitas-worm-the-culture.512650/) and the author and the other readers proceeded to shit-talk his bad ideas
Worm fanfic that focuses on nuanced character interaction is genuinely out of this world. It's such fertile ground, even ten years later, and I am constantly flabbergasted by how good some of the community's writers are.
I can link snippets and stories that I think rock when I get home, if you have any interest
the linked version petered out, the author started a reboot but that's been idle for a long while too, sadly. still, both versions are pretty good and worth reading.
She's sympathetic, but that doesn't mean she's *right*. Taylor consistently chooses to escalate conflicts that she doesn't need to, because she views herself as an irreproachable moral authority. She boils a lot of complex issues down into Taylor (good) vs Everybody Else (bad). Even if that ends up working out for the world in general (if you squint), it ruins her life and the lives of many other people around her.
See, I think Taylor was a deeply compelling character and I think the writing does a really good job of showing how she got where she was and showing the case she makes for herself. I definitely agreed with a lot of the reasoning behind decisions that ended up being disastrous, and would have understood an argument for antihero status right up until the ending, but I think that speaks more to effective storytelling and my own relationship to some of those themes than to her behavior actually being defensible objectively.
Tbf, it's not like r/rational goes that deep into the rationalism side of it anymore. Pretty much from the moment things like Worm and Worth the Candle started getting popular there, the focus shifted a fair bit
... Huh. I mean, I guess I can see some elements rationalists might like, but, as someone pointed out, it's a story about brain parasites causing conflict... And about people's judgements being affected by trauma. And from the perspective of someone desperate to be *needed*.
"Rational" = smart, and her mistakes are in-character rather than simply an excuse to move the plot forward.
TBH, this perceived equivalence explains a lot.
I think you'll find that rationalist wormfic is actually quite enjoyable https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/rhydebles-amazing-collection-of-snips-snaps-and-oneshots.610723/page-2#post-68184493
Oh muse, sing to me the story of the Worm fandom - those poets forever torn between the mad girl-warrior who deserved faint praise, and the heroes who also somehow seemed to suck just as much ass.
The heroes sucking as much was very much the point, though. I enjoyed worm and whatever the sequel was called. When I hung out in the parahumans sub, it seemed like there were a lot of different reasons people liked the series.
Oh, I agree, there are a lot of non-sneer-related reasons to enjoy the web novels, and Wildbow obviously made a very deliberate choice to write about corrupt and failing institutions.
It just makes it awkward when a main character's moral ambiguity is signposted on one hand by the naked rationalizations of a teenager and one the other hand by a laundry list of conveniently extenuating circumstances. Reading comprehension test (hard mode).
Something that just occurred to me about Worm is of all of Taylor's controversial decisions, probably the only one that unambiguously wound up doing more good than harm was at the end with what she did to kill Scion, which in some ways makes the moral takeaway "acting like you're the most important person in the world is a bad idea right up until the point where by pure dumb luck you actually are, at which point go for it"
This is blowing my mine because when I read it, my takeaway was that the painful truth is that without Taylor, Scion wins. Contessa did horrible things in the name of beating him but floundered and when push came to shove, only Taylor was successful.
Seemed pretty clear cut to me that it wasn’t luck.
>Worm is a story of brain parasites making their hosts make bad decisions. So obviously it's rationalfic.
Everything about the 'rational fiction' community seems like it was designed to teach a lesson about why media literacy is important even if your professional career has nothing to do with reading.
it feels designed to *insulate* you from learning lessons about why media literacy is important even if your professional career has nothing to do with reading
At the time the story was being released, it was a whole thing in rationalist circles for people to uncritically support Taylor Hebert's decisions as "rational", even when the text slaps you in the face with how wrong they were. Her perspective on things would be taken at face value and used as further evidence to support this.
A big reason for this, I think, was due to some of Worm's readership at the time coming from a rec in HPMoR, a story where the mentally insane self-insert protagonist *is* portrayed as being right almost all of the time.
Hey now, that's unfair - the "heroes" in Worm were arguably worse than Taylor's crew. She's a supervillain, but that's a neutral description rather than a criticism.
I think a fair amount of this comes from the fact that Taylor did at least seem to want to make things better, which in both a genre and a world where many villainous characters are motivated by "because it made me look good" or "because I wanted to" or even just "because I'm EEEEEEeeeevil" puts her into a comparatively heroic context. In the circumstances she finds herself in her actions are often defensible. But she is also very quick to dismiss any responsibility (or at least fails to consider her responsibility) for getting into those circumstances in the first place. While there are good reasons to do the things she does, there are almost always better reasons to do something else.
Or in less charitable terms, she's better than Jack Slash, but that should not be the standard.
I have a real hard time believing Yudkowsky is concerned about
AI-alignment the way he says he is. Like he spends a lot of time of
things that are definitely not alignment. I can’t remember exactly where
I heard it but there was an interview from years ago where he said
something like “if you’re concerned about AI-alignment the best thing
you can do is give me money.” When I first heard it, I was like “well,
yeah, he does run an institute to try to fix this and it maybe would
scale better than other uses…” Now I’m like… WTF is Yudkowsky doing with
the funding he gets?
Oh my God yud is a Hebert apologist it all makes fucking sense. Somebody has to stop him from writing any worm fics
Man, now I feel weird about liking Worm
did his miss the part where she was a supervillain? Like, card-carrying?
[deleted]
I have a real hard time believing Yudkowsky is concerned about AI-alignment the way he says he is. Like he spends a lot of time of things that are definitely not alignment. I can’t remember exactly where I heard it but there was an interview from years ago where he said something like “if you’re concerned about AI-alignment the best thing you can do is give me money.” When I first heard it, I was like “well, yeah, he does run an institute to try to fix this and it maybe would scale better than other uses…” Now I’m like… WTF is Yudkowsky doing with the funding he gets?