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Rationalist fiction discussion

Watney is pretty much the antithesis of the rational main character archetype in other works, for that matter. Sure, he's smart, but it's less that he's got a plan or is "proactive" and more that he's making up the answers as he goes from one crisis to the next, as is NASA. One of the pivotal decisions of the book, sending the Rich Purnell Maneuver to the crew and their deciding to follow it, is in a lot of ways completely irrational viewed from the sort of save-the-most-people risk-the-least-harm perspective that rationalist takes on ethics typically endorse, as is much of what the crew does to make intercept on the launch of the modified MAV. Watney's taking huge risks but he's risking only himself and if they don't pay off he's dead either way.
 
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While HPMoR certainly did a lot to bring a genre I enjoy in to prominence, I feel like it left a lot of bad legacy code in its wake.

I feel like every rational protagonist these days Is a pseudo robot with barely any emotional range, is obsessed with the idea of munchkining the rules of the setting to acquire godhood, holds transhumanist ideal or has the goal of creating a utopian society utterly free of want or scarcity. All while spouting off scientific or psychological trivia that's only peripherally related to the situation at hand to show off how big brained they are.

It's becoming pretty easy to tell which characters are Yudkowsky clones and which ones are doing their own thing. It's also the determining factor of whether or not I'll drop a story.
 
Night said:
Watney is pretty much the antithesis of the rational main character archetype in other works, for that matter. Sure, he's smart, but it's less that he's got a plan or is "proactive" and more that he's making up the answers as he goes from one crisis to the next, as is NASA.
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He begins with a plan (calculate how many calories he needs to survive until he's rescued, grow enough potatoes to do so) -- crises force him to constantly revise and abandon his plans of course. This doesn't seem to me that different to what happens to other 'rational' protagonists in other works from time to time. e.g. the characters in Worth the Candle also often seemed to move from one crisis to the nextfor a very long time (though they eventually do also start making their own long-term plans).

Mind you, my own suggested description of 'rational fiction' had its first criterion be the author showing respect to the value of 'intelligence, reason, forethought, and preparation', so that's why I think the work fits it.
 
eaglejarl said:
So, you're saying that it's emotionally engaging? ;P
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I think it could be, but not for me personally. I had a disconnect and ended up a little tired while unsatisfied (as some others said the opposite) afterwards.

eaglejarl said:
That's cool. It's something we added to canon Naruto because it was the kind of story we wanted to write. If it doesn't match your preferences, that's fine.
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I can see the appeal of making the world more serious and harsh, it's talked about a lot in internet circles. Murder plants and the general lack of colour just broke me though. You guys are enjoying yourselves though and that's cool.

eaglejarl said:
The players asserted that this meant he could reproduce dice rolls; we weren't confident that was the case but we decided to give benefit of the doubt and go with it. This means he always wins at craps because he can always roll the point.
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I think the best he could do is high probabilty unless his dice are loaded. But if there was the type of argument I think there was I can see how that came about, and I might be wrong. I jumped through the early story posts and little of the discussion.
 
Aris Katsaris said:
He begins with a plan (calculate how many calories he needs to survive until he's rescued, grow enough potatoes to do so) -- crises force him to constantly revise and abandon his plans of course. This doesn't seem to me that different to what happens to other 'rational' protagonists in other works from time to time. e.g. the characters in Worth the Candle also often seemed to move from one crisis to the nextfor a very long time (though they eventually do also start making their own long-term plans).

Mind you, my own suggested description of 'rational fiction' had its first criterion be the author showing respect to the value of 'intelligence, reason, forethought, and preparation', so that's why I think the work fits it.
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It's functionally Robinson Crusoe with a scientific gloss. The fantasy of surviving through cleverness and good fortune while marooned in an isolated and hostile place. I don't think the character responding resourcefully in a "man versus nature" type story makes it a rationalist fic unless all such stories are to be retroactively included.
 
mesonoxian said:
I don't think the character responding resourcefully in a "man versus nature" type story makes it a rationalist fic unless all such stories are to be retroactively included.
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I'd have to consider them individually. In my mind a significant part revolves around what values the author is promoting -- such a survival story may be focusing on intelligence/forethought/preparation as The Martian did -- but it may instead be a character study about the psychological toll of loneliness, or it may perhaps be promoting the value of courage and faith, or be doing a number of different things.

