I found Unsong to be really quite excellent rational fiction with very interesting and unique worldbuilding, right up until I got bored with it and later rather ill-disposed towards its author. That said, the scene where they go over the “Hell Tape” remains one of the most haunting descriptions of Hell that I’ve ever seen, so there’s definitely something of value in there. No idea if it still holds up, but the fact I don’t care enough to check might inform your position.

But most people writing in rationalist spheres aren’t poets or authors. Many are explicitly ill-disposed to the “humanities”, which is not a great perspective to have in general and a terrible perspective to have when trying to create art. Quite a few are holdovers from Gamergate or similar alt-right spheres, where seriously analyzing the media you engage with to figure out what did and did not work and why is seen as a cardinal sin - this is also not great if you’re trying to create good art. And, I feel like this needs to be said, a lot of them are deeply incurous, reactionary assholes, which… you get the idea. You’ll struggle to tell a good story from those perspectives, because telling a good story is hard in a lot of subtle and non-obvious ways. If you’re not curious about the humanities or aren’t willing to dig into why things work or don’t, you’ll never be any good at writing. Call it “Doug Walker Syndrome”.

(By the by, that video is one of the funniest and most vicious takedowns I’ve ever seen, which is only made worse by the fact that Dan’s tone throughout is best summarized by “your dad who isn’t angry, just disappointed”.)

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Are these the superior, “rational” works? This isn’t the pinnacle of authorship, these are escapist fantasies for “young adults”, typically nerdy, male and immature.

As a mod of /r/rational and a writer of a fair number of the rational fiction canon, you’d have to be a fucking dumbass to say that it’s superior or the pinnacle of writing. I mean, there are dumbasses out there, for sure, and I’m sure some of them are saying stuff like that, but “rational fiction” is mostly a matter of where the narrative focus is, and to a lesser extent, aesthetic choices.

A lot of it is just “thinking porn”, and like a lot of porn, there’s a tendency to heighten/fake things to drive at the intended reaction. It’s a second-hand smart feeling, or like … there’s a podcast, 99% Invisible, which sometimes gives me that feeling like I’m getting smarter or second-hand thinking about complicated things, when really I’m just riding the high of someone else presenting those things in the most compelling way without doing any actual thought of my own. A lot of that is what rational fiction is trying to get at, in terms of feelings.

And yeah, a good chunk of it isn’t good, but a lot of that is Sturgeon’s Law rather than a rationalist tendency to build things up from base principles instead of studying what works and what doesn’t, or because of the base aesthetic, which I can understand not caring for but doesn’t make anything automatically ‘bad’, unless you’re the kind of person to rag on aesthetics you don’t like. A lot of it is webfiction because fiction you have to pay for is less accessible, and weekly or monthly releases are going to generate more discussion and community than stuff that comes out once and is then done. A lot of it is fanfic because that’s easier for amateur writers to write, and some of them like sneering at established properties or currently-hot movies (and more defensibly, because there are benefits to working within a structure someone else has made, where you’re not building up your own rules to get that munchkin/exploitation/thinkingness feeling you’re driving at).

So, as the author of YA fantasy novels which get compared to or labeled as rational fiction semi-frequently- though I reject the label- I have OPINIONS.

Namely, that rational fic is a terrible name for an often reasonably entertaining subgenre/outsider literary tradition. (Ignoring some of the more horrific works.) It’s really not some whole new technical approach to fiction- as others have noted, Golden Age Sci-fi accomplished the declared goals of rational fiction (logical worldbuilding, rational characters who make rational decision making) as well, or better, than rational fic does. This isn’t shade cast on rational fic, but is instead just pointing out that the declared definition is simply less useful than examining it as a literary subgenre with accepted conventions and an ongoing internal discourse.

This, sadly, is an opinion I’ve seen rejected or perceived as an attack by the rational fic community, largely because, as others have mentioned, they often simply lack respect for literary analysis and discourse, as well as the humanities in general. It’s very much not intended as an attack, but…

(There are plenty of people who read rational fic who aren’t caught up in that whole… thing, of course, and plenty who read extensively outside rational fic as well. I don’t want to make blanket statements about that fandom.)

I personally reject the label of rational fiction for my books for quite a few reasons- I believe that irrational action is often necessary for characters, for one. I also write a lot of characters dealing with disability and mental illness, and many of rational fic’s complaints about irrational characters often ignore or even demonize mental illness. Furthermore, I have deep philosophical/literary divides with rational fic writers on a number of levels when it comes to worldbuilding- I reject many of their ideas about what makes worldbuilding “logical”, and have my own well-developed ideas about the topic. (Including, but far from limited to, the fact that what we have learned empirically from our own world is often utterly illogical and bizarre. There is no single system of logic that can adequately cover nature’s variations. Hell, a dozen different systems of logic wouldn’t be enough.)

