37 KiB
[deleted by user]
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 12
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Created: 2018-09-03T15:37:46
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Comments:
u/LazarusRises [+43] (4 hours later)
All these answers are fine, but a big part of it is that most rationalist writers are SF/F nerds rather than lit fic nerds. A story about a rational/ist character trying to take down a corrupt CEO or working as a private eye who stumbles upon a conspiracy would be great reads, but nobody in this community is interested enough in reading or writing that kind of material.
u/VorpalAuroch [+18] Life before Death (4 hours later)
I'd read it (the former wouldn't be that different from The Metropolitan Man), but I doubt it would be believable.
u/Evan_Th [+60] Sunshine Regiment (an hour later)
Because, as MoR!Lucius said, if you can find ingenious exploits in the real world, you'll be exploiting them yourself instead of writing fiction. It's a whole lot easier to find them in speculative fiction where there haven't been millennia of real people pouring over the universe and it's rules.
u/Silver_Swift [+6] (13 hours later)
Not all rational fiction is about finding exploits in the world the story is set in.
Aside from that though, you can put the main character in unusual circumstances where they have choices to make that don't generally come up for most people. I can easily imagine a rational Pride and Prejudice kind of story or even a rational Dan Brown style thriller.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+12] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
I can easily imagine a rational Pride and Prejudice kind of story
What would you say is irrational about "Pride and Prejudice" though? The setting is, obviously, realistic. And while the tone is satirical and thus not always entirely natural, all characters have believable wants and needs and reasonably feel like real people. It's a story about, well, pride and prejudice, so of course they don't act fully rationally, but that's par for the course for humans. Unless you want to make a rationalist version in which Liz Bennet is actually a genius budding scientist lady á la Ada Lovelace, in which case, I'm reading that XD.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
I can easily imagine a rational Pride and Prejudice kind of story or even a rational Dan Brown style thriller.
Do you have any examples of these? Because right now, I can anly imagine a story where people solve their problems by talking about them and respecting each others' boundaries, and a story where people solve conspiracies by concluding they're too unlikely to exist.
u/None [+20] (2 hours later)
I'll assume you've already considered the cases in which a clearly fictional setting can present more interesting optimization problems than a real one, in which case:
Not to be impolite, but writing a story set in the real world and showing the main character succeeding in any significant way through "cleverness" increases the smartass potential of the work. That is to say, the more realistic the world the main character unrealistically navigates through is, the more likely people will think you're a smartass writing blatant wish fulfillment. Whether or not you're actually a smartass writing wish fulfillment is irrelevant, as is whether or not doing that is actually a bad thing. The point is that, in the end, negative judgement has been rendered, and people dislike being negatively judged. What science fiction and fantasy does is put a little cushion of unrealism around the work, to soften the incredulity of any person that wishes to criticize the work in bad faith.
Yes, I realize this is a vastly complicated and mostly bad reason. It's why holding yourself accountable to the opinions of others is a bad thing when it comes to writing, because you end up twisting your ideas in all sorts of absurd ways. To summarize:
You come up with a fictional idea.
In writing that fictional idea, you impart a layer of realism to help its intended audience feel emotionally resonant with the work.
In consideration of critics, you add a layer of unreality to the idea that was already fictional to begin with, in the hopes that they won't suddenly and conveniently forget the story is fictional when the time comes to criticize you.
But wait! You can't forget the people reading it in good faith, who would appreciate something with more connection to the real world...
Repeat ad infinitum until your wall of writer's block stretches into the upper atmosphere.
So what you see in rational fiction is a contrast between our mission statement (making realistic works of writing) and our fears (being the next Eliezer Yudkowsky, impaled on a critic's lampoon for sounding too sure of himself).
u/fassina2 [+4] Progressive Overload (2 days later)
That's the best answer for this question.
This type of story is out there, Ayn Rand in particular has some of them. They tend to be controversial, some people love it and see it as inspirational others hate it and criticize it.