If the theme of The Martian for example had been that Watney survived due to his faith, rather than due to his problem-solving... I'd probably have not considered it ratfic.
 
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Aris Katsaris said:
I'd have to consider them individually. In my mind a significant part revolves around what values the author is promoting -- such a survival story may be focusing on intelligence/forethought/preparation as The Martian did -- but it may instead be a character study about the psychological toll of loneliness, or it may perhaps be promoting the value of courage and faith, or be doing a number of different things.

If the theme of The Martian for example had been that Wheaton survived due to his faith, rather than due to his problem-solving... I'd probably have not considered it ratfic.
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But again, this is a very old literary form. Nothing he does is hung up on the rationalist hobby horses. He doesn't engage in statistical analysis, or decision theory, or any other chunk of philosophy. Nothing he does is based in a fundamentally skeptical or detached analysis. He just makes a plan that exploits the limited resources he has access to, which describes huge numbers of characters who authors predate rationalism and thus can't be especially influenced by it.

Cleverness and resilience aren't the same as rationalism.
 
mesonoxian said:
Cleverness and resilience aren't the same as rationalism.
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This goes back to the distinction between "rationalist fic" which is about rationalism, and (the probably badly named) "rational fic" which is a much fuzzier superset which is NOT about rationalism.
I'm NOT making a claim The Martian is the former, I'm saying I'd consider it an example of the latter, because of its focus on intelligent problem-solving.
 
Adloquium said:
That's kind of what trips my skepticism, though. It doesn't actually matter how the character exploits/leverages the "rules" to gain an advantage that may or may not be unfair. The part that I take objection with is that there are rules, baked inherently into the setting (and not, say, societal norms that came about as a result of humans being humans and organizing into groups), that can be taken advantage of "cleverly".
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I mean...every setting has rules. In a hard magic fantasy setting the rules of magic are the laws of physics. In the real world, the rules of nature are the laws of physics. Taking advantage of those laws is what technology is.

Adloquium said:
Like, the description for the definition of Rationalist Fiction includes a line about how the setting has "known and consistent rules", that characters apply munchkinry towards. Which seems to boil down to the characters having access to the Player's Handbook/Dungeon Master's Guide/assorted splatbooks of the world they're in, whether directly (eg a mysterious "system information" voice in the more game-ified settings), or simply through Thinking Very Hard (whether by themselves or by background scholars). And so there are known and consistent rules of the setting that the characters know (as opposed to just the author in their worldbuilding), as concrete as a THAC0 table in terms of how strictly the setting adheres to it.
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This is (probably unintentionally) a strawman of the rational fiction position. [Sidebar: 'Rationalist' was a horrifically bad choice of branding and 'rational fiction' wasn't a great choice either.] Nikola Tesla didn't need to know every detail of real-world physics in order to create the induction motor, and Tavi didn't need to know every detail of the Codex Alera magic system in order to scale up a telescope spell into a light-gathering-death-ray spell.

FortePlus said:
I think the best he could do is high probabilty unless his dice are loaded.
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You may well be right. We were dubious about it but we weren't certain that it was impossible. We had to make a choice and, since both options were plausible, we decided to go with what we considered the most interesting option.

FortePlus said:
But if there was the type of argument I think there was I can see how that came about, and I might be wrong.
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I think you're implying that there was a lot of salt being thrown around? Nah, the players were very nice about it.
 
Aris Katsaris said:
I'd have to consider them individually. In my mind a significant part revolves around what values the author is promoting -- such a survival story may be focusing on intelligence/forethought/preparation as The Martian did -- but it may instead be a character study about the psychological toll of loneliness, or it may perhaps be promoting the value of courage and faith, or be doing a number of different things.