Somewhat unfortunately, as others have mentioned, there is also a LOT of sexism and other grossnes in the underbelly of rational fic. Not to say the same doesn’t exist the hyperspecific subgenre I write in (Progression Fantasy, AKA books for people who love training montages in movies to an unhealthy degree), there’s plenty there, but there’s… more blowback against it in the Progression Fantasy community, in my experience.

Also, rational fic just doesn’t sell as well as a subgenre. There is a passionate, but ultimately limited market there. Progression Fantasy sells FAR better. And when I’m not writing that, I’ve got weird passion project novels about plagues to write. (Don’t get me wrong, though, I love writing my cheesy wizard school Progression Fantasy novels.) Got bills to pay!

This is not the first time this question has been asked, /r/rational has grappled with this a few times. I’ll paraphrase the basic response.

First of all its worth outlining the difference between rational and rationalist fiction. Hpmor is rationalist, meaning it explicitly discusses themes and ideas from the rational community. There’s only a tiny handful or rationalist works, because the rational community is really very small.

Rational fiction means works that have intelligent characters, with clear goals that attempt to solve problems, often in consistent, realistic worlds. The plot flows naturally, instead of being forced along by characters acting stupid or deus ex machina (this is a very cludgy description but hopefully it’s understandable enough). The focus on problem solving, on world building, precludes a lot of great literature.

Arguably, something like The Brothers Karamazov is rational. The characters are well defined and act as you would expect and the world is realistic and consistent. There’s even a central problem, a murder, to try and solve. But the characters act as humans, which is to say they are irrational. The world is consistent because it’s just our world, in 19th century Russia. ‘Solving’ the murder is basically irrelevant. Works of this nature just don’t lend themselves to discussion of how “rational” they are. To be even more explicit, consider rational Romeo and Juliet. The two lovers would look analytically at their relationship, realize that theirs is a mere infatuation and go home. The end.

So this naturally pushes discussions of rational fiction towards ‘genre’ fiction, namely sci-fi and fantasy. These often have clear problems to solve - an evil to defeat, a mystery to solve - worlds to build and consider, and many examples of irrationality driving things forward.

However, that does not mean that discussion should revolve around web serials and fanfics. Nonetheless, the nature of the subreddit has pushed it towards that equilibrium. Go into a recommendation thread and people will be able to give you plenty of published works that are rational, but they’re ill suited to discussion. They come out once and everyone will have to read the entire thing and then have a single thread about it. If you don’t do an explicit book club format, this is very limiting. Web serials and fanfics, on the other hand, are released chapter by chapter, giving regular points for discussion and prediction, and they’re easy for anyone to jump into if they wanted to join in. Thus, the subreddit has defaulted to those formats, even if the average quality is poor. What is more, the two founding works for the subreddit were Hpmor, a fanfic, and Worm, a serial, which probably set the tone early on.

So yes, in many respects r/rational could be r/webserial instead, and even those works that do fit the rational guidelines are not necessarily good literature, but this is much more a reflection of the nature of the subreddit than rational fiction being rare of mostly trashy.

I’ve read HPmor, and even sort of liked it, but I think it falls really short of good literature because it focuses on “big ideas”, rather than the human experience, which is what I think novels do best.

It also misses the subversive quality that really good fanfics have. The best ones twist the narrative in a way to comment on larger social issues, giving us things like wicked, the wind done gone (admittedly I’ve not read that one) or the flashman papers.

While I admit I have never really read much* of supposedly rational fiction, the whole concept as described by Yud’s writing tips kind of strikes me as… overreaction? It seems like people get hung up over some works of fiction having plot holes, inconsistent character behavior or simply things not going the way they’d like and then go wildly overboard in trying to fix it prescriptively instead of just focusing on what makes a good story.

I don’t think Illiad would be better as a story had Achilles written down an expected value table for his possible actions instead of just throwing a legendary temper tantrum. I also don’t believe Romance of the Three Kingdoms would be much improved by Liu Bei leveraging his relative advantage in making straw shoes into creating a straw shoe empire instead of his more literal imperial dreams. That kind of stuff.

