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Rationalist fiction discussion

Simon_Jester said:
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.
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is it not a part of Inigo Montoya's characterization that he has thrown his life away hunting the six fingered man for revenge in Princess Bride? is it not part of Thorin's characterization that he embarks on this quest in the Hobbit?

Why are some large scale decisions off limits when we're speaking of how someone is characterized? Or what they would do?

Like yes. There's a focus on characterization. But by laser focusing on a singular, late scene, a culmination of the events set in motion by Thorin's own character, it betrays a lack of understanding of what a more rational Thorin would even look like, even by his own standards of rationality.

Because a very different Thorin would have never been in even a situation close to that one, let alone the same. He would not have gone with less than twenty men, one of which was a rando conscripted by his wizard friend for the quest, with no backup plan and no certainty this one would work.

And yet that is the scenario he chooses to address, while speaking of characterization.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
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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I've encountered two contradictory definitions.

1. Stories in which the main characters solve their problems using logic and deductive reasoning, and the reader is privvy to their thoughts while they do it. Most detective stories would be ratfic by this definition, as would quite a few others.

2. Stories in which character agency is never limited by genre conventions. IE, the answer to "why did he do that?" or "why didn't they just do X?" always has a sound Watsonian answer.

Some people would say that the second definition is just basic good writing, but I don't think that's actually true. There are well written stories that lean pretty heavily on genre conventions and don't work without them.
 
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Leila Hann said:
1. Stories in which the main characters solve their problems using logic and deductive reasoning, and the reader is privvy to their thoughts while they do it. Most detective stories would be ratfic by this definition, as would quite a few others.
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Amusingly Sherlock Holmes for instance isn't since he just constantly "notices" the clues he needs to and there isn't really any thinking the reader could have any chance to anticipate or replicate really.
 
Leila Hann said:
Oh, Sherlock Holmes is garbage as detective fiction. It's more of a quirky episodic drama about a guy with a magic Wikipedia connection in his brain.
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It's so weird how people constantly bring him up when the talk of rationalist fiction comes up - when even the freaking TV tropes entry of the genre begins with an El Yud quote making a mission statement of not writing something like Sherlock Holmes.

Case of a trope codifier casting a long shadow I guess.
 
Leila Hann said:
Some people would say that the second definition is just basic good writing, but I don't think that's actually true. There are well written stories that lean pretty heavily on gente conventions and don't work without them.
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Can't you draw those Watsonian explanations from the conventions though? Like how a character of this archetype is predisposed to a certain action in a certain situation consistent with their character?
 
FortePlus said:
Can't you draw those Watsonian explanations from the conventions though? Like how a character of this archetype is predisposed to a certain action in a certain situation consistent with their character?
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Sometimes. Not always.

To get on one of my hobby horses, the "masquerade" subgenre of urban fantasy is really, really, REALLY hard to justify with purely in-character explanations. That doesn't mean there aren't good masquerade stories. Just, you kinda have to go into them with a tacit agreement to not ask certain questions, or the whole thing falls apart.

Ditto superheroes, with the secret identities that somehow AREN'T getting revealed left and right by any interested party with even moderate wealth and resources at its disposal. There are some superhero stories where this is justified, but precious few.

A rational (by the second provided definition) urban fantasy or superhero story would need to find a way to avoid this.
 
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Leila Hann said:
1. Stories in which the main characters solve their problems using logic and deductive reasoning, and the reader is privvy to their thoughts while they do it. Most detective stories would be ratfic by this definition, as would quite a few others.
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To be pedantic, this isn't quite true. The classical detective story is told from the perspective of the "Watson", the detective's associate, who by chance is privy to all the same clues that the detective finds, but doesn't have the mental acuity to put them together until the detective has cracked the case. As per Knox, the intelligence of the viewpoint character must be "slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader."

Sherlock Holmes isn't really a part of the tradition, mostly because it's a member of the genre that predates the concept of "Fair Play", or in other words the standard set of assumptions and traditions mystery writers of the Golden Age followed in order to make it easier for a reader to have confidence in their ability to solve the mystery before the reveal.
 
