scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3nw3br.md

Seeking examples of growth mindset in fiction

• Author: u/Swimmer963 *

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3nw3br/seeking_examples_of_growth_mindset_in_fiction/

• Score: 19

• Created: 2015-10-07T21:24:07

Post:

As people who care about rationality and winning, it's pretty important to care about training. Repeated practice is how humans acquire skills, and skills are what we use for winning.

Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get System 1 fully on board with the fact that repeated, difficult, sometimes tedious practice is how we become awesome. I find fiction to be one of the most useful ways of communicating things like this to my S1. It would be great to have a repository of fiction that shows characters practicing skills, mastering them, and becoming awesome, to help this really sink in.

However, in fiction the following tropes are a lot more common:

• Hero is born to greatness and only needs to discover that greatness to win - I don't think I actually need to give examples of this?]

• Like (1), only the author talks about the skill development or the work in passing… but in a way that leaves the reader's attention and system 1 reinforcement on the "already be awesome" part, rather that the "practice to become awesome" part. Examples of this are HPMOR, and the Dresden Files, where most of the implied practice takes place between books.

• A training montage, where again the reader's attention isn't on the training long enough to reinforce the "practice to become awesome" part, but skips to the "wouldn't it be great to already be awesome" part; TVtropes has many examples of this.

• The hero starts out ineffectual and becomes great over the course of the book, but this comes from personal revelations and insights, rather than sitting down and practicing. Nice Dragons Finish Last is an example of this.

Examples of exactly the wrong thing:

• The Hunger Games - Katniss is explicitly up against the Pledges who have trained their whole lives for this one thing, but she has … something special that causes her to win. Also archery is her greatest skill, and she's already awesome at it from the beginning of the story and never spends time practicing.

• Ender's Game: Ender manages to beat a more experienced player 2 out of 3 without ever touching the game controls prior to the contest. Later on, he trains his troops, but he is already magically there himself.

Examples that approach the right thing:

• The Pillars of the Earth - Jack pretty explicitly has to travel around Europe to acquire the skills he needs to become great. Much of the practice is off-screen, but it's at least a pretty significant part of the journey.

• The Honor Harrington series: the books depict Honor, as well as the people around her, rising through the ranks of the military and gradually levelling up, with emphasis on dedication to training, and that training is often depicted onscreen – but the skills she's training in herself and her subordinates aren't nearly as relevant as the "tactical genius" that she seems to have been born with.

• Groundhog Day and similar types of stories. Shows pure growing mindset and determination, no extra talent.

Comments:

u/Gigapode [+22] (an hour later)

I bet you've already read it and included it in your Groundhog Day bullet-point but just in case, Mother of Learning does this.

The Tamora Pierce series Protector of the Small does it, though my memory of them is about a decade old. The fanfic crossover with HP called Ambiguous Artifice seems to combine born to greatness and a lot of hard work if that appeals.

u/8gigcheckbook [+8] (2 hours later)

Protector of the Small is a great example. Tamora Pierce's other works fail on this front: Daine is born with a unique system of magic. Alanna is better, as she trains a lot, but she's also chosen by the Goddess and was born with a magical Gift and a talent for healing.

Protector of the Small has Kel doing good old fashion work to improve, and highlights the skills she starts the book with as a result of the same sort of training throughout her life.

u/lehyde [+6] Nudist Beach (2 hours later)

I bet you've already read it and included it in your Groundhog Day bullet-point but just in case, Mother of Learning does this.

Also Time Braid.

u/PeridexisErrant [+6] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (5 hours later)

Also Time Braid.