*and by “much” I mean “any”

“Rational” fiction is fiction about interesting ideas by bad (or even mediocre) writers. Ted Chiang and Isaac Asimov are kind of rationalist, but they are actually good at writing so it’s scifi. Yudkowski can’t manage his own characters, plot, or pacing, so people call it rationalist.

One of the things you need to understand about the people we sneer at is that they are not widely read. Yudkowsky once discussed how he could never write female characters as profoundly as……the author of a series of fantasy S&M porn novels. I am not making this up.

What I’m saying is that I use r/rational for fanfic recs. It’s the kind of attitude that’s best suited to exploring and stretching someone else’s worldbuilding.

I haven’t read much about the rationalists takes on the subject, but I have the impression that they’re built upon sheer ignorance of the existing literature. There are a lot of books that are “rational”, specially in sci-fi, they probably simply haven’t bothered to read them.

ive been trying to pin down my precise problem with your post, and I think it’s just that r/rational isn’t really that sneerworthy?

like if you want to do the whole ‘oh, they claim their fiction is superior and rational, but its actually kinda dumb and bad’ thing, then, well, HPMOR is right there.

But I don’t really get the feeling that most ‘rational’ authors are actually trying to supplant regular genre fiction by being more rational or whatever. Sure, it’s mostly crap, but most fiction is crap in general. Most of your critiques aren’t ‘rational’ specific.

Quite a bit of golden age sci fi has strong rationalist-style features. Authors like Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Poul Anderson, for example, all had tendencies in that direction. It’s part of why scifi has had such a problem being taken seriously as literature - because a lot of the best work in the field simply isn’t that good, as literature, even though it may have other redeeming features.

I suppose I’m saying there’s a lot of at least quasi-rationalist fiction, it just doesn’t come from the current crop of self-appointed rationalists.

Hard to read even those “tips” without being struck by Yud’s reductive and vaguely putrid understanding of what “intelligence” even is.

Here’s a hot tip for good drama: characters (like people) act based on what seems rational to them at the moment of action - which may not always be “rational” at all. Characters always acting in accordance with pure, “objective” principles makes for dull, childish fiction - not only because it neuters meaningful conflict, but because it isn’t truthful to how humans act or what humans are.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love philosophical fiction. I’m more than happy for characters to go off (in the context of an actual story) talking about Big Ideas, and for their motives to be informed by abstract principles. But fiction isn’t math, and neither are we; that’s the fundamental problem and joy of both fiction and ourselves. If your understanding of human psychology and behavior is as stilted, smug and detached from reality as Yudkowsky’s, you are probably not going to write good fiction.

I dont really have an answer or opinion to the question - mostly bc HPMOR sounds like a miserable time to read and id rather mock the cryptofash than read their thoughts over a few thousand paragraphs - but im curious about everyone ITT describing various types of writing (fanfiction, web serials, YA novels, and i suppose also “rational” fiction) as trash, badly written, or where sentiments like ‘i enjoy it even though i know it’s bad’ come from

As an example fanfiction, as a genre, accomplishes what it tries to do far better than any other genre or writing form. Obviously this is kind of self evident, bc that is what separates it from those other genres, but also doesnt that make it kind of comparing apples to oranges?

Like yeah, obviously if you value technical writing skill and the kind of narrative flow that is drilled into people in higher education, you will get your fix more strongly from “high literature” than from “naruto kills the nazis while making out with neo from the matrix”, but similarly if you’re looking for a story featuring characters you’re emotionally invested in going on a date bc you’re gay and the source material doesnt go beyond subtext, you’re probably better off going for “kiana goes on a seaside date with HoT (pure sugary fluff)” than for shakespeare’s Hamlet, and i feel like it doesnt make much sense to say one is just generally better than the other

I may be reading way too much into this and it’s kind of a tangent but as a fanfiction stan, it pains me to see it dismissed as inferior by default when really it’s just something different entirely

IMO, authorship does not translate well in to the rationalist polymath mindset. Fiction can be done well by people who have a career outside of writing, but it takes dedicated and consistent effort.

I’m actually going to plug Malazan Book of the Fallen here as an example. The prose is stylized but gorgeous (once you get past the first book), the worldbuilding is truly impressive, the author is a archeologist, so his anthropology is sensible, and it feels familiar in some ways without being too cliched. It also, IMO, does the thing that Yudkowsky tries to do with Harry, but better: expressing important ideas through in-charecter thoughts. (The politics are also not abhorrent, which helps a lot). Finally, it actually connects very deeply to a lot of the better parts of rationalism, like the conviction that unwanted death is truly bad an societies’ acceptance thereof is indicative of our moral failing. While Erikson isn’t nearly as blunt about it as Yudkowsky is, it’s this series that really convinced me intuitively that death is terminally bad because of the potential for life it denies. Because of this, it’s actually made me more sympathetic to the rationalist project of fiction, although not to Yudkowsky as an author.

