Rationalist fiction discussion

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is here we again run into the question of what is rational. To believe Darth Vader is your father and that he is telling you the truth--or that he is in fact a villain who betrayed and murdered your father and you should just strike him down...

Even if Luke accepts Vader as his father, the rational thing to do is strike him dead with your sword, not try to redeem him. To redeem him is irrational--an emotional decision based on a desire for family.

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Meh.

My own feel on 'rational fic' is that it's okay for the character to have goals that are themselves 'suboptimal.' Say, someone who will jeopardize their plan to free the galaxy from a tyrant because they really want to feel like they have a family. What's not okay is if the character, having been established as having those goals, isn't clearly pursuing those goals in a way that makes sense and looks like they're doing the best they reasonably can with the skills and resources available to them.

Someone who has two separate goals (redeem father, overthrow tyrant) and has them come into conflict can be rightly berated, can be stubborn about it, and still be rationally pursuing their goals; they're just having trouble squaring the circle of having two goals at once.

People present Methods as the classic rational fic, but Harry spends large chunks of the storyline pursuing goals that aren't really directly related to his 'endgame' ambition of using magic to abolish death or whatever. Even adding extra requirements that are arguably counterproductive (stop Voldemort BUT make sure no one dies), or, well, being deeply conflicted about killing Voldemort after he realizes Voldemort is his mentor-figure.

But that also gets into like... whether or not that arc would resonate as well as the one in the actual film. Luke is told this deeply uncomfortable truth at what is his lowest moment. He has failed to rescue his friends, he has failed to defeat Vader. His hand (and his father's lightsaber) are lost to him in a painful and humiliating defeat. Vader chooses to use this knowledge at this moment of Luke's greatest weakness, despair, and undoubtedly anger in order to tempt him, not only with family but the power of the Dark Side. Give in to your feelings of hate and anger and despair, use that power--and we can rule the galaxy.

Vader using the reveal as a plot to weaken Luke doesn't strike me as a compelling story beat. Not in the same way that it does in the text as is.

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I mean, OK. In my defense, I spent like 5-10 minutes coming up with that plot. I bet Lucas spent a lot longer refining his, plus he's probably better at plotting classic resonant works of fiction with compelling storylines, since he's done it about, oh... 1-3 times, and I've done it precisely zero times.

What I'm saying is, if someone with skill at telling good stories comparable to George Lucas had wanted to tell a story where Luke DOES stay on Dagobah to complete his training, and still make it a good story, I bet it would be pretty damn good, and very possibly just as good or better than the real-life existing story of Star Wars.

Where things go wrong is when someone tries to write "Star Wars, but without the poor choices," but then lacks the story-writing skills of George Lucas, and instead only has the story-writing skills of, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky.

But I'm not sure that's an inherent flaw in the idea of "characters make good choices" as opposed to a limitation of the implementation.

My point is more that the rationalist character analysis of Thorin is deeply flawed, that it interprets all character actions through a lens of "what would I do here?" (explicitly said by Yudkowsky in that quote) rather than "does this make sense for the character as written?" which is the argument made in favor of rationalist fiction--that it is merely internal consistency and a lack of 'idiot balls' or other such plot contrivances.

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OK, in fairness it's a pretty superficial analysis.

But can we step back from the specific quality of it as a movie review? Because I was trying to use it to illustrate something about the genre itself, not about how Yudkowsky hasn't really thought through his specific criticism of one dwarf.

Namely, the idea that one of the pivotal things in a 'rational fic' character is that all the main characters, the ones you're expected to like or identify with, have clearly defined goals and are adaptable, persistent, and reasonably resourceful and sensible about pursuing them.

 

[AmbarGriss]

What does it have to do with the alt right?

 

[Simon_Jester]

What does it have to do with the alt right?

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Ideally I think the other thread is a better place for that and this is specifically about rationalist fiction?

 

[Jake]

But I think this is an inevitable consequence of the idea that character choices should not be errors the reader or writer can spot.

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And that, for me, is what's wrong with the majority of rationalist fiction. Having your characters make choices that the reader can blatantly recognise as bad ones is not, in itself, bad writing: Having them make those bad choices and suffer no consequences because they have Plot Armour is.

