scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3zmfh8.md

[Q] Is reality rational?

• Author: u/Gaboncio *

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3zmfh8/q_is_reality_rational/

• Score: 10

• Created: 2016-01-05T21:56:58

Post:

Just a stray thought that I came across and couldn't get rid of. If you take any subset of people in the world, and write a story about what they do (with some artistic license to make it bearable, of course), would you consider it a rational story? I ask, because I know hope that even though each individual person doesn't necessarily always act in their best interests, the universe as a whole has sane and consistent rules that must be followed.

This leads nicely to a second thing I've been thinking about: what is the distinction between rational and realistic fiction? Is it the fact that the main character is smart and usually acts in ways that benefit her? I'd love to know everyone's thoughts on this.

EDIT: I meant rational in the second bit, not rationalist

Comments:

u/alexanderwales [+33] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)

Reality fails on the first bullet point on the sidebar, then continues to fail its way through all the rest.

• Nothing happens solely because 'the plot requires it'. If characters do (or don't do) something, there must be a plausible reason.

If you were just asking about reality, maybe I'd give this one, because reality doesn't have a plot. But if we're talking about directly transcribing reality into story form and presenting it to an unsuspecting reader, people fail at having plausible reasons for their actions all the time. You don't need to look much further than the "crimes" section of your local newspaper to see that. Actions and consequences just happen with no conscious thought given to them. Maybe the reality-story still doesn't demonstrate a plot, but much of the time people would be acting in ways that were apparently pointless and arbitrary. At best, we might say that they're governed by hidden brain processes that aren't part of conscious thought.

• Any factions are defined and driven into conflict by their beliefs and values, not just by being "good" or "evil".

I can sort of give reality this one. Internally, a lot of people honestly believe that the world is made up of good and evil, so I suppose this criteria is saying something like "people might behave as though there is true good and evil but the story makes it apparent that this is a construct of their mind"? Also, lots of people in reality aren't driven into conflict by their beliefs and values, they're driven into conflict by those same hidden internal processes. When two men get into a fist-fight in a bar, this is usually not reducible down to beliefs and values. It's just two people looking for a fight. There's a lot of conflict in the world that just happens because people behave irrationally; it's the sort of thing that's frowned upon in a rational story.

• The characters solve problems through the intelligent application of their knowledge and resources.

This is sometimes true of reality, but there are lots of times that problems get solved through luck, outside agents, or just go unsolved. If you were transcribing reality, you'd see all sorts of things that look like deus ex machina. And conversely, you'd see people fail even though they were doing everything right. Worse, you'd see people using obviously suboptimal solutions that their resources and knowledge should allow them to realize. Strictly speaking, I suppose I'd have to say that reality passes this criteria, but only because it doesn't say that characters exclusively solve problems through the intelligent application of their knowledge and resources.

• The rules of the fictional world are sane and consistent.

Strictly speaking, I (probably) have to give this one to reality as well. But most of the "rules" that you can see at the human level of reality aren't actually rules at all, they're just things that are agreed upon, emergent, or are useful fictions that people keep up. Most of the rules that people use in everyday life aren't really rules at all, so by that metric reality fails. But this leads right into your next question.

#What's the difference between realistic and rational fiction?

I'm being slightly contrarian above, but part of what I'm getting at is that it's really a matter of what the story is. Rational fiction is, to some extent, about peeling back the layers until you can get to the source. It's not really a matter of whether things happen because the plot requires it, it's about whether the frame hung around character decisions is one that allows for the reader to understand. That's why you see reframing done in rational stories quite a bit; some stories just don't expose the internal thinking of a villain, but just by dipping into their head and getting a look at the facts known to them, we can make a story (more) rational without changing their actions.

You could write a story about a real life dictator that made him out to be a cartoon villain who was innately evil. You could even do this without fudging any facts. Or, if you were being similarly selective in what you put into your frame, you could explain everything that he did, the source of his beliefs and values, how he saw the world, etc. The "correct" framing is subjective, but I believe that increased information usually results in increased complexity. Rational fiction isn't about increased complexity per se, it's more about selecting a frame that maximizes how much sense things make.

Often, this moves fiction closer to reality. But I think that it can go the other way as well, moving reality closer to fiction by framing it as more sensible than it really was (even without changing any of the salient facts).

u/Sailor_Vulcan [+11] Champion of Justice and Reason (32 minutes later)

I think part of what makes rational fiction rational fiction is that it's portrayed realistically, and characters make decisions that they would actually make if they existed in real life. A very very large portion of fiction that takes place in the real world doesn't do that. Of course, if it were just this, stories like Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes might be considered rational fiction for its time. But clearly Don Quixote isn't quite rational fiction and not just because it is a bit deathist at times or because it was influenced by christianity. Don Quixote does have pretty consistent worldbuilding and realistic characterization. Getting some things wrong, even if it is significantly wrong, isn't enough for a work to not be rational fiction, because that would cause a lot of works of rational fiction to possibly suddenly be no longer qualified for the genre just because some more people come along who are better at it or some new knowledge overturns prior perceptions, etc. People can have different priors, or simply live in a time where it would never occur to even the best of people to question certain common-sense assumptions. If a work of rational fiction has an unrealistic ending given the premise, then it should be because of information that the author wasn't aware of or didn't notice, not because their methods for deriving their ending from their premise were wrong.

