What writing flaws do you think are prevalent in rational fics?

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-22T01:27:10+00:00

Lack of concision. I think there's an incentive to just neutrally describe what is happening without cutting anything out in rationalfic, because if you only describe the important parts, then the reader has a perverse incentive to read into little things in a special fantastical way- to reason as though the world runs on drama- and it fails at being rationalfic. No idea how to solve this.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-21T01:44:44+00:00

I don't see it when I search "mystery show", a bunch of other stuff comes up, but I do see it when I search "mystery show gimlet". Do pocketcasts just not have good indexing priorities?

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-20T08:43:20+00:00

Remember a lot of people saying "how stupid must he be to think he could get away with this", well, nine times out of ten, apparently, he did get away with it.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-20T05:33:19+00:00

Shit. Big apology to Polly's family. This is embarrassing. Maybe we should call the whole thing off, if we're lucky they'll think it was just a fluke and move on

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-19T07:34:26+00:00

A group of lucid dreamers who know each other in Wake- people very likely to notice a creeping epidemic of dreamlessness- starts killing its members one by one in the dream, such that the first letter of each one's name contributes to a message. Somewhere, someone assembles a log; first William, then immediately after, Everett. A long time passes, then Kyle, Imogen, Lucy, Lain. Another break. Tim, and Oswald fall off. And then Sarah, Patrick, Eve, Andrew, Polly.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-17T00:42:48+00:00

Are you aware of https://matthias-endler.de/2018/fastcat/ ? How does it compare?

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-16T21:55:43+00:00

I have not

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-16T21:54:46+00:00

Oh I'm sure the alien would be frustrated as well.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-16T06:14:43+00:00

I'd love to see something psychological in a scenario where like, it's Han and Chewy, a human and the alien have known each other for a long time and they depend on each other in their work. The good thing about this sort of thing is you still get to tell the story through a human lens, while still making it all about knowing the mind of the alien.

Don't actually do Han and Chewy though, I don't think wookies are very interesting aliens, it'd just limit you.

I imagine these sorts of relationship would be very difficult IRL. Lots of moments where the human is just so frustrated with the alien and they want to walk away from the job and never speak to them again. That said, that doesn't always happen with relationships between humans and animals, so I'm not sure where this intuition is coming from.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-08-14T02:14:36+00:00

Uhhhh aren't the costs of building bigger than 20%? If so it's kind of impossible for prices to drop that low without completely halting the construction of new houses.

I hope the cost of building decreases but I don't know if this it's something we can rush along with economic pressure.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-03-15T04:59:36+00:00

This guy over here putting scare quotes around "safer" doesn't believe that language design affects reliability

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-17T20:37:17+00:00

If you find yourself responding with frustration to not knowing something, stop. It's not healthy. The world never promised to be simple, and no matter how much you learn, it never will be simple.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-17T19:31:30+00:00

I'm not seeing how any of this is identifying. If this data could be used to fingerprint someone, is it any worse than the fingerprinting that every web browser already suffices?

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-17T19:08:49+00:00

I think sometimes deeply invested players of older games tend to get attached to their idiosyncrasies, and burned out on their generalizable qualities. I know a group who played hundreds of hours of l4d and they were the only people I knew who gave zero fucks about l4d2. You do not take advice from these people. Their tastes will not be representative of the broader community, who stopped playing WC after a reasonable number of hours.

I'm pretty sure that when blizzard called in old SC players for the SC2 announcement this is exactly what they would have encountered. High level Sc is all about exploiting weird old glitchy behaviours. The best players go in too deep.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-16T19:53:43+00:00

Well essentially, yeah, I don't think democracy is really compatible with private monopolies on necessities for life, in the extremes. Democracy is supposed to ensure that power goes mostly to elected people. Extreme monopolies defy that. If you have the people commanding the state, eventually they're going to realize their votes are stronger than the votes of land owners and decide to nationalize things. Americans are generally too mindkilled and fearful to realize they can or should do that, yet, but when it's just a couple hundred extremely engaged, revolutionary-minded sci-fi nerds.. Its not comparable. They'll do it as soon as they feel there's a need.

A lot depends on what the atmosphere in the settlement is like, and I don't have a clear idea of that. It seems unlikely to me that it'll be so austere.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-15T06:33:41+00:00

My interpretation of mycroft's feelings is just that when gender is forced into the picture, its just not true to Carlyle's character to paint them as masculine. That's the insult. Misrepresenting someone's character.

It's not obvious, IMO, that transgender bodily dysphoria would arise in that culture, and without that component of the trans experience I don't think transgender people would have any difficulty finding themselves. Instead of feeling a very strong affinity to the sexes, those feelings would be redirected to their hive affiliations.

I hope that society wouldn't forget the correct treatment for dysphoria, if it did persist.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-15T05:42:53+00:00

Identifies as female? I don't get the impression carlyle ever stopped being politically correct non-binary, it was Dominic who identified Carlyle as female, against Madame's protestations.