This is a very important distinction that a lot of "rationalists" fail to grasp. And also part of why Luminosity blows HPMOR out of the water in terms of quality, because its source material has the protagonist make a lot of choices that would be incredibly bad if not for the power of Plot. (That said protagonist isn't an SI stand-in from the pen of an arrogant ass who isn't half as clever as he thinks he is, and that the author actually bothered to read the source material, both help as well.)

What people think about "Friendship is Optimal"? There is AI (AGI), Technological Singularity, less-wrong-style rationalism and even ponies (as in, simulated versions of the My Little Pony ponies). The whole is much shorter than HPMOR.

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It's also a psychological horror story, and the "rationalist" AI character is actually the villain of the story, albeit a possibly unwitting and arguably tragic one.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

Can someone please explain to me what exactly constitutes "rationalist fiction"? Because so far as I can tell it's some galaxy brained anti-drama where characters always make the Smart And Correct decision, oftentimes using knowledge that only the audience possesses.

 

[Jake]

Can someone please explain to me what exactly constitutes "rationalist fiction"? Because so far as I can tell it's some galaxy brained anti-drama where characters always make the Smart And Correct decision, oftentimes using knowledge that only the audience possesses.

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That's... basically it, except with more self-righteous intellectual snobbery and a substantial demographic overlap with the autistic supremacist movement and the pseudointellectual wing of the Fascist International.

 

[FortePlus]

Lightly toasted take: Naruto is a rational protagonist.

- gets an insane amount of mileage out of a handful of techniques
- constantly innovates
- never gives up and always looks for solutions in times of trouble
- uses his life experiences and goals to solve problems creatively
- terrible social skills
- refuses to be trapped by the status quo

I mean he fits a lot of the criteria, doesn't he? Seriously, if you base it on what we've been given it should make sense. He's never not giving 100% towards a goal.

 

[Suzu]

Lightly toasted take: Naruto is a rational protagonist.

- gets an insane amount of mileage out of a handful of techniques
- constantly innovates
- never gives up and always looks for solutions in times of trouble
- uses his life experiences and goals to solve problems creatively
- terrible social skills
- refuses to be trapped by the status quo

I mean he fits a lot of the criteria, doesn't he? Seriously, if you base it on what we've been given it should make sense. He's never not giving 100% towards a goal.

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Naruto has terrible social skills? The man who eventually became the Ninja President?

 

[FortePlus]

Yes, actually. He was charismatic obviously and his work ethic inspired a lot of people, but he was a goofball for most of the series and had no idea how to talk to people or actually navigate social situations. His ability to just cut right to it is something that made him endearing, but it wasn't something he learned on purpose.

He was taught a bunch of things between the end of the war and his start as Hokage.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Lightly toasted take: Naruto is a rational protagonist.

- gets an insane amount of mileage out of a handful of techniques
- constantly innovates
- never gives up and always looks for solutions in times of trouble
- uses his life experiences and goals to solve problems creatively
- terrible social skills
- refuses to be trapped by the status quo

I mean he fits a lot of the criteria, doesn't he? Seriously, if you base it on what we've been given it should make sense. He's never not giving 100% towards a goal.

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I think quite a few fans of rational fiction would agree with this, or at least say "Naruto comes closer than many protagonists to being a rational fiction protagonist."

Certainly, Naruto has been seen as making a good prototype for rational fanfiction takes on his setting.

Can someone please explain to me what exactly constitutes "rationalist fiction"? Because so far as I can tell it's some galaxy brained anti-drama where characters always make the Smart And Correct decision, oftentimes using knowledge that only the audience possesses.

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That's... basically it, except with more self-righteous intellectual snobbery and a substantial demographic overlap with the autistic supremacist movement and the pseudointellectual wing of the Fascist International.

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I am quite confident that one loses no accuracy when describing a subculture's fiction genre while exhibiting total contempt for the subculture and its genre.

@Arthur Frayn , do you want an answer to the question from someone who isn't basing their description on a thick slab of contempt, or were you just here to join the sneers?

 

[mesonoxian]

OK, but the vector that Yudkowsky is pushing his endorsement or lack thereof along is something I think is worth looking for in fictional characters, if not in ALL fictional characters:

Namely, intelligent determination.

The combination of flexible thinking, good judgment, and a great desire to see through one's projects represents an important combination that most real-life successful people display. Fictional characters that display these things too can be very interesting and inspirational.