Here is the reason that Don Quixote doesn't quite cut it as rational fiction. An important part of rational fiction is not just that the worldbuilding is consistent, but that there are rational/intelligent characters, and that rationality/intelligence is portrayed realistically. In rational fiction, your protagonist wins on their own merits and by thinking things through, rather than on being chosen by the gods or having some powerup or special item or genetically inherited ability etc.

u/LiteralHeadCannon [+7] (5 minutes later)

From personal experience, absolutely not.

u/rineSample [+8] (4 hours later)

Somewhat relevant post by Scott Alexander

u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)

And a very similar post from Charles Stross (which links to Scott Alexander's post).

u/Gaboncio [+2] (20 hours later)

Yeah, I think these best capture the essence of what I was asking. Really funny too!

u/Xtraordinaire [+4] Team Glimglam (2 hours later)

It can be rational, it can be rationalist, or it can fail spectacularly.

Depends on the people featured in the story. In general reality is a good setting for a rational story because yes, the rules of the world are very much what we call consistent. Generally people in the world are not "good" or "evil" but rather a shade of gray and act at least semi-rational. However, people do not always act rationally, and what's more, some people are rewarded for their irrational behaviour. It's called "luck". It makes a nice story, but it makes an irrational story.

For example, in a perfect rational story there is no America. Columbus sails West and dies to starvation or, more likely, mutiny. In reality, his clearly wrong ideas about circumference of the Earth lead to a lucky discovery.

As for what constitutes rationalist story, the sidebar makes it pretty clear, I think. Rationalist story is problem solving using certain techniques, with no relevant information being withheld from the reader.

u/ctulhuslp [+1] (12 hours later)

Yes, reality is the most rational thing we've ever seen, it's just too big complex for any one person to understand all dependencies, so it may appear unreasonable if you don't take it into account. If someone seems to act "irrational", it is mostly because observer has no idea about his reasons.

If we go by points in the sidebar:

• plausible reason - it is always there, duh. It is just that getting to it sometimes requires literal ages of smartest people of the planet to find this reason.

• Again, duh. It's obvious that everyone has his reasons.

• Sort of. Characters are trying to solve problems through intelligent approach; first, they can be wrong, second, their opponent is not any less intelligent and thus those over-the-top-complex Lelouch-like plans don't really work; third, there is no full or perfect information, so again, over-the-top-complex plans don't survive contact with reality. And a lot more reasons, I guess.

• Physics, duh.

So, basically, reality is fully rational, it's just too deep and complex to really understand why without getting a degree about this specific field.

And difference between rational and realistic fiction is that realistic one depends on quality of pieces of fiction; generally, I feel, realistic one does not simplify reality to a degree where everything is perfectly reasonable; it is, but getting to it should require years/decades/aeons of research, not "I thought for 5 minutes after skimming through handbook and discovered relativity theory". Same with reasons behind people's (err...) actions: psychology is hard. Like, centuries of research by really smart people and getting PhDs and lifetime of hard work to understand fraction of it hard. If you understand it without deep research, you only understand some grossly oversimplified part of it.

TL;DR: whether some realistic fiction will be rational depends entirely on this piece of fiction; reality is as rational as you can get; reality may seem irrational if you don't do your research because science is hard and no human being can do enough research to understand all of it; difference between rational fiction and reality is, as far as I've seen, in the proper research taking really small time and giving almost no error and being all too easy in rational fiction, and in character almost always having access to unrealistically good information.

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

I disagree with calling reality itself rational. It has rules and constraints imposed on itself, but it doesn't behave intelligently. Neither do its agents. People always have their own reasons for things, obviously, but rarely are those reasons consciously determined by the agent. You can look at almost any emotionally driven reaction as irrational. Increase the number of agents involved and the situation is almost guaranteed to progress irrationally, irrespective of what should happen. Although, once the number of agents is large enough, it then becomes dictated by trends that can be researched and found within the sets that the agents belong to.

u/ctulhuslp [+1] (2 days later)

Err...I thought that setting having well-defined rules without contradictions is enough to call it rational; as setting does not have neither any intelligence nor behavior to speak of, it is impossible to tell anything about (un)intelligent behavior of it.

No, I'm afraid I can't. Emotions serve some evolutionary purpose - for example, ensuring social bonds that improve chances of survival of a genetic strain. Just what is the purpose of emotion is deeper biology than I know, but they developed through rational and mostly understood processes and thus can't be called "irrational". Calling laws of nature and their consequences "irrational" is generally bad idea(purpose of rationality is improved modelling of reality), and emotions are byproduct of evolution.

Now that I think about it, I probably don't understand something about rational fiction, because in my head it loosely equals well-defined setting, where anything not in the rules is derived from them in rational way. So I don't see any problem in irrational agents as long as whys and hows of their actions are rational(so, existence of mad person is rational because it does not contradict setting, even if his actions do not seem such). So there seems to be miscommunication due to differing definitions of rational fiction, and mistake seems to be on my side. Sorry.

u/Kishoto [+1] (5 days later)

Huh. I meant to respond to this days ago. Anyway....

Evolution is a rational process, in that it follows clearly defined laws (the laws of the universe) It's not an intelligent process, strictly speaking, but I can acknowledge it's rational in context of what we, as people, consider rational. However, that doesn't mean that the actions of the agents spawned from such a process is a rational one. Of course, emotions serve some sort of purpose. That doesn't make emotional decisions, in and of themselves, rational. A rational decision is one where you consider, to the best of your abilities, the truth of a situation, and make a decision that (again, to the best of your knowledge) will lead to the truth you desire most, based on whatever utility functions you may possess. Emotions naturally inhibit such a process. They make it much easier to distort the truth of a situation, and cause us to act in ways that our logical selves would consider irrational. This isn't always a bad thing, per se. But I simply can't call emotions, in and of themselves, rational.

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