The way I read the quote, the point doesn't really seem to be about Thorin himself but rather how the story allegedly jettisoned Thorin's agency in favour of giving Bilbo the spotlight. I don't know if that's actually true but at the same time I think focusing on Thorin's specific actions is the wrong thing to take away from the discussion maybe? Like it doesn't matter specifically what Thorin's plan was or whether he should have spent days scrabbling at the door, the argument is that Thorin doesn't have a plan at all because the scene is about Bilbo and implicitly because the writer therefore knew it would never get actioned so didn't bother to come up with one.
 
Delirium said:
The way I read the quote, the point doesn't really seem to be about Thorin himself but rather how the story allegedly jettisoned Thorin's agency in favour of giving Bilbo the spotlight. I don't know if that's actually true but at the same time I think focusing on Thorin's specific actions is the wrong thing to take away from the discussion maybe? Like it doesn't matter specifically what Thorin's plan was or whether he should have spent days scrabbling at the door, the argument is that Thorin doesn't have a plan at all because the scene is about Bilbo and implicitly because the writer therefore knew it would never get actioned so didn't bother to come up with one.
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This is wrong on two fronts. Firstly, this isn't what Yudkowsky complains about. He doesn't say "Thorin loses agency" he says Thorin reacts in an unbelievable way.

Secondly, even if we assume that was his point, he is still wrong. Thorin absolutely had a plan. Go to the door on Durin's Day. Wait for the last light to reveal the door. Open the door and steal some treasure. That he didn't have a fall back plan or a rational response to failure is rather the point of the scene.

What you are complaining about is the point of the story. That a little, grounded homebody who thinks more like a modern person and is more concerned with comfort and safety than adventure will see problems differently, and respond to them differently, than a bitter displaced warrior king and his retinue.

That characters react differently to the same situations, based on their personal investment in the situation and their past experiences isn't a flaw.
 
mesonoxian said:
This is wrong on two fronts. Firstly, this isn't what Yudkowsky complains about. He doesn't say "Thorin loses agency" he says Thorin reacts in an unbelievable way.

Secondly, even if we assume that was his point, he is still wrong. Thorin absolutely had a plan. Go to the door on Durin's Day. Wait for the last light to reveal the door. Open the door and steal some treasure. That he didn't have a fall back plan or a rational response to failure is rather the point of the scene.

What you are complaining about is the point of the story. That a little, grounded homebody who thinks more like a modern person and is more concerned with comfort and safety than adventure will see problems differently, and respond to them differently, than a bitter displaced warrior king and his retinue.

That characters react differently to the same situations, based on their personal investment in the situation and their past experiences isn't a flaw.
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He pretty much says it though? Like I just disagree completely with your read on it, sorry.

He talks about how the scene exists to prop up Bilbo, how Thorin doesn't seem to have an inner guidance, behaves like a zombie, etc. This is all about Thorin's agency whether correct or not. Respectfully, I just don't think you're reading the quote right and this thread is subsequently missing the main thrust of the argument in favour of 'Yudkowsky doesn't know how humans think let's dunk on him.'

I don't think he's correct because the scene is too minor to draw such a vast conclusion from and lacks any sort of engagement with the rest of Thorin's choices in the narrative but it's still what he's trying to say.
 
Delirium said:
He pretty much says it though? Like I just disagree completely with your read on it, sorry.

He talks about how the scene exists to prop up Bilbo, how Thorin doesn't seem to have an inner guidance, behaves like a zombie, etc. This is all about Thorin's agency whether correct or not. Respectfully, I just don't think you're reading the quote right and this thread is subsequently missing the main thrust of the argument in favour of 'Yudkowsky doesn't know how humans think let's dunk on him.'

I don't think he's correct because the scene is too minor to draw such a vast conclusion from and lacks any sort of engagement with the rest of Thorin's choices in the narrative but it's still what he's trying to say.
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I don't think I have ever made any secret of thinking Yudkowsky is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and finding him obnoxious. But my complaints about this piece of criticism are based on the extreme lack of insight it represents, not my personal distaaste for him.