Obviously, obviously, not all characters need to possess or aspire to these traits. But there's a lot of good art you can build around stories where everyone displays or at least aspires towards good judgment, flexible thinking, and determination to not give up on important projects or the hope of accomplishing great deeds, at least not until all options are exhausted and they've spent extended periods of time trying to brainstorm new options.

...

Now, it can be legitimately in character for Thorin to give up. See also Yudkowsky's ex's answer to the quote, which parallels yours but along different lines ("this is one way to set up a scene where Thorin does give up in disgust here").

So a genre where deliberate efforts to resist giving up, to be adaptable and keep trying to use one's resources in new and inventive ways so long as breath remains in body, are a cornerstone of the 'strong/main' characters of the story? Yeah, I can get behind that.

I mean, that's fair.

At the same time, it's understandable for readers of a certain subculture to crave protagonists whose mindset is relatable to the kind of person who is (or who admires, or who aspires to be) determined, sensible, flexible, and humble enough to know that life won't always make things easy for them.

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Sure, you could write about characters who possess those traits. Nobody has suggested otherwise. The problem is that Yudkowsky didn't say he'd have preferred to read a story with a more rational Thorin. He claimed that the movie portrayal lacked a "spark" of inner life because the character didn't behave as he would expect. Because he is apparently incapable of identifying with any character that doesn't behave within a very narrow range, he assumes those characters are behaving arbitrarily, and anyone who doesn't think so must not be smart enough to recognize it. That is a pretty serious problem on a lot of levels.

If people want stories of coolly determined protagonists in worlds with easily manipulated rules, they are welcome to them. I find it dry and tedious, but to each their own. But presenting it as a "solution" to some flaw in the rest of fiction is really obnoxious.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

@Arthur Frayn , do you want an answer to the question from someone who isn't basing their description on a thick slab of contempt, or were you just here to join the sneers?

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I mean, everything I've seen every time this has come up points towards what @Jake was (facetiously) describing - characters being Correct And Right all the time because the author assumes that's how Correct and Right people act. I've also seen it come up in criticisms of fiction, where people say a character wasn't acting "rationally" because they didn't act in a way they expected/didn't act on knowledge that the characters didn't posses but the audience did.

Like, this seems to be a case of (once again) the Internet assuming that personal preferences are actually this very specialized thing that needs to be labelled, and not just, you know, a form of criticism that's sometimes right and sometimes wrong. I can intellectually understand the appeal of something like "Methods of Rationality", if it's this giant story-length pisstake about how the Wizarding World doesn't hold up to strict scrutiny, but if it's done completely seriously it sounds like a fucking chore.

 

[FortePlus]

I think quite a few fans of rational fiction would agree with this, or at least say "Naruto comes closer than many protagonists to being a rational fiction protagonist."

Certainly, Naruto has been seen as making a good prototype for rational fanfiction takes on his setting.

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I don't track the rational Naruto community really, but a lot of authors in general (rationalists and everyone aside) who want to try and take a deep dive into the series have this take of him as severely suboptimal. The modern ninja in the series however are not the stereotypical shadow warriors who operate under cover of darkness constantly, they're warriors and soldiers (pretty clearly illustrated by the fact that there are spec ops organizations all over the place). Missing that point leads to the misconception that he's a "bad ninja" and could do better by changing...everything about himself.

There are also complaints about the setting and how it doesn't make sense because technology has progressed at different speeds in places which...seems realistic after 3 continential wars in 50 years? (Also being steeped in hundreds of years of tradition.) And the fact that in reality different places actually do have different levels of tech? I don't know if I want to touch on it too much but Naruto looks to be a good target for ratfic, if only because of the sentiment that there is so much to be "corrected".

 

[daniel_gudman]

Well Naruto as a character uses some pretty seriously sub-optimal tactics, but like... part of that is out-of-story, the author retconned the Kage Bunshin memory thing kinda, and in-story, most of the blame lies with Kakashi for not realizing that Naruto should just build his entire fighting style around always ganging up on everyone with at least three of himself, and training the kid that way, right?

The kid's signature move is turning magic points into disposable-but-tangible copies of himself and he's got like a gazillion MP. Give him like, grenades, watch as clone bodies turn them into homing grenades.

It would have taken about a week to take Naruto in like, chapter three, to go from there to "Gaara" in Weight Class, you know?

So Nauto is sub-optimal in that all the way until the timeskip he goes from "kinda ok" to "pretty good" when meanwhile his character sheet said "extremely OP for level" all along.