From the short time I've been around this sub, it seems to me that most people here wouldn't like this kind of story..
u/Teulisch [+36] Space Tech Support (an hour later)
you dont see much fiction on the scale where rationist fiction would work for the real world.... start with a small town. set up a corrupt system of neopotism and stupidity. now add a smart guy. why is he there? easiest answer will be family, but could be something else.
so ya got a smart, honest, hardworking man visting his dear sick aunt out here in a small midwest town. he sees how the HOA and cops and bureacracy have hurt his aunt over the decades, so hes motivated to put an end to that. and now you have a rational fic of a man tearing apart a corrupt town, where the cops WILL pull him over and break his tailight just to ticket him... and arrest him for 'resisting arrest'. and then you get the tricky 'but how do we resolve this plot?' question. the proper way to handle it is slow and boring and full of lawyers. the entertaining fiction way tends to much less realistic however.
maintaining suspension of disbeleif for the heroes victories is the tricky part. is it more spy fiction, crime fiction, or mystery? there are different styles that could work.
u/pevangelista [+4] (7 hours later)
Can't you create believable super powers in a real world setting? Maybe your MC could become part of a powerful secret society or he could inherit a ton of money and resources.
u/Teulisch [+8] Space Tech Support (23 hours later)
honestly, I would not consider the superhero genere to be 'real world'. superhero and supernatural are settings that take place in an approximation of the real world, and keeping the mundane part of the world 'normal' really prevents them from being rational. the moment things get properly rational, you start moving away from the real world very quickly.
u/Kanddak [+6] (3 days later)
Hey, three other commenters here before me. You all very clearly stopped paying attention after the first sentence. Read the second sentence again. The phrase "believable super powers" in the first sentence clearly refers to large amounts of mundane money and power, not to supernatural abilities, and all the Worm recommendations are drastically off the mark.
u/ThrowAway2018badgoat [+11] (12 hours later)
Yes. See 'worm'.
u/Lemerney2 [+2] (2 days later)
It’s called Worm/Parahumans. Amazing read, if you’re into smart, realistic characters in a smart, realistic world. Although the character isn’t a rationalist, but some of the ideas she comes up with are amazing, and almost every single character arc is amazing and lands perfectly. One of my favourite stories of all time. And it’s available free.
u/sicutumbo [+29] (an hour later)
It leads to much more interesting results than real life would allow. If you're substantially smarter than the people around you, say in the field of business, you can make a successful company after years of work, but you're not going to fundamentally alter the history of even your country. Even in science/engineering, it would realistically take years or decades to make significant progress over the state of the art, and the most significant improvements that a single person is capable of making would be tools that primarily other people use to affect change. It doesn't make for a good story. In a fictional world with new and exploitable rules, a single person can meaningfully change things (i.e. make good drama for a story) in a short time without the author having to actually become proficient at a real life field. Similarly, the author can define the limits of the new rules, and isn't constrained by real life limitations that they would need to spend a lot of time researching.
If you have a story set in the past, where the protagonist doesn't necessarily need to be smarter so much as have a bunch of conclusions memorized (how to do chemistry, how a computer should be built, how to make steel, how to do science, etc. All things that are easier to know the conclusions that other people made than work it out yourself), then you have an uplift story. See A Hero's War, which is kind of a blend, because the protagonist primarily gains power through applying magic to make memorized machines work better or easier to make than through pure innovation on the magic system.
Also, math. Any real life field will generally require math, and the people who went through the effort to learn all that advanced math generally don't become authors.
Edit: One more thing: large conflicts that CAN be solved by a single person or a small group... already have been. Unless you want your story to focus on a much smaller scale than most authors are willing to write about, your story would need to be about societal change rather than the actions of a few people. An extremely competent group of diplomats is not going to be able to realistically resolve the situation with North Korea, fighting climate change is a global effort, corruption can be exposed but requires lots of other people to actually expunge, etc. Small numbers of people just aren't enough to fully solve a conflict, which generally isn't very satisfying narratively. People can be leaders of a larger movement, but they are hardly doing everything by themselves.
u/fassina2 [+3] Progressive Overload (2 days later)
> If you have a story set in the past, where the protagonist doesn't necessarily need to be smarter so much as have a bunch of conclusions memorized (how to do chemistry, how a computer should be built, how to make steel, how to do science, etc.