If the theme of The Martian for example had been that Wheaton survived due to his faith, rather than due to his problem-solving... I'd probably have not considered it ratfic.
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There was a scene where the NASA personnel specifically pointed out (for the reader's benefit) that mere problem-solving wasn't enough for Watney to have survived. It was his personality, like his optimism and good humour, that meant he didn't give up or give in to despair, which let him use his problem-solving skills to survive.

You could say Watney survived due to his faith that he could survive.
 
Aris Katsaris said:
This goes back to the distinction between "rationalist fic" which is about rationalism, and (the probably badly named) "rational fic" which is a much fuzzier superset which is NOT about rationalism.
I'm NOT making a claim The Martian is the former, I'm saying I'd consider it an example of the latter, because of its focus on intelligent problem-solving.
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I think that "rational fic", just any fiction focused on procedural, non-social problem solving, would be way too diverse to make up any kind of genre. Like the set of fiction prominently featuring dogs, you can list its members, and point at a thing they have in common, but it doesn't really do any further analytical work.

A genre that includes the Sherlock Holmes stories, Anthem, the Martian, and the Odyssey would be a weird one indeed.
 
eaglejarl said:
I think you're implying that there was a lot of salt being thrown around? Nah, the players were very nice about it.
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I was implying there was a long discussion on how to justify magical muscle powers giving you the ability to become a gambling god, and that it got detailed enough to convince the authors, even if it wasn't strictly correct (players will exploit odd things when they want to in any story).
eaglejarl said:
You may well be right. We were dubious about it but we weren't certain that it was impossible. We had to make a choice and, since both options were plausible, we decided to go with what we considered the most interesting option.
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More than fair. You sometimes want to make a decision on something so you can move ahead, and then change it later if necessary.

I think the expectation people have of rational community readers and writers (including the expectations those in the community say they have) puts a lens on these sorts of things that would otherwise have less focus.
 
mesonoxian said:
I think that "rational fic", just any fiction focused on procedural, non-social problem solving, would be way too diverse to make up any kind of genre. Like the set of fiction prominently featuring dogs, you can list its members, and point at a thing they have in common, but it doesn't really do any further analytical work.

A genre that includes the Sherlock Holmes stories, Anthem, the Martian, and the Odyssey would be a weird one indeed.
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Yes, but an adjective can be useful without having to define a genre.
 
Rerarom said:
Yes, but an adjective can be useful without having to define a genre.
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It could be, but presumably we'd want any such adjective to do more than simply pick out works with a single broad element in common. Otherwise it isn't really a useful element of criticism, it is just a point of trivia.
 
eaglejarl said:
I mean...every setting has rules. In a hard magic fantasy setting the rules of magic are the laws of physics. In the real world, the rules of nature are the laws of physics. Taking advantage of those laws is what technology is.


This is (probably unintentionally) a strawman of the rational fiction position. [Sidebar: 'Rationalist' was a horrifically bad choice of branding and 'rational fiction' wasn't a great choice either.] Nikola Tesla didn't need to know every detail of real-world physics in order to create the induction motor, and Tavi didn't need to know every detail of the Codex Alera magic system in order to scale up a telescope spell into a light-gathering-death-ray spell.
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I'm basing my definition of what "Rationalist Fiction" is from this post, specifically the "winning entry". Hence why I use words like "munchkinry" and "exploit", since those are the actual words used.

As mentioned, I have no problems with the author knowing the rules of the setting, but in RL, we know the laws of physics imperfectly, and there's plenty of fuzzy areas even in the bits we do know. So it strikes me as unrealistic that the characters can know and understand the rules of their own setting so well, which either means they are once-in-a-lifetime geniuses, or these rules are so simplistic that anyone could theoretically have come up with those creative ideas to exploit the rules, and the characters just happened to be the first to do so.

So when Tavi creates a light-gathering death ray spell (akin to Archimedes's apocryphal Mirror), it's not that he's managed to figure out how to do it. It's that everyone else reacts in surprise and astonishment, instead of immediately recognizing the principles of optics, and coming up with (or at least hypothetically thinking about) a counter. Tavi didn't need to know everything about the Aleran magic system, but the non-Tavi characters seem curiously ignorant about it in comparison.

