How about Scooby Doo?
It's elementary, but I spent a lot of time on it back when I was 3-4 and would have continued watching for somewhat longer if they hadn't started introducing stories where the magic WAS real.
The moral "it's ALWAYS natural" and the extremely repetitive plots (repetition is, I suspect, very good for kids) are basic but definitely positive.
Only saw one or two episodes, but I think Kimba the White Lion may also have had positive but elementary rationalist messages.
Especially because Scooby Doo always featured a villain who was taking advantage of peoples' superstition and irrationality.
I liked Terry Pratchett's book "The Wee Free Men". It's a fantasy novel where the main character saves herself by having "First Sight" (original seeing; the ability to notice what her eyes are telling her even when she wouldn't have expected it) and "Second Thoughts" (cognitive reflectiveness; the ability to look over her own thinking for biases and distortions).
In defense of Conan Doyle, Wikipedia says:
Sherlock Holmes remains a great inspiration for forensic science, especially for the way his acute study of a crime scene yields small clues as to the precise sequence of events... All of the techniques advocated by Holmes would later become reality, but were generally in their infancy at the time Conan Doyle was writing.
and goes off to claim that later detective fiction actually became less realistic as writers shifted attention to psychology rather than forensics.
The Prince of Nothing. The Prince of Nothing. The Prince of Nothing. I'll say it as many times as I have to to get people on this blog to read it. The Prince of Nothing Trilogy. The Darkness That Comes Before. R. Scott Bakker.
True, Anasurimbor Kellhus is one of the "mutants", even to the point of the author explicitly stating the Dunyain spent a few centuries running a eugenics program to get an intellect of that stature. But the later books of the trilogy also go into some detail about the rationalist training Kellhus undergoes with the Dunyain, the methods he uses, and even a little of the social structure of the Ishual monastery. He's one of the perspective characters, and we see him using his techniques; there's always a strong sense of "I could do that", which remains right up until I actually try. And there's no better work to demonstrate the "sense that more is possible", or the ways in which a real rationalist would be the polar opposite of the "Spock" prototype, or a bunch of other things (disclaimer: many don't become fully clear until The Thousandfold Thought, the last book in the trilogy).
The Dunyain conception of rationality isn'...
It's interesting that "Watchmen" (in theaters now) is the Hamlet of a genre that is strongly anti-rational, yet has numerous rational elements. The most important, I think, is that the Earth is saved only by inhumanly rational people making rational decisions - rational decisions which the typical viewer cannot condone even after the fact, even knowing that they saved the Earth. In so doing, it proves to these viewers, not just consciously but deep in their gut, that they themselves would doom Earth by their irrationality.
On the other hand, Dr. Manhattan embodies the popular culture's prejudice against rationality perfectly when he explains why he isn't interested in life by saying, "A living body and a dead one contain the same number of atoms". People try to imagine why scientists are interested in little things under microscopes, but not in gossip or football games. They can't imagine that the little things under the microscope are actually more interesting, so they conclude that scientists are cold and boring, and thus unable to see how interesting gossip and football really are.
You can't do what the character does, and in the comic it's strongly implied that it didn't work anyway.
In defense of Sherlock Holmes:
The typical Sherlock Holmes story has Holmes perform twice. First he impresses his client with a seemingly impossible deduction; then he uses another deduction to solve the mystery. Watson or the client convince Holmes to explain the first deduction, which gives the reader the template Holmes will use for the second (likely inferences from small details). The data that Holmes uses to make the second deduction are in the text and available to the reader--the reader's challenge is to make Holmes's inference in advance.
Holmes himself attributes his success to observation, not rationality. (There's a startling passage in A Study In Scarlet where Holmes tells Watson that he can't be bothered to remember that the sun orbits the earth! Visit the link and search for 'Copernican Theory' in the full text for the passage.) The Sherlock Holmes stories are intended to be exercises in attention to detail, which is surely a useful skill for a rationalist.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs.
Beautiful comment, but I'd add that whatever remains of the hypotheses you considered is often more improbable than your having missed an unconsidered alternative.
I just stumbled across this and felt this comment and the one above it were worth reminding everyone of in light the Knox case discussion. Way too many of our discussions have involved trying to come up with accounts of the crime that make sense of all the evidence. In retrospect I would labels such discussions as fun, but unhelpful.
I reject that entirely. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something which works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, ‘Yes, but he or she simply wouldn’t do that.’
-- Dirk Gently
In the real world, these are mostly just games we play with words.
Someone who has been rained on for 14 years straight has an extremely surprising property.
The label we assign that property matters a little, since it affects our subsequent behavior with respect to it. If I call it "rain god" I may be more inclined to worship it; if I label it a "localized meteorological phenomenon" I might be more inclined to study it using the techniques of meteorology; if I label it an extremely unlikely coincidence I might be more inclined not to study it at all; if I label it the work of pranksters with advanced technology I might be more inclined to look for pranksters, etc.
Etc.
But other things matter far more.
Do they have any other equally unlikely observable attributes, for example?
Did anything equally unlikely occur 14 years ago?
Etc.
Worrying overmuch about labels can distract us from actually observing what's in front of us.
This reminds me of a bit in the Illuminatus! trilogy-- there was a man who had filing cabinets full of information about the Kennedy assassination. [1]
He kept hoping that he'd find one more piece of information which would make sense of everything he'd accumulated, little realizing that most of what he had was people getting things wrong and covering their asses.