Maybe check out Dr. Stone.
It's a manga, the MC does exactly what you are talking about.
u/Sayath [+10] (4 hours later)
The closer you come to reality, the greater the scrutiny placed upon your work becomes. Consider a near-future, hard scifi story about a startup in chemical engineering. Such a startup would depend on some form of breakthrough to become relevant. This breakthrough would be the only break from reality, basically an additional axiom of "what if". Everything else would have to be derived from it. To properly explore the idea, the author would have to be a chemist themselves, or do extensive research that equals a chemist's background in the narrow space of the idea.
Now consider all the soft scifi / fantasy stories. The author is practically unrestricted to make up the rules, and their word is effectively final. In rational stories we demand a self-consistent system. Yet, the complexity of such a system is still trivial in comparison to real chemistry / physics / etc.
Beyond, the reader usually demands some greater scope of ability to effect change than what they are capable of in real life. Power. Influence. Overturning the status quo. Something beyond the mundane. I doubt you'd find reading about the day-to-day workings of an office clerk very compelling (it might be a different story if its a magical office clerk, or in the far off future with all these new gadgets!).
Whilst still maintaining that beyond-the-mundane level of impact, the author will be hard-pressed to write a compelling piece featuring present day reality. Most authors writing for entertainment have no history of making a significant impact on reality themselves. The people who are actually changing the world as we know it, are busy doing exactly that. Entrepreneurs, researchers, politicians, influencers, ... Most of these do not write. And what writing we have of them is mostly (auto)bibliographical, highly technical or propaganda.
If you wish to read about reality, I suggest non-fiction, e.g., historical accounts (rise & fall to power, war stories, ...), biographies, investigations into corporations and their dealings, etc.
Finally, in my opinion, most fictions recommended in this subreddit only excel at being rational(ist). Apart from these very worthwhile ideas, the writing is average at best. Especially the fanfiction stories suffer from this.
Consider "Pokemon: The Origin of Species", a greatly lauded work in this subreddit. The author tries hard to re-imagine the Pokemon fiction to be more sensible, and the actions of all characters involved to be more in line with it being some form of 'reality'. At the same time, the author wishes to communicate rational concepts and their implications on the characters' behavior. Yet, fundamental questions of a society living in such an environment are not discussed. It's still an adventure story with survival elements. Would you really send your 12 year old child into life-threatening situations (even if they mature faster)? With only one pokemon to start out with, when your status in society would enable you to arm them with more, or at least send an escort with them? Similarly, the economics of being a trainer are very much brushed aside.
In a way, the superficial inconsistencies have been polished off, only to reveal the deep cracks in the foundation of the work. Mind you, the story is still enjoyable. However, I reel at the lost potential by confining oneself to a specific known universe. The work could be so much more if it investigated what a society with combat pets ("pokemon" / "digimon" / ...) looked like in a more realistic way, investigating the societal effects thereof.
Of course, from the author's point of view, the story is different. An established universe leads to significantly less setup. The world can already be presumed to be known. Often the characters are also well known. Hence, only modifications of the status quo need to be stated. E.g., in "Pokemon: The Origin of Species", the author pretty much never gives any real descriptions (characters, scenes, ...). The focus is fundamentally only on the actions of the characters: Blue being a trainer, Red being a researcher, and Leaf being a journalist. In these actions the rationality is presented and dissected as an educational piece.
Now consider switching the same educational piece to reality. The author needs to provide far more description, setup and explain much more for the reader to understand. Reality is difficult. It requires far more effort to conceptualize (with too many rules, many of which are hard to grasp). Fiction is a simplified model, enabling the author to hand wave most of the difficulty away (placing it under your suspension of disbelief) and only introduce as much complexity as desired.
u/GeneralExtension [+3] (a day later)
I doubt you'd find reading about the day-to-day workings of an office clerk very compelling (it might be a different story if its a magical office clerk, or in the far off future with all these new gadgets!).