They do train, but there's a lot of strength-from-personal-reflection and strength-from-bloodline which we can't replicate in the real world.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+15] Godric Gryffindor (5 hours later)

All shounen anime ever, but especially Hikaru no Go, the amazingly addictive show (and manga) from which I generalized Tsuyoku Naritai.

u/TennisMaster2 [+10] (5 hours later)

I was always suspicious Hikaru no Go was where that came from; it's not nearly as prevalent an explicit Japanese cultural facet as your article made it out to be.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+5] Godric Gryffindor (7 hours later)

It also appears in Mahou Sensei Negima, thereby proving the point.

u/TimTravel [+1] (a day later)

It's not everywhere but it's pretty common.

u/None [+4] (a day later)

Weirdly enough, for an otherwise utterly irrational show, it tends to show up a lot in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, in which clever tactical thinking, hard work, and raw luck are often the only way for the mangaka to get his heroes through fights with strictly-more-powerful villains.

u/AlcherBlack [+1] (9 days later)

It was in fact a great show. Not that you mention it, maybe it actually played a role in me acquiring a sort of a proto-growth-mindset quite early on without me even explicitly realizing it...

I'll go recommend that show to some people who might be in need of it and see how it goes.

u/Transfuturist [+7] Carthago delenda est. (2 hours later)

Luke's journey in Star Wars is a good example of this, specifically his time on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. He levels up between Empire and Return, which isn't seen, but the difference between Luke in New Hope and Return is apparent, and Dagobah was a good part of it.

u/gbear605 [+3] history’s greatest story (21 hours later)

System 1?

u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (21 hours later)

From Thinking, Fast and Slow (but also a common bit of LessWrong jargon). Wikipedia sez:

The book's central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

u/Predictablicious [+2] Only Mark Annuncio Saves (an hour later)

Baby Steps, the Anime is entirely focused on training and reasoning about repeated failure as a way to improve the main character's skills. The show is about a guy learning how to play tennis from scratch and while he has some talents in visual cognition and analysis most of his improvements come from practice.

u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (4 hours later)

Why isn't Western media more like anime? They have so much more creativity and freedom to experiment, it's ridiculous!

u/None [+14] (4 hours later)

Welllll because it is, really. I mean, just because anime tropes allow for a higher level of baseline weirdness, doesn't mean most anime aren't just repeats of the same crappy tropes over and over again.

I mean, consider how many anime deal with cute girls doing cute things in high school, and don't even have airsoft battles or zombies. Or harem romantic comedies with soulless, no-personality male protagonists obviously meant to let the otaku audience fantasize about being surrounded by adoring beautiful women without having to relate to others.

With anime, the import process pre-filters things, so you see a selection of higher-quality material without having to browse through all the crap. There's actually quite a lot of good Western media when you exercise an equally strong filter.

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (6 hours later)

I'm not saying they don't have dreck, I'm saying that their total of creative and experimental film (that is, in the mainstream) is greater than ours.

u/None [+1] (17 hours later)

[deleted]

u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (17 hours later)

I can't really agree with that point. Some of the best anime out there never got a dub or were sold in the west and vice versa some of the worst stuff the industry shits out does get licensed.

The argument is not that the filter functions perfectly to only grab the cream of the crop. It's that the filter greatly increases average quality. For the stuff that gets imported, someone had to sit there and think, "Yes, this is good enough that it's worth the cost of importing", then they had to spend thousands of dollars on doing that. Unless that filter is no better than random chance, the stuff that gets imported is going to be of a higher average quality.

The exact same argument applies to work the fans do. The only works that get fansubs are the ones where some fan sat there and thought, "Yes, this is worth the hundreds of hours it's going to take to translate this". Because fans have limited time, they're going to be selective in what they translate. So they're applying their own filter, except the filter has somewhat different criteria.

u/None [+1] (18 hours later)

[deleted]

u/sir_pirriplin [+1] (a day later)

problem is that the companies that import that stuff are not interested in quality

What about fansubs? They don't get money, so presumably they chose what they honestly find more enjoyable.

u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

If fan translators could make legal money from what they do, and that money did not affect their selection method in any way (which rules out the option of licensing the Japanese works and selling the translated versions for profit), then perhaps we would be in the world where that filter is valid.