But again, that's not his fault precisely, it's really the fault of his literal Genius Battle Master, in charge of teaching him how to fight real good. Who, to bring this back to topic, is extremely traumatized and cannot rationally min-max his charges' builds, because he absolutely couldn't make the emotional commitment to genuinely accept the responsibility of teaching them to be their most optimal selves, for whatever "optimal" means.

 

[FortePlus]

The thing about Naruto's Shadow Clones is that while he had the ability to make a lot of them, they weren't good for anything aside from attacking. You see his numbers sharply drop in part 2 after he learns some decent chakra control (he was wasting it, part of why Ebisu was called in during the exams).

And remember he does walk around trying to pummel people with waves of clones, but it almost always turns out terribly because he runs into someone who knows how to actually fight (Naruto could not fight to save his life in part 1). He's awful at what we would call regular learning until the series midpoint and instead does much better when he's taking action (something Kakashi wises up to). Case in point is the Rasengan, where he got detailed instructions and couldn't follow them, instead finding his own way to get the same end result.

I would say it was a combination of Kakashi not being all the way committed and Naruto being nearly impossible to actually teach, which is why Jiraiya focused so much on fundamentals and shoring up most of his weaknesses over the time skip period.

I also think that if he committed to keeping up the clone rush tactics and made that his staple, he would have ended up lacking in other areas. It's definitely correct that he didn't take the best options all the time, but he at the least tried to do what he thought was best with the tools he had at hand. Also "throw 1000 kunai at someone", as optimal a decision that would be, would likely end up stuffed for some reason because magical wizard soldiers.

 

[Jake]

The kid's signature move is turning magic points into disposable-but-tangible copies of himself and he's got like a gazillion MP. Give him like, grenades, watch as clone bodies turn them into homing grenades.

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Point of clarification from someone who's not very familiar with the series: How much of a mental connection does he have to these clones? Because the full sensory experience of what it's like to blow yourself up with a grenade several times in a row would do absolutely nothing good to someone's sanity.

 

[daniel_gudman]

He can get a memory packet sent when they end, but only once someone tells him how to turn that option on. Until then they're fire-and-forget. Definitely no telepathic link or whatever.



Like in Kakashi's position, you tell Naruto to create about four clones per enemy, and every time one gets broke, replace it. Teach him Shunshin and have him improve Kawarimi until it's trivial for him to tele-swap places with another himself, and they just constantly do that Shell Game so it's really deeply random which one of him is the "real" him. And focus on improving his basic foundation of fighting skills on a daily basis -- both in the daily reps of the absolute basics of throwing punches, and in the sense of having him frequently spar to improve his battle sense. That would be about my first-three-months plan for the kid.

So it's not Zerg rush, it's a constant high pressure designed to be exhausting to deal with. You turn every single battle into an attrition match against someone with inhuman stamina.

 

[FortePlus]

Point of clarification from someone who's not very familiar with the series: How much of a mental connection does he have to these clones? Because the full sensory experience of what it's like to blow yourself up with a grenade several times in a row would do absolutely nothing good to someone's sanity.

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He gets the memories of the clones and energy from them back (he uses this to charge one of his transformations) but not sensations. The clones can be disrupted by energy spikes from the main body or any undesired physical change aka getting punched hard or something. Otherwise they're independent of him. He can communicate intent to the clones before summoning them, which is what he usually does.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not familiar with the Naruto setting... but... It would be reasonable to suppose that Naruto faced some practical physical limits in his ability to Zerg rush enemies, if he didn't actually do it.

It's just plain a violation of the principle of charity to assume that someone is using an ability much less forcefully than they could, all the time, and if you're trying to rational-fic a setting, in my opinion that's a bad choice. If no one is strong enough to lift the Giant Rock and become king, it's probably not because everyone is actually only using 20% of their strength unless that's somehow a plot point in the original setting. It's probably just really heavy.

I mean, everything I've seen every time this has come up points towards what @Jake was (facetiously) describing - characters being Correct And Right all the time because the author assumes that's how Correct and Right people act.

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I don't think that's a fair summary of what's going on inside the heads of a lot of the people who like these stories.

Things like "they didn't use knowledge I only have OOC, so they are irrational and bad" are not exactly standard genre conventions.