Or in the past.
u/sparrafluffs [+3] (8 hours later)
Worth the candle is a great example of the opposite of TOoS: the IRL author is writing a story set in a world which he himself has built. The reader is given in depth description of anything unusual. Even further, the author has written the character as a twisty sort of mind who inverts or avoids tropes, which requires the protagonist to explain what he's seeing, but, also, the world he is in also slightly twists those ideas.
So you have the author creating a narrator. The narrator has created unusual things in his various worlds which he describes. The world he is in has produced mutations of those ideas which require description. The game layer requires description.
In the end, when the work is complete, a motivated individual could theoretically produce an encyclopaedia which might rival one from that world.
u/Sayath [+3] (10 hours later)
Indeed, "Worth the candle" comes with a plethora of imagination and originality. The author explicitly shows that one's fantasy does not have to stop at generic game classes, and the usual elves-dwarves-humans trifecta that incurs. There's more to imagination than Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons.
Yet, if I may be so bold, the plot -- as far as I have read it -- is very generic. I have read countless survival stories, and I am growing very tired of them. While "Pokemon: TOoS" tries to distract from survival by interspersing it with other content, it still suffers from the same fundamental plot objective.
Personally, I wish to read stories that try to achieve something greater than bare survival. Living in an industrial nation, I hope to avoid threats to my well-being by not stepping into these situations in the first place.
Instead, I prefer reading about difficult decisions. How people form their opinions, how they convince others of their narrative, and how they act on it. Consider Giovanni in "Pokemon: TOoS". That is a character I can relate to. He ruthlessly pursues his goals, whilst making the hard calls, and living with the consequences of his choices. Beyond the shiny exterior (and whatever illusions we tell ourselves), reality resembles this web of complexity and competing priorities. There are no heroes or villains. There are only humans with motivations, goals, plans, desires, and incentives. Real people driven by conflicting ideals, but constrained by realpolitik.
To me, that's far more intriguing than planning the nth survival of the hero (of which I am absolutely certain, the book isn't finished yet) and his party (each of which, in most stories, will never suffer any form of permanent damage against all odds to the contrary -- and if so, it will be cured in approximately 5 to 25 chapters).
u/GeneralExtension [+1] (a day later)
far more intriguing than planning the nth survival of the hero (of which I am absolutely certain, the book isn't finished yet)
You might enjoy tragedy. Seeing how people make decisions, and...don't survive/succeed at everything.
u/best_cat [+6] (a day later)
A fantastic setting helps remove real-world baggage. This makes it easier to explore the heart of a philosophical dilemma.
Let's say I want to explore the idea of bail. Bail lets us free some factually innocent defendants defendants. But it means that some number of innocent people will be victimized by factually guilty defendants.
You could do this story in real-world Baltimore. Maybe the city is considering some bail-setting algorithm. The problem with real-Baltimore is that real-Baltimore is profoundly corrupt and racist. So, to anyone who's familiar with Baltimore can side-step the philosophical dilemma and just say that, no, obviously you don't let corrupt racists use opaque algorithms in their judicial system.
Re-write this into a fantasy setting, and we can rule out the non-philosophical objections. The algorithm isn't closed-source nonsense from a corrupt company; it's a spell with a precisely known failure rate. The king isn't a closeted racist; he's a dragon who hates all bipeds equally.
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
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u/best_cat [+1] (4 days later)
Anything is possible, but I don't think it would be easy to do. To invent an example pitch:
My story is set in Hiram, Missouri, and focuses on Jamal Okonkwo, an African immigrant who is framed by a corrupt prosecutor. Will the local judge realize that the seemingly-convincing evidence against Jamal rests on accounts from only two people?
So far as I know there's no such town as Hiram Missouri, so we could make up whatever details we want.
But, genre convention is that made up towns are assumed to be typical for their region, just like made up people are assumed to be normal (read: not secretly dragons or something)
So, I could assert that no one in Hiram Missouri is racist. Maybe the prosecutor is ONLY upset about an online dispute about crypto currency.
