## How we might be able to make rational fiction more popular, and some possible reasons why we should. [BST][D]

* Author: u/Sailor_Vulcan  *Champion of Justice and Reason**
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3c7a8x/how_we_might_be_able_to_make_rational_fiction/
* Score: 0

* Created: 2015-07-05T15:27:33

### Post:

One thing I think is important to remember, which we all know but sometimes it seems like we can kind of sort of forget it, is that less intelligent people are not strawmen any more than we are; they have their own thoughts, motivations, and patterns of behavior, and they are not always the nincompoops that they sometimes seem to be (and sometimes are). I suspect there are actually a LOT more people out there who are otherwise naturally intelligent but have not learned how to use their intelligence effectively, and fall into the mental traps that our community tries to avoid, making them effectively less intelligent, even though they have the potential to think and act more intelligently.

I also suspect that it is partially a confidence problem. Maybe some people go through school and succeed, and because of that they attain the belief that they are smart, while others do poorly in school and attain the belief that they are not smart. Maybe the people who think they are smart also try more to be intelligent, and practice and practice and practice to hone their cognitive skills, while the people who don't think they are smart give up much earlier. Maybe this might create a larger gap in cognitive skills between people of higher and lower natural intelligence than there otherwise would be.

I recently had a conversation with one of my close friends and his mother, who are nowhere near as intellectual as I am, and I was trying to help this friend with an identity crisis he was having along with a bunch of emotional issues caused by his difficult past. While what I could do was rather limited since I don't have training in psychological therapy, I did suggest to him that maybe one thing he should try was, "treat all of that psychological baggage like a cognitive bias, and *look* at yourself, at your thoughts, emotions, motivations and patterns of behavior, and ask yourself, what would it all look like to you if you saw yourself from the outside? Disregarding all the stereotypes, and all the judgements and all the emotional crap you went through, what does it actually look like?"

His mother's immediate response to this was to say that while people like me could do that, people like them just weren't smart enough. But I suspect that they COULD do it, if they practiced the skill enough, and had others who could help them learn it.

I suspect that rational fiction as a genre is obscure because most people don't like thinking really deeply or all that much for fun. Oftentimes because they're not that good at it (or they think they're not). However, even intellectuals don't necessarily like to think deeply for fun. My mother, who's a psychiatrist and IS technically good at thinking, only enjoys it as part of her work as a psychiatrist. She spends all day using her intellect to help people at work, but as soon as she gets home, or really when she's anywhere other than at her office with a patient, she doesn't want to think deeply or very much at all. This is probably in large part because of a chronic sleep problem she has.

But back to the main point, I think we could make rational fiction more popular if we made it more accessible. Not by toning down the intelligence of our stories, but rather the difficulty of the subject matters.

One idea that's been in my head for a while is to write a story about someone who at the start is really irrational and gradually becomes more and more rational over the course of the story. I considered making this an autobiographical novel, but I'm worried that my memory is not good enough to write it, and that it would be filled with inaccuracies and continuity mistakes.

Increasing the popularity of rational fiction is important to me because in other genres, intelligence is too often misrepresented as not being useful for anything except giving cool gadgets to the REAL heroes of the story, and actually intelligent characters are WAY too often relegated to being the sidekick or the villain, if they're even included at all. When an "intelligent" character IS the hero, they seem to pretty much always be a strawman, who's only considered intelligent because they have glasses, speak incomprehensible technobabble or have a PhD, and NOT because they're actually shown to USE their intelligence to make intelligent decisions and solve problems. I'm not sure what the actual consequences of this misrepresentation might be. I'm not sure whether people see intellectuals this way because that's how we're commonly portrayed, or we're commonly portrayed this way because that's how people see us, or both. I'm not sure what effect this misrepresentation of intelligence has on life outcomes if any, but if it has any effect,  I suspect it makes people even less likely to want to develop and use their own intellects.

Thoughts?