You can choose to read the notion of the missing "spark" to refer to agency instead of character motivation, but I don't think that makes it any less wrong.Thorin isn't suddenly rendered passive. He behaves in a way that naturally follows from his emotional state. Bilbo is more emotionally removed from the situation, more level headed, and far cleverer than Thorin, and so he figures out the situation in the way the more volatile and impatient character doesn't.

It isn't that Bilbo has agency and Thorin doesn't. It is that they are behaving in different ways, because they are different characters. Yes, the scene was set up to show the differences in their characters. That isn't some conspiracy to aggrandize one character at another's expense. It is literally how characterization works in all competent fiction. (Incompetent fiction can just tell you directly about the characters, but presumably nobody wants that.)

Having characters take turns wearing the idiot hat is a bad way of writing. It happens in plenty of low quality works of fiction as a way of generating and prolonging contact. (Lost comes to mind as a show where a lot of plot lines could be resolved by a ten minute conversation between characters.) It is really better avoided if you care about quality. So he's right on that point.

The thing is, "have your characters act in character" is not a insight Yudkowsky has discovered and is delivering to a world previously ignorant of his wisdom. It is an extremely old and basic piece of writing advice. It is incredibly basic, both in terms of the development of modern writing and when most people learn it. So trying to explain it to others comes off as extremely condescending and arrogant.

His example of such a character is simply wrong, and his attempt to explain the scene reveals an extremely limited ability to understand people who differ from him in their behavior and psychology. There is nothing wrong with being bad at getting into the heads of other people. It is an aptitude some people are better or worse at. But presuming that not only is any character you don't understand the result of lazy writing, but that the reason other people enjoy such characters can only be their ignorance of proper motivation and characterization is again, arrogant and reflects a total lack of self awareness.

And his solution to it (writing "rational" characters) isn't a good solution. Because real people are often motivated in ways that are suboptimal for them and those around them. People consistently acting with insight, restraint, and wisdom is both unrealistic and antithetical to dramatic situations, There is nothing wrong with liking unrealistic fiction. I like cozy mysteries. Nobody in those acts like a person. Other people like action movies, where physical and psychological trauma is easily shaken off and responded to with a one liner. Still others like fairy tale fantasy where the story works on poetry more than logic. Every single one of those is an oversimplification of reality, and every one is fine to enjoy. But acting as if one's preferences reflect superior moral, aesthetic, or cognitive qualities rather than just being what you like is again, arrogant.

Yudkowsky attributes the existence of fiction he can't understand to lazy writers and idiotic audiences instead of his own lack of capacity; condescends to tell others the basics of fiction as if he stole them from Olympus, and then gives advice that would actively make most stories worse. This isn't people looking for an excuse to hate on Yudkowsky. This is Yudkowsky being a grade-A dingus.
 
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Is it possible that rational fiction is meant to be divorced from real life like other categories of fiction, or is it supposed to be more realistic on the whole?

Live and let live is easy enough for the former personally speaking; the ratfic I've read, besides HP Methods, has been pretty dry with occasional bits of good characterization. Sometimes it's actually pretty good with a few characters when they get focused. Or "ratfic" since as some have said not all of it qualifies as such. Still, it's something that people like so whatever. Genre conventions do irk people who aren't even rationalists, so I get it on some level.

The latter is kind of different and smacks of the arrogance that people think of when they hear the words "rational" and "fiction" one after the other.

I wonder if there's Sonic the Hedgehog ratfic out there somewhere. It's probably awful.

Delirium said:
He talks about how the scene exists to prop up Bilbo, how Thorin doesn't seem to have an inner guidance, behaves like a zombie, etc.
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Kind of seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul here tbh. Putting this scene on an island was a bad move, and deleting Bilbo's agency for the "ideal" Thorin seems even worse. That kind of Lego Build A Story mentality doesn't do well for analysis or writing, since things can't just be swapped out to fix them. Sometimes things work and other times they're just cooked, and in either case pulling them out means pulling apart the story.
 
Gul Damar said:
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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EarthScorpion said:
No, they're just badly written.
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The thing is I think stuff like that drives the complaints of rationalists, except that they then apply it to literally any decision they don't like ever, or because they just don't understand different people's thought processes.