Probably useless anecdotal data point: I post my work on r/rational from time to time and it enjoys modest popularity. It’s an original world and the hero gets his ass handed to him a great deal. Hell, I’m not even rationalist, and I make no bones about that. pyrebound.wordpress.com , and nobody claims that it’s not rational or that it doesn’t belong.

The broader proliferation of junk is Sturgeon’s Law at work; it’s not like the average minor work of spec-fic isn’t also terrible and derivative. The overload of fanfic specifically is (I think) a conscious choice by people who are overwhelmingly concerned with exploring concepts. The advantage of fanfic, from this perspective, is that little time needs to be spent on exposition and the reader hits the ground running. I don’t read it because I like original worlds and don’t follow the pop culture works they’re usually based on, but they have a goal in mind and they pick the shortest path there. In that sense, it’s a “rational” choice.

(before anyone asks, I come on here from time to time to get some balancing perspective, even if I think it’s often less than fair and I disapprove of sneering on principle; I don’t believe in HBD, Yud seems to be running some kind of cult, HPMOR is unreadably bad, and Moldbug is a really tiresome troll)

I would highly recommend any of Ted Chiang’s short stories, but particularly Story of Your Life

Dunno about Yud, but SA writes fiction from time to time, and it is one veil of plausible denialibility away from actual fanfiction. LIke “here is this fanfic of American Gods super cool story with ancient gods in modern setting fighting with clever plans to go back to relevance, who could have fought about that. Oh, here a tale of how you can”travel to” a different universe by re-programming your understanding of perceptual evidence, totally new (also: I am not going to cite de Camp as inspiration, but Yudkowsky. Because if it was not done here, it does not exist). Oh, and a shitload of stories that are just the narratization of a logical puzzles, without any of the talent that Asimov or Anderson displayed in choosing actually interesting puzzles, making them relevent in the story in a natural way, or make the conclusion logically necessitated.

One thing that really caught my eye, while reading his fiction, was not only the thinly disguised plagiarism. Was that, when reading his non-fiction writings, seems he did not understand anything about the things he plagiarized. Like, Gaiman is merely entertainment and it’s difficult to get something serious from it, but I would not expect an avid reader of him to fall for “intellectual charity at any cost!” or treating culture as such a meaningful category as SA does. Similarly, The Incomplete Enchanter is mainly a divertissement, but if you start thinking about it a bit seriously, you get an healthy dose of Criticism (in the philosophical sense) out of it, which rats seem to completely ignore in favor of whatever naive epistemology they are re-inventing and flavoring with Bayes. It really seems that they are at the level of bias in which they are simply unable to learn anything but the Sequences, even when it is embedded in a nice novel they seem to like

There’s plenty of rational fiction out there, that doesn’t hit r/rational due to the relatively recent emergence of the genre. A lot of Discworld and the Long Earth series would qualify, for example (especially the Night Watch ones).

Other people have mentioned the difference between rationalist and rational fiction, so I’ll just echo the presence of that.

The other reason that you see those three types of work in the sub is because those are the ones that are most likely to be authored by the kind of person who’d post on Reddit at all. I think you were looking at it the opposite way, causally.

Sturgeon’s law will apply to any community like this, of course, which is where you get crap like Time Braid, but you also get Ra and Worth the Candle. It’s something that can only really be sifted through time and repeated analysis.

And the crappier stuff that shows up but isn’t made by authors in the community is usually just not a right fit, but is shown off by people who think they get the point of the genre but misapply it (in a similar way to say, Sherlock as rational fic). I find that personally frustrating, but it’s nothing uncommon.

i spend a lot of time in the ratfic community. the honest answer is that writing is hard and the community is young and small, so there’s just not going to be enough of it

he want to educate young minds aka “grooming them” not in a sexual way but in a manipulative way to his way of thinking so they can financially support him and his AI initiative. that explain the jejeune focus on all that shitwriting.

It’s not that normal fiction is flawed and rationalists can do better - rational fic is more like a particular kind of genre, where either the protagonist is ‘rational’ or the world is.

by the way, the best rational fic is Cordyceps, an anti-rational fic, by a LWer. It’s a trip.

its not enough to refute his stupid screeds and ramblings, you need to know what fanfiction he likes? lol

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