I'm slightly more lenient with regards to exploiting social rules, since that's basically what charismatic people do in RL, but that's only because we also all understand that social rules don't actually have the force of natural laws behind them, and are enforced only as far as people can enforce them. (Compare to, say, the speed of light in a vacuum.)
 
mesonoxian said:
It could be, but presumably we'd want any such adjective to do more than simply pick out works with a single broad element in common. Otherwise it isn't really a useful element of criticism, it is just a point of trivia.
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Renewal said:
I think meso's point is that at that level of breadth, it's a trivial descriptor.
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"Political" is also a term that can be applied to a broad variety of works in different genres and to varying degrees but it isn't a useless or trivial descriptor.
 
Adloquium said:
So it strikes me as unrealistic that the characters can know and understand the rules of their own setting so well, which either means they are once-in-a-lifetime geniuses, or these rules are so simplistic that anyone could theoretically have come up with those creative ideas to exploit the rules, and the characters just happened to be the first to do so.
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Yeah that's one of The Things that makes rational fiction so contentious. It feels like everyone else has stalled out at just the right moment, simply so someone can show up and take advantage with "common sense" or whatever you call it; not even a fresh or actually innovative solution, just rising above some goofy complacency.

Granted, "not rational" fiction is terrible at this too.
Vyslanté said:
Some people have fantasies where they punch people; some have fantasies where the world makes sense.
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Why not both.

MrCogmor said:
"Political" is also a term that can be applied to a broad variety of works in different genres and to varying degrees but it isn't a useless or trivial descriptor.
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No, it definitely is in cases since "political" can be applied to any old thing that people want.
 
Subrosian_Smithy said:
Are Ao3 tags useless just because they're not immediately applicable to literary criticism and analysis?
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This can be one aspect of how they might be useless, yes. Like, somebody puts "Dark" on a story, what does it mean? It could mean an overwrought angstfic, it could mean a realistic depiction of PTSD, it could mean it's somebody's rape-murder fantasies. If "rational" tells us that little...yeah it is kinda useless as a tag. It only has meaning in conjunction with other tags, as "Dark" does, and nobody's advanced or used a vocabulary towards that end yet.

MrCogmor said:
"Political" is also a term that can be applied to a broad variety of works in different genres and to varying degrees but it isn't a useless or trivial descriptor.
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When political can mean "has a female character who isn't a shrieking harpy" to someone and "is about a President" to another...yes it's kind of useless and trivial. Everything is politics, and that means it tells us little about anything.
 
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Vyslanté said:
Some people have fantasies where they punch people; some have fantasies where the world makes sense.
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Based on the light novels I've been reading, particularly isekai escapism, this does seem to be true. (Along with the additional fantasies of "I don't have to work anymore" and "I can get a romantic partner".)

Admittedly, a lot of the fantasies of "I know how the world works" also has the protagonist (and a few of their allies, at most) be the only one to know how the world works, but I don't think that's an issue solely with Rationalist Fiction.
 
Night said:
This can be one aspect of how they might be useless, yes. Like, somebody puts "Dark" on a story, what does it mean? It could mean an overwrought angstfic, it could mean a realistic depiction of PTSD, it could mean it's somebody's rape-murder fantasies. If "rational" tells us that little...yeah it is kinda useless as a tag. It only has meaning in conjunction with other tags, as "Dark" does, and nobody's advanced or used a vocabulary towards that end yet.
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That doesn't actually establish that tags are useless, though; just that many people are using them in different ways. Even the muddled and diluted usefulness of a controversial tag is still more useful than no tagging system at all.

In fact, that's essentially why we still use genre descriptors in common parlance, despite the fact that a genre descriptor can mean many different things depending upon the context in which it exists (which I should hope you don't need genre theory to prove). The more discursive and analytic functions of a genre classification can't be said to take strict precedence over the experiential and organizational implications of genre, the capacity for genre to build a bridge between author and audience and to contextualize individual story elements.
 
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