To use an example, one of the recurring issues with kid's shows is for there to be episodes that amount to "its character X's turn to cause trouble and have to learn a life lesson", which often makes characters feel less like actual people and more like actors going through skits. Which is probably because in many cases that is indeed all the show is aspiring to be, because these were made to sell toys or obligated to attach morals because kid's show.

I can understand complaints about characters being driven by primarily Doylistic "the author wanted them to be there and do that, because otherwise they couldn't get the plot from A to B" rather than Watsonian "this is a 'natural' byproduct of the character's thought processes", but that's kind of separate from whether or not a character is rational. And in many cases we aren't informed on what a character's thought processes would 'logically' be anyways.
 
What constitutes rationalist fiction for me is simple: The story tells you that it is on the description or it comes from this subreddit: r/rational
I do not know or care much about ratfics aside from that. In my experience, the vast majority of rational fiction or at least fanfiction has been very good.
Examples that I think are good: Pokemon: The Origin of Species Chapter 1: Unreliable Predictions, a pokémon fanfic | FanFiction, Instruments of Destruction, a star wars fanfic | FanFiction, and The Metropolitan Man Chapter 1: Literally Incredible, a superman fanfic | FanFiction. The one I do not like but ironically set the foundations for all the above is Methods of Rationality, Which in my opinion warps the setting it is in bizarre ways that make me confused, has everyone act out of character and to me was simply very boring to read. The only way I could read most of it was by reading it with commentary from spacebattles: https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...nd-irrational-methods-of-irrationality.337233. Note that I do appreciate some of the characters such as the thing that is supposed to be Voldemort. In my opinion it along with Harry could do just fine in an original story but not if they are supposed to be Voldemort and Harry. That and the author did do a lot of work to make 122 chapter story.
 
mesonoxian said:
I don't think I have ever made any secret of thinking Yudkowsky is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and finding him obnoxious. But my complaints about this piece of criticism are based on the extreme lack of insight it represents, not my personal distaaste for him.

You can choose to read the notion of the missing "spark" to refer to agency instead of character motivation, but I don't think that makes it any less wrong.Thorin isn't suddenly rendered passive. He behaves in a way that naturally follows from his emotional state. Bilbo is more emotionally removed from the situation, more level headed, and far cleverer than Thorin, and so he figures out the situation in the way the more volatile and impatient character doesn't.

It isn't that Bilbo has agency and Thorin doesn't. It is that they are behaving in different ways, because they are different characters. Yes, the scene was set up to show the differences in their characters. That isn't some conspiracy to aggrandize one character at another's expense. It is literally how characterization works in all competent fiction. (Incompetent fiction can just tell you directly about the characters, but presumably nobody wants that.)

Having characters take turns wearing the idiot hat is a bad way of writing. It happens in plenty of low quality works of fiction as a way of generating and prolonging contact. (Lost comes to mind as a show where a lot of plot lines could be resolved by a ten minute conversation between characters.) It is really better avoided if you care about quality. So he's right on that point.

The thing is, "have your characters act in character" is not a insight Yudkowsky has discovered and is delivering to a world previously ignorant of his wisdom. It is an extremely old and basic piece of writing advice. It is incredibly basic, both in terms of the development of modern writing and when most people learn it. So trying to explain it to others comes off as extremely condescending and arrogant.

His example of such a character is simply wrong, and his attempt to explain the scene reveals an extremely limited ability to understand people who differ from him in their behavior and psychology. There is nothing wrong with being bad at getting into the heads of other people. It is an aptitude some people are better or worse at. But presuming that not only is any character you don't understand the result of lazy writing, but that the reason other people enjoy such characters can only be their ignorance of proper motivation and characterization is again, arrogant and reflects a total lack of self awareness.

And his solution to it (writing "rational" characters) isn't a good solution. Because real people are often motivated in ways that are suboptimal for them and those around them. People consistently acting with insight, restraint, and wisdom is both unrealistic and antithetical to dramatic situations, There is nothing wrong with liking unrealistic fiction. I like cozy mysteries. Nobody in those acts like a person. Other people like action movies, where physical and psychological trauma is easily shaken off and responded to with a one liner. Still others like fairy tale fantasy where the story works on poetry more than logic. Every single one of those is an oversimplification of reality, and every one is fine to enjoy. But acting as if one's preferences reflect superior moral, aesthetic, or cognitive qualities rather than just being what you like is again, arrogant.

