posted on May 28, 2021 12:17 AM by
u/IsThisSatireOrNot
132
u/IsThisSatireOrNot47 pointsat 1622161139.000000
No hate on Fortnite…
But I find it likely that in thirty years, if Eliezer Yudkowsky is
remembered at all, it won’t be for his ‘work’ on AI. It’ll be for
writing the first ‘rational’ fic to be classified as such.
Okay, full disclosure, I don’t read fanfic, let alone ‘rational’
fanfic. I’ve heard about the Harry Potter book - some praise and some
sneers at bits - but I have no idea what that entails as a ‘rational’
genre. Is it just removing any and all magical realism and replacing it
with a protagonist with bordering fantastic ‘rational skills’ like
Sherlock Holmes?
I know I could answer my own question by just reading some of the
stuff but the impression I have, as described above, is already a turn
off. I have no issue with fanfic generally and I’m sure it’s a great
community, or set of communities, for would-be writers to hone their
writing.
> I have no idea what that entails as a 'rational' genre.
Imagine a self-consciously stupid person's ideas about what it's like to be very smart. Then imagine that they think that storytelling is where you get your protagonist to monologue out all the ideas you want to convey. Then imagine that they regard the relationship between the content of that monologue and the setting of the story to be a matter of sheer irrelevance. Put this sentiment into words... and voila.
It's like if Ayn Rand had a baby with really boring bad scifi.
The stuff where the author doesn't bother to tell a story but instead spends most of their time wanking off over how amazing some imaginary tech is, and how it works.
You take an existing story/genre, then you try to inject 'realism' into it by providing rational explanations for common tropes or magic systems.
This can involve a 'rational' main character who uses their superior reasoning skills or whatever to exploit the rules of the system and in general make all the other characters look like idiots.
But there's also rationalish stuff like Worm that isn't so heavy-handed and is basically just about exploring those common tropes with a bit more depth.
"Show the dark side of a genre convention by playing it absolutely straight" is not exactly a new thing, after all. *Madame Bovary* was for romance novels what *Madoka Magica* was for magical-girl anime. Likewise, for example, if I remember correctly, there's actually a huge amount of formal academic evidence showing that *Titus Andronicus* was Shakespeare doing this to Senecan tragedy, pushing the melodrama and gore to the point of absurdity. *The Bacchae* was Euripedes taking Greek mythology as it existed in disorganized folk tales and giving it a horrifying order. (I was one course shy of a literature minor; I've heard all the takes....)
> Madame Bovary was for romance novels what Madoka Magica was for magical-girl anime.
One of those "there is nothing new under the Sun" moments realizing that "guys rag on something intended for gals" is such an old genre.
What, you don't like the idea that Worm is 'rationalish'? It has some of the standard features, plus it's obviously an inspiration for a lot of subsequent ratfic, which kind of puts it somewhere in that space by default.
Obviously it's silly to say that Worm is best characterised as rational fiction, or that it's only good insofar as it's rational fiction, or whatever you mean by 'co-opt' here.
Calling Watchmen ratfic was just me being facetious.
Worm strikes me more as "Yud likes it, therefore it must be Rational!" rather than something like HPMOR where it sets out with a philosophical chip on its shoulder.
I wouldn't say Wuyrm really "explores" superhero tropes so much as "replaces them wholesale with ones from more prestigious genres". Which put that way confronts us with the dark possibility that Watchmen is a rational fic.
Could ask what the deal with the worm is? I tried starting it once but it just seemed like any other disaffected teen anti-hero sort of story. Maybe I didn't give it enough a chance, but just didn't seem very novel.
Okay so the book does start very slow and with a very conventional premise, the idea being that as it unfolds it adds layers of complexity and innovation. In my opinion this never happens and it never stops being a very simple thing communicated at great length: it's not what you have, it's what you make of it. Primary protagonist isn't socially-successful and has a on-its-face unexciting power (controlling arthropods) but manages to obtain power and kill more traditionally-feminine and traditionally-powerful women in spectacularly gruesome ways regardless.
