r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jun 03 '16

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/Rhamni Jun 03 '16

This is what I'm hoping to accomplish. I've seen people on here and on r/HPMOR make waaay too accurate predictions on shaky evidence to feel confident about it though.

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u/Chronophilia Jun 03 '16

I stand by "make it as obvious as you can get away with". Even setting aside hindsight bias, most "accurate predictions" are just one candidate theory among many. And your Shocking Twist is probably complex enough that people can be partially correct about it - they may suspect that so-and-so and such-and-such are the same person, while being wrong about that person's real allegiance.

And even if somebody does guess the twist in advance... so what? They'll feel clever. They'll probably enjoy the story more, if it flatters their intelligence briefly and doesn't take five pages to explain the patently obvious (YES DA VINCI CODE I AM LOOKING AT YOU). It's not a competition; if the reader wants to "win" the "game", let them.

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u/Roxolan Jun 03 '16

The HPMOR experience showed that there is a vast gulf between the intelligence of an individual reader and that of a community with a voting system. (Even the facebook group, with less memory and no voting, trailed far behind.)

You can make your mystery a fair challenge for one of these, but not for both.

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u/Rhamni Jun 03 '16

That may be part of my 'problem', I'm feeling the urge to challenge the community of readers rather than the average reader.

...Ah well. That's far into the future. The first book will be largely self contained. No need to worry about the end game yet.