Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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Mostly agreed.

Fundamentally a perfectly rational world is unrealistic. Humans do behave irrationally, even insanely. Humans also behave sub-optimally because they are trapped in systems full of crazy perverse incentives. The world itself is full of paradoxes and chaotic feedback loops; the best intentions rationally and logically executed can and do lead to perverse outcomes that would not and maybe even could not be forseen.

Sometimes a rational investigation terminates with a big WTF. People see UFOS or Bigfoot all the time, and they're not all nuts. What are they seeing? Not enough information. The universe doesn't present you with all the evidence so you can tie a neat bow around it. It presents you with a dirty noisy incomplete data set so you can ponder it forever. (See also: bounded rationality. Bayesianism deals with this problem by defining truth as a float instead of a boolean, which I kind of like. Bigfoot might 0.0137384 exist.)

The universe gives us Fermi paradoxes and dark energy and Godel's incompleteness theorem.

That being said, I do like the aversion to the idiot plot. It's a big pet peeve of mine. I also like stories where all the characters have depth. To me that's just good characterization, something often lacking in genre fiction. Even if the villain (or the hero) is mad or irrational, there is some depth to it and they have their reasons however twisted these might be. But a lot of that is just good writing.

I also like the aversion to the deus ex machina, which is also lazy writing. If there is some kind of super-thing that intervenes, it should too be developed as a character with depth.

Rational fiction does not depend on the entire world being rational, only the main characters. Choosing to make the main characters unusually rational is no worse a sin than making them the "prophesied heroes of destiny," or any of the other special abilities usually given to protagonists. The rest of the world is free to be crazy—many plot points in Methods of Rationality, for example, develop as a result of thinking critically about the canon irrational magical world. (Magic itself isn't irrational, but the lack of characters exploiting overpowered artifacts like Time Turners and the Philosopher's Stone is.)

Fundamentally a perfectly rational world is unrealistic. Humans do behave irrationally, even insanely. Humans also behave sub-optimally because they are trapped in systems full of crazy perverse incentives. The world itself is full of paradoxes and chaotic feedback loops; the best intentions rationally and logically executed can and do lead to perverse outcomes that would not and maybe even could not be forseen.

A perfectly rational world is supposed to be realistic. It is supposed to be like reality.

Even in our reality, people or the things they do don't always make sense, but you can find out the reasons why if you just dig deep enough.

So, that's kind of an interesting point, right?

If a character behaves rationally, like beep-boop minmax profits and losses and proceed from there, then it really doesn't matter whether they have depth or not, because it won't really impact the story.

The entire point of a character with depth, like say Harold Lauder in The Stand, is that that depth gives a reader insight into why they do what they do during the story. It provides tension between what is obviously the correct/logical thing to do, and then trying to predict what the character will actually do and why.

If characters are purely rational computational entities, it doesn't really matter what their backstory is, what their motives are, or anything else. The story rapidly devolves into a mere exercise in the reader checking the author's math.

The entire point of a character with depth, like say Harold Lauder in The Stand, is that that depth gives a reader insight into why they do what they do during the story. It provides tension between what is obviously the correct/logical thing to do, and then trying to predict what the character will actually do and why.

First question: did you read through all of HPMOR?

beep-boop, sociopath, scumbag rich kid, etc.

Second question: why do you call out the author of the article for using "him" instead of "her/them/xer/it/whatever", then proceed to use incredibly demeaning terms and guilty-by-association smears against another oppressed subgroup, the true nerds? Your comments have been drenched with slimy, wet, arrogant hypocrisy.

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The thing I dislike about so much of this rationalist stuff is that, honestly, it breaks apart like so much driftwood when confronted with the jagged incongruities of how real people work.

Maybe you are using too narrow a definition of "rational". It's easy to break something apart like so much driftwood when you're attacking a strawman.

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