But readers are going to go into the story looking at things via a racial angle, because that's our expectation for how that conflict would play out in that region.
To some extent, my very premise would be taken as apologetics for actual-Missouri. And this would make it hard for people to get into the story.
I'd be better off just saying that its a corrupt sherrif who arrested an elf
u/Dragfie [+3] (16 hours later)
They do exist: It's called a biography.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
Writing real world rational fiction is a lot harder, because it vastly increases the amount of time and effort the author has to put into 'studying'. A lot of the fun of rational fiction is watching the main characters develop clever tricks, and exploit holes in their world's physics/magic systems. This is relatively easy to write, because the author designed those systems themselves, and has plenty of freedom to explain why this clever trick isn't common knowledge, or why the main character was the first person to invent this magical device, or develop this stratagem.
If you write rational fiction in the real world however, you greatly limit how much cleverness you can show, because you have to work within a pre-existing system, that all of your readers know as intimately as you do. If you write your character pulling off some kind of clever financial get rich quick scheme, there's a chance your going to have a reader who actually works in finance, and will tell everybody exactly how bad that clever plan actually is. If you write your character inventing something awesome, actual engineer will be on standby to explain exactly why it wouldn't work; if you have your scientist character discover something, you'll have actual scientists in the comment section screaming about how unlikely it is they discovered it first/how physics or biology or chemistry doesn't work that way.
The best way to get around this kind of thing is to write about jobs very few people have (like super spies), or to introduce some kind of new, never before seen element into the story; something nobody has any experience with... and that often is going to be magic, or some kind of scifi element. Things that let the author be clever, without having to worry about experts critiquing their plans, because they're the only expert that matters when it comes to the magic system they just invented.
There are so few real world rational stories, because setting it in the real world greatly hampers the amount of clever stuff you can have in the story, because suddenly you have to put so much more work into justifying everything. If HPMOR was set in the real world, people would start asking questions about Hogwart's safety regulations, or why battles were allowed, or just how expensive such an awesome school would cost, or why it was allowed to operate with so little oversight, etc... Setting in a magical world silences all those questions, and lets the author focus on being a good writer instead.
And also world-building is half the fun of rational writing. Creating a standard fantasy or sci-fi world, and then trying to make it consistent and sane, is fun. Writing about how rational agents would react to a sudden shift in the Force heralding the appearance of a strong Sith user, is almost instantly entertaining. Writing about how rational agents would react to the sudden appearance of a powerful new terrorist group is less instantly fun, about a dozen times more complex, and at least 60% harder to write.
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
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u/None [+1] (4 days later)
What do you find entertaining?
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
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u/None [+2] (4 days later)
If you liked metropolitan man, then you'd like most star wars rationalist fiction. The Sith are just human force users, but evil. Essentially a person, but with precognition, telekinesis, mind control, and a whole host of other powers, dedicated to increasing their power at all costs. Given that you didn't know what a Sith is, I think you'd actually like most rationalist fiction, once learned what they were about :)
u/LieGroupE8 [+5] ** (9 hours later)
I wrote a post about this a while back. My opinions remain mostly the same.
I think rationalist fiction in the real world is trickier to write, but still could be pulled off in an interesting and satisfying way. It needs to have the right sort of scope and setup. For example, I have a real-world rationalist story in mind that revolves around some high school kids trying to navigate a thorny personal moral dilemma in which simply going to the authorities or telling parents is not obviously the correct solution. If I ever get around to writing it, I think I can make it sufficiently interesting to capture people's attention. In a real-world setting, rationalist plots about exploiting resources for maximal gain are nearly impossible to write for the reasons stated by others in this thread; but plots about flawed, emotional people trying to self-actualize should remain unaffected.
u/GeneralExtension [+2] (a day later)
That sounds interesting to read.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
Something I believe I would really like to see is rationalist fanta-history. It takes a real history geek to pull it off properly, but it would be amazing to see someone pick a reasonable divergence point, some pivotal event in human history where a random occurrence could have tipped the scales decisively on a macroscopic level (for example, "Gavrilo Princip fails at killing Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo", "Joan of Arc is killed by bandits on her road to meet the Dolphin of France", "Constantine is killed during his struggle for power and does not become Roman Emperor, thus never officially recognising Christianity") and draw the logical conclusions from that.