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

It's that the filter greatly increases average quality. For the stuff that gets imported, someone had to sit there and think, "Yes, this is good enough that it's worth the cost of importing", then they had to spend thousands of dollars on doing that.

That is the same argument that says the best shows are the ones that sell the most. Business decisions are extremely different from fan decisions, particularly when you consider that fan decisions are not for profit. I cannot disagree with your comment any more than I already do. UNDER EVALUATION

u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)

No, it's not the same argument. The argument is similar to one that says "books which get published tend to be better than books which don't get published". But that's not at all the same thing as saying "the best books are the ones that sell the most".

Business decisions are different from fan decisions, but business decisions are predicated on people either sticking around so that they can be fed advertising, buying the product, or buying the merchandising for the product. Those are all things that fans do.

A businessman purely seeking to maximize profit is going to put his money towards the things that he thinks will make him money ... but the way to make money is to have people actually willing to buy the product. So if a businessman is looking to put dubbing on an anime in order to release it to Western markets, he's not going to pick something that absolutely bombed and which no one liked, he's going to pick something that has shown some measure of success. We can be pretty sure that he's not going to be picking from the bottom 10%.

And yes, some of it is going to be shit. Sometimes our businessman is going to get a license on the cheap, sometimes his predictive power is going to be terrible (or simply fail him), sometimes he's going to select things which are generally palatable instead of those which are daring and bold ... but he's still applying a filter and that filter is still going to raise the average quality.

It's possible that we could even empirically test this if we had a big database of anime, whether or not they were imported to the west, and ratings, assuming that we could get past selection biases. Assuming such a database existed somewhere, my prediction is that the average rating for the set of all anime would be lower than the average rating for the set of all anime that got imported to the west.

(My views are somewhat colored by having briefly worked at a publishing company where I sifted through manuscripts to see which ones might be suitable for profit-motivated publication. The idea that this profit-motivated process doesn't incidentally filter based on quality is just ... well, I don't think I could disagree with it more.)

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

Okay, I can understand that. I should probably go see about having my comment-disagreeing module examined.

u/AugSphere [+1] Dark Lord of Corruption (a day later)

big database of anime, whether or not they were imported to the west, and ratings

anidb?

u/RMcD94 [+1] (13 hours later)

Cute girls doing cute things barely exists in western media though. It's either gone through massive sexualisation so it's hot girls doing hot things or uh I can't even think of anything else. Western media has a serious lack of female centric shows. I guess some kids shows ala power puff girls would come under it so the or would be it's demographically targeted at toddlers.

The harem thing is more common, but you can hardly use things that never or hardly happen to show that anime is similar to Western shows.

u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (18 hours later)

Define cute? Because the first thing that comes to mind (for me) is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, which values cuteness over hotness and tends to be romantic but not sexualized. And that archetype (or shades of it) shows up everywhere.

u/RMcD94 [+0] (18 hours later)

I suppose I could for the discussion accept that definition as cute, but I'd say that that's a cute girl doing cute things which isn't the same as cute girls doing cute things.

There's a very different use of characters there, one is cute as an additive or reward or even contrast for the main character and the second is cuteness for its own sake which as I said seems restricted almost entirely to very young children demographically.

Flicking through that trope page some of the examples, like Her, under films really don't seem to fit the concept brainz was referring too that is very common in anime.

Edit on my phone but having a look at brains comment looks like I misunderstood what he was saying anyway

u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

Western media has a serious lack of female centric shows

Two Broke Girls, Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23, New Girl, Mom, Orange is the New Black, Weeds, Pretty Little Liars, Scandal, Gossip Girl, Parks and Recreation, The Good Wife, Veep, Jesus Christ, do I really need to say more? The fact that none of it is moeshit makes it that much the better.

Full disclosure: I actually like moeshit.

u/RMcD94 [-1] (a day later)

I haven't seen a lot of those but those I have like Orange is the New Black don't fit at all...

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

That's your complaint? That Orange is the New Black doesn't fit? These are all female-centric shows; you are wrong about whatever dearth you thought there was. Are you committed to the truth or not?

u/RMcD94 [+0] (a day later)

I thought you were talking about the cute girls doing cute things part.

