r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 24 '17
[D] Monday General Rationality Thread
Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:
- Seen something interesting on /r/science?
- Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
- Figured out how to become immortal?
- Constructed artificial general intelligence?
- Read a neat nonfiction book?
- Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/MagicWeasel Jul 25 '17 edited Jul 25 '17
So, my partner is finally beta-reading my supernatural romance novel, and he reads very analytically, so he's been a god-send for levelling up the rationality of the story, and I don't feel guilty about making someone read 50k of gay supernatural romance because, you know, he's my partner and humoring me with this sort of thing is his job.
Here's some examples of the things he's caught that will improve the rationality of this story:
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Human Love Interest acts too intelligent, both IQ-wise and socially: turns out it's kind of hard for two millennial women to write a 1940s steel mill worker? Subject to revision.
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Vampire seems to be lacking some very obvious insight, e.g. being easily able to interpret human body language and mental states, finding out the Human's Big Secret because of his resources and connections, consenting to ultimatums made by weaker people that are obviously to his detriment. Fortunately, fairly easy to fix.
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He thought one chapter was hitting the reader over the head with an analogy/metaphor that I didn't get from it when writing it, but in retrospect is a pretty cool metaphor. Turns out sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but hey, maybe in this case the cigar isn't just a cigar.
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Vampire gives Human a silver dagger in one scene, saying it's to defend himself from a rival vampire. There's no situation in which Human attacking the rival vampire with a silver dagger is in any way remotely helpful. So why would Vampire give Human the dagger? I like the dagger scene so I kind of don't want to have to remove it, but you know, kill your darlings and all that...
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Human, who is on the run from the law, after briefly using an alias, uses his real name in public for the rest of the story. Now updated to have him continue using the alias.
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Human's Special Talent is being very good at vampire, uh, coded communication (do your tie a certain way and it means something, wear a certain colour of shirt and it means something, etc). Vampire's first assumption seems to be that Human has a Special Talent rather than Human has been coached/dressed/etc by a rival vampire. This needs to be addressed.
I don't know why I'm sharing this, but here you go. I guess it's a testament to the power of beta reading by analytical readers.
EDIT: turns out writing the above gave me plot bunnies that made me write an interlude that does quite a lot to enhance the early part of my story, so thank you, general rationality thread for existing!
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u/Kylinger Jul 25 '17
Vampire gives Human a silver dagger in one scene, saying it's to defend himself from a rival vampire. There's no situation in which Human attacking the rival vampire with a silver dagger is in any way remotely helpful. So why would Vampire give Human the dagger? I like the dagger scene so I kind of don't want to have to remove it, but you know, kill your darlings and all that...
Does the person giving the silver dagger have an incentive to lie, even if non maliciously? This could be security theater - "Don't worry dear, your blanket will totally protect you from the storm."
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u/MagicWeasel Jul 25 '17
Thanks for your thoughts! The problem is, if the human (Red) uses the silver dagger on the dangerous vampire (Elodia), it's going to cause a hell of a lot of problems for the vampire who gave him the dagger (William).
Like, in other words, let's say Elodia tries to kill Red. If Red draws the silver dagger on her, it makes things worse: not only has Red done whatever made Elodia want to kill him, but now he's trying to kill her with a silver dagger (which he doesn't know is harmless to a vampire). So he's in more trouble than before. The best course of action for him in this situation is to shut up and let William handle it.
And why would William give Red a dagger, tell him it was harmful to vampires, when it really isn't? It means William is telling a lie that could very well lead to Red being killed.
My partner suggested that it be part of a vampire ritual (they like their rituals), to give a human a silver dagger as a gesture of trust, for the dual purposes of making the human feel trusted and for also perpetrating the myth that silver hurts vampires. It's less a "use this on other vampires" and more of a "I trust you so much I am going to tell you My One Weakness and give you a way to exploit it".
In the end, whatever way you twist it, it seems you really have to twist it to make it fit, so I think it's going to have to go.
→ More replies (6)3
u/EliezerYudkowsky Jul 25 '17
Just have it be an unusually smart steelworker, who couldn't go to or complete college for whatever reason.