Like, this seems to be a case of (once again) the Internet assuming that personal preferences are actually this very specialized thing that needs to be labelled, and not just, you know, a form of criticism that's sometimes right and sometimes wrong. I can intellectually understand the appeal of something like "Methods of Rationality", if it's this giant story-length pisstake about how the Wizarding World doesn't hold up to strict scrutiny, but if it's done completely seriously it sounds like a fucking chore.

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It's rather more than that. A lot of easily irritated people look at it, decide "oh, this is just a story mocking the Wizarding World and how it doesn't hold up to strict scrutiny, how absurd to write a novel-length story about this" and then sort of skim past any bits that don't support this analysis.

 

[FortePlus]

He can get a memory packet sent when they end, but only once someone tells him how to turn that option on. Until then they're fire-and-forget. Definitely no telepathic link or whatever.



Like in Kakashi's position, you tell Naruto to create about four clones per enemy, and every time one gets broke, replace it. Teach him Shunshin and have him improve Kawarimi until it's trivial for him to tele-swap places with another himself, and they just constantly do that Shell Game so it's really deeply random which one of him is the "real" him. And focus on improving his basic foundation of fighting skills on a daily basis -- both in the daily reps of the absolute basics of throwing punches, and in the sense of having him frequently spar to improve his battle sense. That would be about my first-three-months plan for the kid.

So it's not Zerg rush, it's a constant high pressure designed to be exhausting to deal with. You turn every single battle into an attrition match against someone with inhuman stamina.

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All of this makes sense on paper and would be a good place to start making him into an elite pretty quickly. But we have other things going on within the world and this is what makes things tricky.

1. Kakashi is not a full time teacher. He's the team leader and instructor, someone who instills the basics after kids leave the academy. He is also an upper tier soldier for the village and does missions. It introduces a time crunch, and he has three students to look after and get up to speed.

2. Naruto himself as already stated is bad at school. Going back to the initial Rasengan training he had a lot of dedicated time with the last true expert for that technique. With motivation he got the technique down. He's a stubborn student and benefits from a lot 1 on 1 time, time that might not be available in the right quantities.

There were also other external factors to consider. This kind of regimen is doable for Kakashi given the right timing, but he never really had that. I make this observation because shortly after Sasuke was in crisis over his growth, Kakashi was soon out of the village doing work and didn't get back until after the valley fight, at emergency speed no less.

Resolving the situation of time I think would require a lot of tinkering with the plot. Also, there was something I think was a major turning point in Kakashi's approach, and that was Wave Country. In a situation where the team leader was captured, the rational move for the much weaker team would be to retreat from an audience perspective. The rational move for Naruto as a character was to even the odds by freeing his team leader. Seeing this kind of unpredictability and the driving effects of the competition between Naruto and Sasuke may have made Kakashi reconsider putting Naruto in a normalised position. (As an aside, Sakura could be taught a host of generic things but her greatest issue was lack of drive. We can (I would) argue that Kakashi forcing the issue would have made her worse off with more jutsu.)

 

[Gul Damar]

Would Prometheus and Alien Covenant count as Anti-Rationalist fiction by having the characters not only act in ways you cannot fathom for the sole reason of endangering themselves, but also being contradictory from scene to scene like the xenobiologist who is terrified of alien corpses then without pause wants to cuddle the angry space cobra that's acting hostile to him? Or the pilot who refuses to let her collague escape the sickbay with the Neomorph claiming danger of infection and then a minute later goes back into the sickbay with a shotgun with no sign she had a change of heart but for some reason felt she had to let her die with an excuse and then finish the job?

 

[EarthScorpion]

Would Prometheus and Alien Covenant count as Anti-Rationalist fiction by having the characters not only act in ways you cannot fathom for the sole reason of endangering themselves, but also being contradictory from scene to scene like the xenobiologist who is terrified of alien corpses then without pause wants to cuddle the angry space cobra that's acting hostile to him? Or the pilot who refuses to let her collague escape the sickbay with the Neomorph claiming danger of infection and then a minute later goes back into the sickbay with a shotgun with no sign she had a change of heart but for some reason felt she had to let her die with an excuse and then finish the job?

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No, they're just badly written.

 

[Terrabrand]

But can we step back from the specific quality of it as a movie review? Because I was trying to use it to illustrate something about the genre itself, not about how Yudkowsky hasn't really thought through his specific criticism of one dwarf.

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I mean. It illustrates a lot about the genre at least for how Yudowsky views it.