### Comments:

> **u/IomKg** [+2]  (22 hours later)
> 
> When you write "rational fiction" do you mean rationalist? because rational fiction in itself should not be something people will avoid.
> In a lot of ways rational fiction is just fiction where the author needed to do more heavy lifting in the background.
> There are some things which people like in regular fiction that I suppose will not be possible, or at least not reasonably so, in rational fiction. But otherwise there is nothing particular in rational fiction that will make it more difficult for the reader.
> 
> Any difficulties i can think of at least are essentially just styles that writers use which might distance "casual" readers, rather then inherent hurdles to rational fiction in getting ration fiction read more..
> 
> If you mean rationalist fiction specifically then I think it will be fairly difficult to keep rationalist fiction both generally accessible and interesting, because one of the aspects of it is teaching, and in teaching. So the best that could be done would be a story which is interesting as a rationalist fiction for people who have less background, but for people that already know the principles etc. it will just fallback into "regular" rational fiction..
> Though that would be difficult in my opinion and most writers will have hard time pulling that off, so i think it would work better if writers will target the demographics seperately..

> **u/KZLightning** [+1]  (9 hours later)
> 
> A lot of what you have said sounds right. I think that current examples of rational literature are rather complex. If you want to get more readers, start simple and work your way up SLOWLY.
> 
> For example, most people have not been trained to think logically. So having a character think through problems logically and explain their thoughts would be a simple example of this. As the story progresses, the problems that they have available should increase in difficulty. At the same time, the problems should NOT be ordinary. They should draw attention. Also, if you are showing logical thinking, then you should avoid math. (The reason for this is that math often seems difficult and will turn people off.)
> 
> If the problem-solving and the story are integrated, then you can build confidence in the reader that they can solve these problems. This would be rationalist fiction that is accessible to ordinary people.
> 
> The problem with the current batch of rationalist fiction is that everyone is too intellectual. Your average people knows no statistics, little math and almost no logic. Your average rationalist fiction assumes knowledge in these subjects. So write your fiction assuming that readers really do know nothing about this. Your average person rarely makes decisions based on abstract factors. More often emotional and relational reasons are primary. Your average person is not aware of the reasons behind their own decisions. So start with a character in the same position as the average person and let them learn this. (Coming-of-age fiction is a particularly good way to do this.)
> 
> I have more suggestions, but I lack the ability to write any of these works.

>> **u/Transfuturist** [+3]  *Carthago delenda est.* (22 hours later)
>> 
>> > you should avoid math
>> 
>> Nope. You can use math, you just need good diagrams and good explanations. Cryptonomicon was good with this.

>>> **u/ElGuien** [+2]  (a day later)
>>> 
>>> Absolutely. Another, possibly better approach is to disguise it so people learn it without realising that's what they're doing. If you do it right, they won't ever realise that what they were doing was maths unless it's pointed out, because it has none of the things they associate with maths. (numbers, the notation, difficulty, tediousness, irrelevance to anything practical...)

>>>> **u/eaglejarl** [+1]  (3 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> I'm not sure how you do everyday-useful math without numbers or, at least, variables that represent numbers. Maybe things like graph theory, but that's not going to be sufficiently everyday-useful to make the reader retain it. 
>>>> 
>>>> Can you give an example?

>>> **u/KZLightning** [+1]  (23 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Maybe. I haven't read Cryptonomicon so I do not know how well it worked.

>>>> **u/eaglejarl** [+1]  (3 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> The diagrams were interesting but very jarring. They really broke the flow, and some of them were "well, duh! I already got that from the description!"

> **u/Jiro_T** [+1]  (a day later)
> 
> One thing which certainly doesn't help rational fiction is using rational fiction to sell Lesswrong-style ideas like cryonics, AI danger, etc.  It often amounts to "rational people come to agree with me", and to audience members who don't agree, comes across as preachy protagonists who think they are rational but have big blind spots.  Saying "if you're rational, you must believe in cryonics" gives an entirely wrong idea of what rationality is that will turn many people off.
> 
> Another thing to avoid is to have the rational character seemingly not need to know how to defer to authority or otherwise deal with people because his rationality makes everyone listen to him.  That comes across as wish fulfillment of the "I wish I didn't need to have social skills in addition to being smart" type.  (And I see some of that in HPMOR.)

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