Yudkowsky attributes the existence of fiction he can't understand to lazy writers and idiotic audiences instead of his own lack of capacity; condescends to tell others the basics of fiction as if he stole them from Olympus, and then gives advice that would actively make most stories worse. This isn't people looking for an excuse to hate on Yudkowsky. This is Yudkowsky being a grade-A dingus.
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Bruh, all I'm saying is that i thought you were reading it wrong. I don't like Yudkowsky either and think the whole rationalist movement is at best a sham and at worst a cult.

I disagree with your interpretation of his words, it's possible for us to have this disagreement while agreeing that the guys a nutcase more generally.
 
Delirium said:
Bruh, all I'm saying is that i thought you were reading it wrong. I don't like Yudkowsky either and think the whole rationalist movement is at best a sham and at worst a cult.

I disagree with your interpretation of his words, it's possible for us to have this disagreement while agreeing that the guys a nutcase more generally.
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Sure, but I don't think your reading varies enough from mine to appreciably change the conclusion. Even if that is what he meant, he's still wrong.
 
Second Mover said:
It's so weird how people constantly bring him up when the talk of rationalist fiction comes up - when even the freaking TV tropes entry of the genre begins with an El Yud quote making a mission statement of not writing something like Sherlock Holmes.
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The amusing thing is; most of Yud's writings (including the stuff he has under an alt-name he has posted on this site) has many of the major writing flaws as the Sherlock Holmes series.
 
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Leila Hann said:
To get on one of my hobby horses, the "masquerade" subgenre of urban fantasy is really, really, REALLY hard to justify with purely in-character explanations. That doesn't mean there aren't good masquerade stories. Just, you kinda have to go into them with a tacit agreement to not ask certain questions, or the whole thing falls apart.
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Yeah, but like. I'm not convinced that these are actual problems with a genre that need to be solved.

First reason is that, well, with a good enough writing a stock genre convention ceases to be a genre convention and just becomes a part of the world. It doesn't even take that much good writing, just writing that's just a little bit clever about it.

Like in World of Darkness where the name Masquerade comes from the fact that the Masquerade is implausible is part of the setting. Because the Masquerade is an actual social order among Vampires, that they're really obsessed with upholding, because they know they'd get exterminated in like five seconds if it wasn't. Upholding it requires constant clean up and mass societal manipulation and things are often teetering on the brink. Hell, the entire premise of the new game is that the Masquerade actually broke, and it's going to deal with the consequences of that.

If someone is still complaining about it at this point, then to me that says they're just complaining that the convention is being used at all, not that it doesn't feel plausible as written.

The second is that the mentality behind rational fiction (because it sure ain't unique to them) tends to treat genre conventions as Lego blocks that make up a genre and are inherent to it, instead of just creative trends that tend to be tied to a genre. And they put way, way too much stock in these conventions as cornerstones of genre.

Fantasy gets this a lot, where you got a lot of writers with a relatively limited reference pool for the genre trying to subvert tropes or really high falutin attempts at making them justified in the world. They'll think they're super clever for having an Adventurer's Guild or Thieves Guild exist in the most literal fashion possible, and then going into excrutiating detail why it makes sense, without ever stopping to think whether they even need that shit. You don't. Fantasy doesn't need adventurer's guilds, it doesn't need dungeons, it doesn't need dragons, it doesn't need an arbitrary reason why guns don't exist. You can create any kind of damn world you want, and it would probably be more interesting than trying to one up the most basic bitch genre conventions while constantly nudging me going "Eh? Eh?" to remind me that this world I'm supposed to get immersed in is in fact a work of fiction.