It and its author isn't actually into the rational-sphere, bears mentioing, they just thought it would be interesting to basically do Code Geass but with an American superhero world.
But that whole idea of "optimzing", and of course the actual reason (becoming important for that potential you definitely have, getting even with your social betters, etc) people get attracted to the rationalsphere in the first place, drew people not for the attempts at characterization and worldbuilding and action but as a kind of didactic text about how everyone else can't see your genius so you'll have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and take down anyone who stands in your way.
That the actual story is about someone deeply unhappy who remains unhappy because the root cause is never addressed is apparently easy to miss.
**Rational:** Internal verisimilitude. Consistent Internal diegetic reasons for how things work. Relatively introspective characters. Not really a genre so much as a style that can be found across genres (although the subreddit heavily prefers fantasy and sci-fi).
In cases of fanfic, this means deconstructing and reconstructing the original story. The subreddit tries to claim Worm as fitting in this label because the world building goes into complicated directions to justify and explore the implications of the superhero tropes present, but Wildbow seems to dislike the label somewhat (Yudkowsky’s shoutout brought a surge of audience which on one hand was good but on the other hand got a lot of people that miss the point of his work in favor of obsessing over vs. debates and min-maxing applications of powers).
**Rationalist:** As above, plus author mouthpieces giving long rants/discussions aimed at explaining topics like cognitive biases and decision theory.
In the case of fanfic, this often means hijacking or completely rewriting a canonical character so that they can give these rants or introducing an original character. Both of these things can attract the ire of certain fanfic communities for obvious reason.
Note in reality, a lot of stuff that gets heavily upvoted and discussed on r/rational doesn’t necessarily meet either of these definitions is just stuff the subreddit happens to like... for example Chili and The Chocolate Factory is set in a “Roald Dahl cinematic universe” and is completely nuts in world building and internal logic but was very well liked and upvoted. It ended with a >!parody!< of HPMOR’s “final exam” with a >!pun based solution!<.
> Wildbow seems to dislike the label somewhat
He actually wrote his second work (Pact) with the protagonist as someone who acted largely for emotional reasons just to avoid being pigeonholed into the rationalist genre.
I can remember comments from Wildbow about having mixed feelings on rapidly gaining an audience vs. the kind of audience he gained, but I don’t remember him ever saying Pact was ever written to avoid rationalists or the rational label.
It might just be that I was interpreting some amount of subtext to a statement about his audience after the Elizier shoutout or something like that. It's not in his blog post, so it's likely it was some reddit comment he made a few years ago, and I'm just not remembering precisely. Very possible he didnt say "rationalist" though.
I can see the appeal of the internal consistency stuff. Certainly I've had a conversations after seeing a movie with friends about plot holes, internal rule-breaking, etc. and could be fun re-structuring a story to resolve those, reading how others would resolve them, etc.
The long rants though. Nah, dawg, I'm good.
The borders around "rational" fanfic are inevitably going to be fuzzy. What strikes one reader as "holding to a high standard of diegetic consistency, very Rational" is Writer's Workshop 101 to somebody else. Part of the psychology of fanfiction is wanting to spend more time with characters one likes, maybe without the strictures that come with network TV. So, you write a scene that could happen between episodes. Then you think, "That bit in season three would have made more sense if we knew he had a habit of using the same password for everything," so you write something to fill in the missing piece. Or, "Wait, there were so many obvious counterarguments he could have raised in that scene --- but maybe there's an emotional reason he didn't? Aha..."
My guess is that, outside of fanfic explicitly written to be capital-R Rationalist, there's a considerable amount of social arbitrariness and happenstance in what gets claimed as "rational".