That's kinda the problem. Let's break it down shall we?

• The analysis specifically elects to frame Thorin as a skinwalker

He doesn't just call him out as irrational, he dehumanizes the dwarf and and acts like no real human would ever act that way.

In fact, it is worse than that since Thorin is not human. He acts as if no thinking being would ever behave that way in reality. He dismisses the very existence of a perspective that is not exactly and precisely his own.

This is reinforced by...

• He makes a huge assumption about the writer's motives.

He doesn't restrict himself to talking about the irrationality of Thorin's actions, he specifically and explicitly assumes that Thorin is behaving like a skinwalker because the writer wanted Artificial Hollywood Drama. He doesn't for even a moment consider that the writer might have been doing as he did; asking 'what would I do in this situation?'.

So he makes it entirely clear he thinks the only reason for Thorin to behave this way is intentionally bad writing, knowingly making a subhuman, inhuman being for Teh Dramaz.

And not a different frame of reference.

Furthermore...

• He buys into the scenario too much anyways, and makes further strawman assumptions about Hideous Beast Unmind Thorin.

Okay sure. Let's just accept it as irrational for Thorin to give up there.

Why did he assume Thorin would not return in an hour after his emotions cooled? Not give it a try next day, just in case? Not come back in a year?

These are unfounded assumptions. He paints Thorin as more irrational than is actually in evidence, because whatever Thorin would have done next is unclear since Bilbo interrupts.

Conversely, it's not terribly rational for Thorin to depart through multiple deadly environments with a force of less than twenty people to defeat a mighty nigh invincible army slaying dragon using a secret passage he doesn't even know for certain exists or will still work with no backup plan whatsoever.

Yet Yudowsky basically just looks at the scene and blithely accepts Thorin getting himself into that situation and doesn't go 'wait, shouldn't he have had a backup plan? Made a different strategy? Not bet on beating an invincible war machine with a fraction of the kind of troops it beat before by using a secret passage he doesn't even know for sure exists?'

Instead he goes to the scene and goes 'well, I would have doubled down on the bet the secret passage exists!' without considering whether he should have reached that situation at all.

This is by the way entirely consistent with his own rationalist fanfic in that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is quite prone of archetypical stations of canon writing, where for example Harry meets a lot of people in the same order, goes to the same house, and faces many of the same trials at the same times, he just handles it 'smarter'.

Without considering if a smarter Harry would have reached the situation at all.

 

[Vyslanté]

This is by the way entirely consistent with his own rationalist fanfic in that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is quite prone of archetypical stations of canon writing, where for example Harry meets a lot of people in the same order, goes to the same house, and faces many of the same trials at the same times, he just handles it 'smarter'.

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The rest of your post is good, but that paragraph is 100% untrue.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Can't respond to some of this in time, but:

Conversely, it's not terribly rational for Thorin to depart through multiple deadly environments with a force of less han twenty people to defeat a mighty nigh invincible army slaying dragon using a secret passage he doesn't even know for certain exists or will still work with no backup plan whatsoever.

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I'm pretty sure the original plan was to rob the dragon, not to kill it.

Yet Yudowsky basically just looks at the scene and blithely accepts Thorin getting himself into that situation and doesn't go 'wait, shouldn't he have had a backup plan? Made a different strategy? Not bet on beating an invincible war machine with a fraction of the kind of troops it beat before by using a secret passage he doesn't even know for sure exists?'

Instead he goes to the scene and goes 'well, I would have doubled down on the bet the secret passage exists!' without considering whether he should have reached that situation at all.

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I mean, arguably. On the other hand, he's making a point about what kind of thing he thinks makes good characterization, NOT rewriting the entire movie in an entirely different way. I feel like this is kind of massively missing the point of the quote.

This is by the way entirely consistent with his own rationalist fanfic in that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is quite prone of archetypical stations of canon writing, where for example Harry meets a lot of people in the same order, goes to the same house, and faces many of the same trials at the same times, he just handles it 'smarter'.

Without considering if a smarter Harry would have reached the situation at all.

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There are some significant challenges and situations that Harry does avoid, or implicitly avoids (saying "I would short-circuit the entire plot of the second book" or something like that). He gets into quite a few situations that do not parallel the ones his canon counterpart gets into.

Also, Harry doesn't go to the same house- for obvious reasons he's sorted into Ravenclaw.