Practical Guide to Evil is a big one in these category. It's probably one of the "best" examples of rational fiction, and comes one of the closest to being it's own thing separate from that. But it constantly shoots itself in the foot because it's preoccupied with meta-commentary and trying to 'play' with stock fantasy tropes. It bogs down the story with obtuse bullshit, ties all the tension and conflict in abstractions instead of the actual events of the plot, undermines the actually effective attempts to make the setting feel like an organic world. And I don't get why it would be impressive to you unless most of your ideas about the genre came from RPG sourcebooks.

Also, you're really not all that clever for pointing out that destiny and Black and White morality enforced by greater powers is dumb. Especially not if you're the Sword of Good, a Yud short story that a lot of people are impressed by but I think is piss that makes it seem like Yud's barely even read/watched Lord of the Rings, let alone examples of the genre that are actually interesting.

Also I've seen Prachett mentioned once or twice, and he's like a model for a lot of these writers. And the thing that you have to understand about Pratchett is that not only does he have a way better grasp of the fictional concepts he's playing with. But that his world is this big, real feeling world where fantasy tropes are real because it's parody. Not parody as in your story constantly pointing out that tropes exist and that's super clever, but actual jokes and humour based around it. And his books broke out into being more dramatic works within the parody as a result of the series getting more sophisticated over time. You can't just brute force that end state by having fantasy tropes be self-consciously real in a setting.

Pratchett also doesn't stan for Dark Wizard Stalin. That's a common theme in both above mentioned works.
 
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@Reveen I think you are agreeing with @Leila Hann super hard here. At least, I don't read their post as crticizing works that don't explain genre conventions.
Leila Hann said:
Ditto superheroes, with the secret identities that somehow AREN'T getting revealed left and right by any interested party with even moderate wealth and resources at its disposal. There are some superhero stories where this is justified, but precious few.
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Yeah. I'm reminded of how, in Into The Spider-Verse, we never really think about the sheer logistical challenge of staffing a research facility with scientists willing to kill a middle-schooler at the drop of a hat. Doc Ock is a Science Villain, of course she has Science Minions!

Asking about the vetting process doesn't actually improve the story at all.
 
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Reveen said:
Also, you're really not all that clever for pointing out that destiny and Black and White morality enforced by greater powers is dumb. Especially not if you're the Sword of Good, a Yud short story that a lot of people are impressed by but I think is piss that makes it seem like Yud's barely even read/watched Lord of the Rings, let alone examples of the genre that are actually interesting.
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I'm sure Yudkowsky will be absolutely crushed to learn that his anvilicious short story about the banality of evil, complete with an unwittingly racist protagonist who participates in war crimes, isn't a deeply sophisticated riff on the state of fantasy cliches after all.
 
I have been known to say, on many occasions, that I have no interest in ordinary humans.

To elaborate: pettiness frustrates me, whether it's in reality or in fiction. So does partisanship, and narrow-minded short-sighted thinking. I am well aware that this is realistic, and that most people care only about the people close to them -- but that doesn't in fact make such stories any less frustrating to read.

This is why I almost exclusively read fantasy and sci-fi -- because only in those "unrealistic" genres do we ever allow ourselves to write characters with ambitions beyond the immediate and banal, where we have characters that wish to save the world or rule the world or otherwise dramatically revise the setting in which they are written. Even then, I'm haunted by that obnoxious old saying: "villains act, heroes react." Frodo doesn't particularly want to leave his home; he does so only because Sauron threatens his life. Harry Potter would love to just live his life in peace, but can't because Voldemort believes in a prophecy.

Rationalist fiction -- when it's done well, which I'll happily admit is rare, I actually avoid most things explicitly tagged "rational" unless they come recommended from someone who's tastes I trust -- but at least in theory, rationalist fiction takes that to the logical conclusion, writes stories about people that are proactive, that seek to fix problems before they themselves have to suffer them, that don't need their village to be burned down or their parents to be killed to think that the status quo is unacceptable. In that regard, perhaps it might be better to call it "Singerian"or "utilitarian fiction" -- though by the nature of the community, there's rather a lot of overlap.

In that regard, while it's entirely true that realistic humans generally don't act in ways we'd consider "rational", that doesn't in fact make them any more interesting to me personally. If I wanted to read stories about petty, small-minded people hurting each other for stupid reasons, I'd just watch the news.
 
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