The most annoying part of the rants is when the author has read the exact same stuff that you have (the original HPMOR, the sequences, etc.) and doesn't have much to add so you are reading (often word-for-word) stuff you've already read. This is even worse if the author is repeating all of EY neologisms for terms that already exist in academic fields. I find the rants are a little bit more tolerable: if they are about a new topic I haven't seen before, if the character giving it has a personality beyond just author mouthpiece that justifies why they would give the rant in story, and if the author follows the conventional terminology so I can double check it on Wikipedia (i.e. the Pokemon Rationalist fanfic had stuff about Cognitive Behavior Theory). But even in with those conditions more than one or two rants per entire fanfic is too much even if the fanfic is otherwise "good".
Rants can be acceptable sometimes: *The Iron Heel* is still considered a classic even though almost all the dialogue consists of lengthy author mouthpiece rants.
I’d say no? I know nothing about the author, but Chili and the Chocolate Factory has shockingly good themes for a rational fic, to such an extent that I’m halfway convinced the author might be an alt of someone from this sub who’s trying to shift ratfic away from HPMOR. Wait, sorry, I meant “raising the sanity waterline.”
On one hand... pun-based world building, a creative fusion of everything Roald Dahl's ever written, and wacky fun original characters and ideas that blend well with the Roald Dahl universe. On the other hand... the story regularly points out the immorality and horror of the Just World Fallacy and fairy tale logic that the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Great Glass Elevator ran on. In the process of doing so it makes the (now deceased) Willy Wonka and the (now an adult) Charlie Bucket into morally and psychology unhinged monsters.
So clever ideas and the expense of mutilating the original characterizations... seems like a metaphor for rational!fic as whole. At least this story doesn't take itself too seriously.
tbh i don't trust anyone who doesn't read the ORIGINAL Willy Wonka as a "morally and psycholog\[icall\]y unhinged monster". (Although Charlie Bucket, in the OG novel, is pretty much just a hapless reader stand-in.)
I read 2, 3 chapters and it was competently written. The project was completely committed to a forced kind of 'wackiness' that made it hard for me to keep reading (but if you enjoy absurdity it could work).
It also has the virtue of being quite short (or at least average book-length). Some of these webfictions have terrible pacing and get so bloated that you have to read thousands of pages to "get to the good part."
I mean being internally consistent is basic writing advice any editor or author will stress as important. Like, the non-didactic definition is just inventing basic solid writing from first principles, and explaining it in a far less helpful and intuitive way.
It’s a sign of good writing but it’s not the highest priority for many works, probably including fanfiction. And there’s plenty of works where inconsistencies are handwaved, so you could technically say they’re still consistent but it doesn’t really feel like it.
Rational fiction also takes it a step further in a specific way. A superhero story can be internally consistent and good, but not be “rational” if everyone’s powers come from random contrived different things, or if ostensibly normal people act like superhumans. It’d appeal more to people who like “rational” fiction if there was a cohesive explanation and the regular humans acted like humans.
In my opinion rational fiction has drifted from whatever HPMOR is considerably, and now is just book club with a particular taste in fiction that isn’t well defined. And that’s a good thing.
Every time rational fiction, which while started by Rationalists as a propaganda tool to spread the sequences etc has little to do with lw Rationalism, we as sneerclubbers go both barrels into mocking them like they are fully on board LW Rationalists (making a huge butt out of ourselves), we should be a little bit more careful with that.
No hate on Fortnite…
But I find it likely that in thirty years, if Eliezer Yudkowsky is remembered at all, it won’t be for his ‘work’ on AI. It’ll be for writing the first ‘rational’ fic to be classified as such.
And maybe the creepiness.
Okay, full disclosure, I don’t read fanfic, let alone ‘rational’ fanfic. I’ve heard about the Harry Potter book - some praise and some sneers at bits - but I have no idea what that entails as a ‘rational’ genre. Is it just removing any and all magical realism and replacing it with a protagonist with bordering fantastic ‘rational skills’ like Sherlock Holmes?
I know I could answer my own question by just reading some of the stuff but the impression I have, as described above, is already a turn off. I have no issue with fanfic generally and I’m sure it’s a great community, or set of communities, for would-be writers to hone their writing.