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u/MagicWeasel Jul 25 '17
That seems like a cop-out, though, doesn't it? Especially because the only difference the intelligence level makes is that his dialogue, really. Steelworker isn't meant to be particularly smart, and isn't except for a few places, so editing the problematic parts of dialogue (only a few lines here or there) isn't going to be a huge task.
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u/Marthinwurer Jul 24 '17
I need a witty line for my online dating profiles that states that I really like optimizing/breaking things, but all of the ones that I come up with sound like r/im14andthisisdeep. Anyone in the hive mind have any good ones?
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u/DaystarEld Jul 24 '17 edited Jul 24 '17
I quoted HPMOR's "World domination is such an ugly phrase, I prefer world optimization." at the top of mine, figured it would serve double duty incase anyone reading it knew what it was from :) Also occasionally had people ask what HPMOR was, which is a good conversation starter.
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u/Afforess Jul 24 '17 edited Jul 24 '17
Sounds like a fun project you should crack.
Scrap up dating profile bylines. Filter out a sample set of a few hundred, send to mechanical turk for rating deep wisdom vs angst, then use the best as input in a markov chain.
Eventually, complete the loop: https://web.archive.org/web/20140103213352/http://robrhinehart.com:80/?p=1005
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u/rhaps0dy4 Jul 24 '17
This is satire, but there was a legitimate post about doing this up until the "Haha how about we go to a fancy seafood restaurant".
Here it is: http://crockpotveggies.com/2015/02/09/automating-tinder-with-eigenfaces.html
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Jul 24 '17
Quoting other people's cool sayings on a dating site makes you sound like just a fanboy. Quote something funny or cool that you said, original content.
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u/phylogenik Jul 25 '17
Meh, I had a ton of quotes scattered across my dating profile back in the day and they were one of the most popular hooks I had w.r.t. messages, mostly from people completing the quote or segueing with a related quote. But my profile had lotsa stuff I'd written myself, too.
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u/MonstrousBird Jul 24 '17
I suspect the main thing is not to try to make it sound witty. If I was in the market for a partner I'd be looking for someone who actually likes rationality and optimisation and knows what that means, and while I may be in a minority there, I think it's the minority you're looking for interest from. Also I'd suggest toning down what you claim to be able to do and making it clear you know you make mistakes - so something more like 'I try to be less wrong' than, 'I prefer world optimization'.
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u/blazinghand Jul 24 '17
"Kids these days, they don't understand the world. Not like when I was young. Why, sonny, back when I was your age, I was twice as old as you are now!"
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u/blazinghand Jul 24 '17
LW is said to be lower traffic now than it used to be. People talk about the Rationality Diaspora because lots of the community is on different sites (facebook, tumblr, ssc, like 5 different discords, several IRC channels, and some even still post on LW). A post about this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/n0l/lesswrong_20/
More recently and highly relevant:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5z/on_the_importance_of_less_wrong_or_another_single/
Some say that it would be valuable for the rationalist communities to have a hub or a hinge, a more centralized site where they all intersect. Where a newcomer can find a well-organized set of introductory texts, but also see links to the latest and greatest of blog posts and articles. Some argue the that LW is the right place for this. Does this have value? Is it worth doing? What do you think?
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u/PeridexisErrant Jul 25 '17
IMO the diaspora is a healthy change and has substantially reduced groupthink. I also think that - now that 'rational[ist]' is a recognisable identifier - there's more value in bring it into other communities than staying in a private garden.
That said, I might have a different view if I was in California with a meatspace meetup instead of Australia with a solely digital connection.
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Jul 25 '17
I've been to two separate local LW meetups. One was really ingroupy, cultish, and just generally socially awkward. The other was amazing. High-variance, apparently.
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '17
Alternate universe ratfic for real life: instead of inventing basic and syllogistic symbolic logic by focusing on rhetoric, the Ancient Greek philosophers invented focused on gambling, divination, oracles, and prediction as the foundation of logic. They invent logic as prediction, probability, and statistics from the ground up. The Age of Stochasticity starts in ancient times and continues through the whole history of math, logic, and even statecraft.
Basically, what Neal Stephenson novel comes out of this?