- Location
- Athens, Greece
Hmm. Well, she's intelligent and determined, but the story also specifically values emotions and makes the completely-true-and-factual-but-not-particularly-rationalist-flavored point that (entirely) removing emotions from decision-making doesn't actually get pure and perfect reasoning, but instead can and does cripple people, using a drug that does just that as part of an overall point about motivations, reasoning, emotions and so on.
But again, even though that's actually pretty evidently true, it's not very Rationalist aesthetic, I don't think?
How do you choose goals without emotions in the first place?
The rationalist-as-emotionless-Vulcan is not a trope that rationalists believe in.
Again can you give a couple examples of fics that actually have this 'aesthetic' you are talking about?
There were attempts to define it more formally, but they consistently run into issue of technically excluding HPMOR because its world-building is not actually particularly consistent or logical. Some of it is due to the author's failings (see the portrayal of bullies as spawnable monsters who are weirdly self-aware about their role as bullies), while some of it is actually deliberate: HPMOR loves pointing out inconsistencies in Rowling's world-building and how the magical Britain is "insane", but that does mean it has to preserve those inconsistencies to begin with.
Neither author failings nor deliberate inconsistencies, would be much of a problem for a "definition". A definition could e.g. easily say that it's about an author *attempting* to create a consistent world, or alternatively to lampshade its inconsistencies -- if we actually decided that "consistent/logical worldbuilding" is the common single element we crave in rational fiction.
But there's no consensus on this, and that's why there's no particular strict "formal definition" (beyond what was voted for the sidebar, I guess), because the aspects of HPMOR that we enjoyed and we wanted more of are a fuzzy set, and different people valued the elements of it differently.
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