Don't know why. My bad sure enough.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+5] Roll the Dice on Fate (16 hours later)

A fair part is inherent to the medium. A large assembly of people in a musty church is about as expensive to draw and render as a large assembly in space. Hell, if you go detailed enough the church might actually be more expensive in some cases, so why not do it space? While live action can send actors to a church for cheap, rendering a spacescape is horrendously expensive in CGI. This means that smaller companies can pump out crazy shit at a lower cost, allowing them to take greater risks.

I mean, imagine trying to shoot Attack on Titan or Gundam in live action. Sure, you could technically do it but the price would be astronomical (no pun intended). It gives them much greater freedom to be off the wall.

Think back to western attempts on the same medium and you'll find they can be pretty damn creative as well. Consider Courage the Cowardly Dog or Wren and Stimpy or even South Park. The differences between that and live action are many and obvious, because they do just have more freedom.

Say you're a creative young writer in the US and you want to do a zombie scene. Just a throwaway zombie scene for a gag on a low budget live action show. It's a huge hassle and like as not just not going to happen. In an anime you can totally do it pretty easily.

u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (17 hours later)

Definitely agree with this. There's a reason that most film students make films set in their city with people their age as cast members, and it's not that they're completely lacking in creativity.

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

Many anime, including Attack on Titan and Gundam themselves, ironically, use extensive CGI, so your argument does not entirely make sense. I will admit that the plausible detail necessary to integrate CGI into anime is much less than that necessary to integrate it into live action, but it is nevertheless present.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (a day later)

Fair enough, I did not know that. One's still much cheaper than the other though, right?

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

I don't know enough to say that.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (a day later)

I mean, I feel like live action CGI should be more expensive because of the greater level of detail and less stylisation. That said, I also do not know for sure.

Edit: That said, the argument still holds together so long as the variance in cost between between a mundane and fantastical scene is low in anime and high in live action.

u/None [+1] (a day later)

That's a huge factor, yes. Japan has the attitude, "Comics and cartoons are for children and nerds, but holy hell they sell to those markets like hotcakes so pay for good stuff!" Much of Western media has the attitude, "Comics and cartoons are for children and nerds, so why bother putting effort into such products? They'll buy whatever we make."

u/thedarkone47 [+5] (36 minutes later)

There's [this] (https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/). There is quite a bit of grinding as Juan changes from an incompetent to a god among men. Also he has the powers of a RPG character.

u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (2 hours later)

Yeah but in his case, he learns exceptionally quickly and training's a lot easier when you can get measurable proof of progress every time you practice. I'd be more impressed with him if he wasn't noticeably getting stronger after every practice session.

u/LeonCross [+7] (8 hours later)

I'd imagine that, even if learning at a normal human rate, if you somehow had tangible an objective measure of your "skill level" and "experience towards next level" it would be much easier to convince system 1 anyways.

"Look system 1! See! Look at that EXP going up when I do things! This is immediately satisfying!"

u/IllusoryIntelligence [+3] (a day later)

Gamification tools like fitocracy code academy and duolingo are pretty good real world examples of that. I mean they aren't close to providing perfectly accurate measurements but there is something inherently satisfying about filling bars.

u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)

Well, yes, that's exactly what happens with biofeedback, but that's not something you can generalize from fiction to the real world. Yet.

u/None [+2] (a day later)

That's basically how weight-lifting works, yeah.

u/Stop_Sign [+2] (14 days later)

If you haven't, look up The Games We Play (story only) on spacebattles. It's everything the gamer should have been, and he levels up wisdom first

u/thedarkone47 [+2] (14 days later)

Bro, did you even look at the link before commenting.

u/Stop_Sign [+1] (14 days later)

Welp

u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (3 days later)

This is one of the aspects of Worm I loved. She builds her costume over time, gradually expands her repertoire of techniques.

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