Other than that, thrillers and mysteries are certainly potential ripe for exploitation too. Other genres, less so, because if a story isn't driven by some kind of rational enquiry to begin with, then there's nothing special about making it rational - it simply means it'll have a realistic setting and hopefully characters written well enough to feel like they have motivations and needs and aren't just plot devices. But that's a characteristic of a lot of good literary fiction.
u/RMcD94 [+3] (3 hours later)
Alternate history self inserts are kind of like this
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (9 hours later)
If you want to make individual characters' stories actually interesting and have narratively satisfying stakes in a real world setting in a rational fic, you need to find a way to make it so that the smartest, most competent, most powerful agents don't swoop in and make all of your protagonists' work moot.
In the story I've been writing, my solution is to have the smarter more powerful characters working on harder problems which require spending more resources. The protagonists are valuable not because they are the best in their fields, but because they are disposable and so can be given more risky tasks which are less vital and don't require as much skill. And all of the more talented people in their fields are spending their time on other more difficult tasks. But just because the protagonists' jobs are relatively less important doesn't mean they aren't making a critical difference towards the good guys' ultimate victory. Basically they're a force multiplier. One of the protagonists is one of the last surviving members of an organization that started a social movement to promote rationality to the general public in order to help prevent an authoritarian regime. He uses the reputation of that organization and his association with it as a way to help increase funds and employee recruitment to beneficiary organizations that are trying to save the world.
Even when one of the protagonists appears to take over the world, in reality he's just a puppet and figurehead, but his actions still matter because he's the one interacting with the public directly and he needs to keep up appearances.
Also, another important thing is to stick to what you know as much as you can, and when you can't you should have smart, sensible knowledgable editors on hand to check your work for consistency and realism. This makes it easier to write stories set in or near the present rather than the future.
That being said I've probably spent more time editing and fleshing out my story than actually writing it. I don't know if that's a universal trait of good rational fics set in a real-life contemporary setting, but i suspect that it is.
Also, I suspect that rational fics set in real world are just a kind of hard sci-fi by another name.
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
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u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (14 days later)
Sure thing!
u/Amonwilde [+2] (12 hours later)
Rationalists in the real world tend to be people who talk about reproducible research, programmers, or people who talk about reproducible research who are also programmers. Not the most exciting basis for a sizzling novel.
Kidding aside, I think the problem is that rationality is only mildly useful in the real world. Most people get by fine with hand-me-down heuristics and rationalists have to treasure every moment their self-training actually helps them. If this were otherwise, the world would be run by rationalists, which it most certainly is not.
u/Dragfie [+1] (16 hours later)
I disagree. The world is run by intelligent people. Only intelligent people know its a bad idea to be seen as the one running the world. Also intelligent or rational doesn't equal selfless.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+4] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
The world is run by intelligent people. Only intelligent people know its a bad idea to be seen as the one running the world.
Not nearly that straightforward. Most likely, sure, total dumbasses are not at the highest levels of power. Those that look like they are are probably putting up a bit of a facade (consciously or unconsciously) because it makes them look more innocuous than they are, it makes their opponents underestimate them, and it makes them more appealing to the sort of people who hate feeling looked down upon by those they perceive as smarter than them. But that doesn't mean ruling is about rationality. The one thing that really matters in power is being able to handle humans, and humans are far too complex a subject to be predicted and manipulated by simple rational means. It could be possible, in theory, but not for another human; our brain just doesn't have enough computational power. So the people who really end up being best at manipulating other people use heuristics and algorithms that evolution baked into our brain for the sake of social interactions, and often probably follow gut feelings more than rational chains of reasoning. There's some thinking in there too of course, but you just can't solve people the same way you solve a differential equation.