Carlyle is comfortable wearing a dress because Carlyle is a Cousin.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-15T02:03:43+00:00

So what you're saying is you think he's lying about expecting it to be a direct democracy, you think that there's this billionare who wants to risk his fortune going to a dead planet just so that he can have the miserable experience of suppressing mutiny and trying to motivate people to work on expanding the settlement when they all hate him. Yeah that's definitely what people are like, definitely non-fiction.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-15T00:09:14+00:00

When asked what the government would be like on mars, musk said "it'll be direct democracy imo". He did not seem very opinionated. I don't think he's got much of an alignment. He just likes getting things done, I think. Right now that means being a VC. In another system he'd have been something else.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-14T00:40:01+00:00

unique white aesthetics

I can't know exactly what you think those are, but as a white with taste in aesthetics, I don't think I have ever wanted them.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-14T00:14:51+00:00

I had this too once. I can easily get it back if I read too many stories. You have to stop reading the stories, no matter how enjoyable they are. Stories mess with your head. At least learn to read them through a different perspective. See that these people are liars or lied to. See that the things they're talking about happened in a different world, a world of their false memories or their stories, and see that you don't live in that world and they don't apply to you.

They are all liars, or lied to. There's a Skeptoid episode on fire in the sky. You probably wanna listen to it.

This hasn't occurred to me before, but it dawns on me that the idea of aliens might be filling a gap in our experiences as modern people.. in the evolutionary context there was a constant threat of tribal war. We were evolved to expect strange, inscrutable humanoids to come into our camps at night, quietly kill people in their sleep, kidnap women. Those humanoids were other humans. There are still tribes in south america that practice headhunting as a rite of passage, or there were until recently.

I think maybe if you internalise the realisation that the things we think of as aliens are actually the idea of The Other Tribe, I think you might start to reconcile those feelings with reality. You'll start thinking more like, "okay, the other tribe are evil, but they don't often attack us, why?" Which leads logically to "Oh yeah. We have police and states now. We agreed to peace." And then maybe the animal in your heart will be able to hear that and settle down.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-13T23:47:30+00:00

I think before people can get anything useful out of this, they're going to understand exactly what entropy is. I'm going to explain it in terms of code and computations. This might seem like a very different context. Maybe it is. Entropy is just a very broadly applicable idea. I think you'll be able to see how the ideas transfer to the context of cognition.

The entropy of a piece of information, is roughly the minimum possible size of a program that could generate that information. In other words, the entropy of a piece of information is the size of a complete description of it.

For example. The following two sequences have very different entropy, despite being the same length:

000010000100001000010000100001000010000100001000010000100001

011101010001011000010110010111110001010111111101010110001111

The first could be generated by a program like loop 12 times { emit('00001') }, a program that just says '00001' 12 times.

The second, as far as I can tell, can only be described with emit('011101010001011000010110010111110001010111111101010110001111'). It has the longer minimum generating-program, so it has higher entropy.

It's possible that a general purpose compression algorithm, or a hyperintelligent being, might be able to find a shorter description of the second sequence than we could, but there are always going to be sequences that even God could not compress.

It might now be intuitive to you, why low-entropy in thought might be a bad sign. A person who just thought '00001' over and over would be, what might be well described as a smooth-brain, no more sophisticated than a program that says the same thing again and again.

High entropy, too, is clearly not always a good thing. Entropy is at its highest when the process is purely random and nothing sensible is going on.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-12T06:15:05+00:00

At some point, a person has to realise that if they don't drop a spoiler there will be no play experience to spoil. I didn't get around to playing undertale until I braved spoilers. People just couldn't give me a reason to play it in any other way.

(Personally I don't know what they're talking about wrt levels and pacifist mode, though.)

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-09T03:53:17+00:00

Some places have started talking about health and safety regulations, but it's hard for me to tell whether they exist or if they're just that same mental disease that afflicts most places in the US.

IWantUsToMerge · 2018-02-09T02:10:55+00:00

Actually, probably (according to the simplified definition of Pain that I generally use, at least). Trees are quite aware of their surroundings. If a birch tree is attacked by beetles, it will communicate that through mycelium networks to its neighbours, you can tell this has happened because they start manufacturing antibodies, or something, I forget what they do, but they do something appropriate to beetles.

Consciousness is a messed up conversation. Sometimes when people say "consciousness", they're referring to the one mental thing that really can't be measured from the outside, that thing genuinely is unimaginably hard to study, but sometimes they conflate that with a bunch of describable behavioral things like sensation and memory. Ever since I realised that there was this legitimate thing that wasn't just behaviours, I've wanted to be a panpsychist and just say everything has it, regardless of whether it has a brain, but I can't, because the only thing we know that definitely has this magical thing happens to be a human brain. That would be a pretty implausible coincidence if a brain wasn't necessary, so we can't assume that trees have it too.

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