This is also a good reason why sci-fi or fantasy make a good setting for rational fiction. Magic or advanced technology are black boxes that transform knowledge into power. We can already appreciate how knowledge matters more in terms of social status in the present world than it did, say, in Hun society in 200 AD. If technology becomes ever more complex and more powerful, we can imagine the relative power conferred by rational vs. social skills increasing proportionally. In a world in which a single sufficiently knowledgeable person, by technological or magical means, can blow up whole countries, the balance of power is radically upset compared to what we're used to.
u/Dragfie [+2] (a day later)
Think i agree completely more or less.
I would still say however that those you mentioned right there, are usually people known by everyone, by virtue of that being their skill, but most people who really "run the world" (as much as a unpredictable world can be run) are not well known at all, and i would say much more rational than those the public commonly thinks of as holding great power.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
Depends on how you define "run the world", really. In as complex a society as we have right now, even the most powerful person holds probably a ridiculously small amount of sway over the whole thing. Sure, compared to us commoners, we may feel that a President or a CEO (forget Kings and Queens, most of those are blatantly just for show at this point) can take grand decisive actions. And in some cases, yes, some of them might find themselves taking potentially history-steering decisions. However, being able to take action and being able to control the consequences of that action are two very different things. Human society is like a massive enraged bull that is launched in a crazy run with too much momentum to be steered in a single sharp turn. A lot of processes are so big, no single decision or action can affect them. I think if we really had a full picture we'd find out that the world really isn't ruled by anyone in particular; people do things for their own purposes but most of the time it's the unintended consequences that dominate the results.
So, yeah, there are less-known powerful people, in fields outside of politics, that are probably leveraging more rational skills (though social skills are still very important for them to reach those positions). But even them probably don't hold as much power as we might think.
u/Dragfie [+1] (2 days later)
Yes, hence the "" marks.
u/Amonwilde [+1] (23 hours later)
Not sure that the self-label rational can be thought of as equivalent to intelligent. Relatively intelligent people probably do run the world, but I doubt they call themselves rationalists.
u/None [+7] (a day later)
I believe charisma and likeability probably plays a larger role than intelligence
u/Amonwilde [+2] (a day later)
This. The people who run the world are those with an intuitive understanding of how to get other people to do what they want. This can, but rarely does, overlap with rationalism. We have hard wiring for a lot of the interpersonal stuff, being able to run a regression or take a test well only correlates a bit with that capability, at best.
u/Dragfie [+1] (a day later)
I doubt they would call themselves rationalists, but they would be rational, and IMO most would share methods with rationalists if only by effect not name or definition.
u/PastafarianGames [+1] (a day later)
I'd point out here that there is a subset of detective/mystery novels which are rationalist fiction set in the real world; Sherlock Holmes of mythic stature (not necessarily the actual books, I suppose) is just as much ratfic as Worth the Candle or Practical Guide to Evil.
His modern spoof-in-part of Psych's Shawn Spencer has ratfic-self-insert levels of super-analysis and super-observational powers but also perpetually possesses the idiot ball, but I would genuinely recommend watching at least the first episode if you're interested in deconstruction of rationalist fiction tropes.
u/muns4colleg [+1] (a day later)
Because having a sci Fi fantasy world with magic or super technology and a purely invented society lets then apply the rational way of thinking to everything, where in a real world setting sometimes it just might not make sense.
u/Nepene [+1] (a day later)
http://selfpublishingrelief.com/self-published-genres-sell-most/
Those are the most popular genres, sci fi and fantasy, with women being less common fans of an internet community spawned off some guy who likes philosophy, and so less romance (the next most popular genre) but, rationalist real world fiction would probably sell well.
u/kotoshin [+0] (10 hours later)
I don't know about you, but the most "rationalist" sci fi I started on as a kid was Theodore sturgeon. The man straddles so many sci fi sub genres with his writing, it is unbelievable.
But under it all, what he's most writing about is people and emotions, even if they aren't... Quite Human. Likewise, John Wyndham. "Midwich cuckoos" and "chrysalis" are almost literally Mirrors to each other in terms of perspective.