[1] Once upon a time, it was normal to store information in filing cabinets, and there was only one Kennedy assassination.
The thing is, it's usually much easier to solve the mystery by getting a feel for Doyle's tells than by trying to piece together whatever abstruse chain of deductions Holmes is going to use. Examples:
Watson is an incredibly good judge of character. If he thinks someone seems cold, that person is heartless. If he says someone seems shifty, they are guilty of something (although maybe not the crime under investigation).
The woman never did it. The only two exceptions to this are a story in which he clears one woman to implicate another (who is the only other possible suspect), and one in which an innocent woman is corrupted and manipulated by an evil man.
Just from those two rules you can usually figure out whodunit, at which point you can occupy yourself by figuring out how, a task made relatively simple by conservation of detail.
Hello Less Wrong,
My first comment ever. I have been lurking on Less Wrong for several years already (and on Overcoming Bias before there was even a Less Wrong site), and have been mostly cyber-stalking EY ever since I caught wind of his AI-Box exploits.
This year 2012, on a whim, I joined the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) last November, and started writing a novel I had been randomly thinking of making, "Judge on a Boat". The world is that humanity manages to grow up a little without blowing itself up, rationality techniques are taught regularly (a certain minimum level of knowledge in these techniques is required for all citizens), practical mind simulations and artificial intelligence are still far-off (but being actively worked on, somewhere way, way off in the background of the novel), and experts in morality and ethical systems, called "Judges", are given the proper respect they deserve.
The premise is that a trainee Judge, Nicole Angel, visiting Earth for her final examinations (she's from Mars Lagrange Point 1), gets marooned on a lifeboat with a small group of people. She is then forced to act as a full Judge (despite not actually passing the...
How about The Hardy Boys? I read dozens of these as a young kid, and the thing that stands out in mind now is, there was always an answer to the mystery, one that could be arrived at via clues and deduction. Looking back now, I think they had a major impact on my manner of thinking, reading them as young as I did (kindergarten and 1st grade, I'm talking) such that years later I was inclined to look favorably upon a 'rationality technique' when I encountered the idea of one on OB.
"If You Give a Mouse a Cookie"
A good primer on chaos theory for youth?
"Rendezvous with Rama"
Why have a plot when gradual discovery with expository dialogue will do.
"Contact" -Sagan
More scientific method
"The Diamond Age" -Stephenson
This book even has long discussions of computing
"Sideways Stories from Wayside School"
Anything with jokes is going to be about logic at some point.
"Of Human Bondage" -Maugham
This book has a famous scene where the Phillip goes to Paris to study art; you get the impression that he isn't very good at painting and as time goes on he starts to recognize that his fellow students are not great painters either. After two years, he gradually builds up the courage to have one of his instructors look at all of his work and let him know whether or not he can achieve his goal of becoming great painter. After he receives a negative verdict he commits to a new life plan.
To some extent, I don't believe that "realism", to the point of realistic rationalist techniques, is important.
Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, The Boxcar Children, Sherlock Holmes may fail to convey rationalist techniques, but they certainly convey rationalist values and beliefs, like "intelligence is useful", "observation is important", "there is a right answer". Enthusiasm for the subject is far more important to learning than a head start in knowing the subject.
Encyclopedia Brown is an especially bad example. Most of the mysteries he solves, he solves by knowing some piece of minor trivia which contradicts some off-hand statement of the criminal. This promotes "rationality" as "knowing a lot of facts", which is absolutely not what we're trying to promote here, and provides the wrong model of problem solving. Encyclopedia Brown is based on formal logic, not Bayesian probability.
Knowing lots of facts absolutely matters in the real world though. Having a good theoretical framework to organize them and logic (probablistic or otherwise) to manipulate them help too - but not without real facts.
But just "intelligence is useful" takes people farther than many intelligent people get. Seriously.
I think you may be thinking of The Great Brain, not Encyclopedia Brown, there. Encyclopedia Brown was a boy of upstanding moral character, which meant The Great Brain was more fun to read.
Greg Egan's Orthogonal series, for the weaker criterion. Most of the characters are scientists, you get to see them struggling with problems and playing with new ideas that turn out not to work. That's not the only rationalist aspect, though: [about the future inhabitants of a generation ship] "They won't feel as though they're falling, they'll feel the way they always feel. Only the old books will tell them there was something called 'falling' that felt the same." [while having to fast] "She... began [working through] the maze of obstructions that made it impossible to [open the cupboard] unless she was fully awake. Halfway through, she paused. Breaking the pattern [3 days eating, 1 day fasting] would set a precedent, inviting her to treat every fast day as a potential exception. Once the behaviour that she was trying to make routine and automatic had to be questioned over and over... [it would be] a dozen times harder." When launching their rocket, they make plans for every survivable catastrophe they can imagine, and practice them. They explain their ideas to each other: "Why aren't we testing this on voles?" "We would need smaller needles, and...
The manga/anime series "Death Note"
It's a long mental battle between two clever people, not much for rationality techniques, but characters think rationally, and the magical parts have well defined rules, similar to Lawrence Watt-Evans' fiction.
I would be terribly thankful to anybody who could reccomend me some more stories involving these sorts of fights. Trickery and betrayal is common enough, but a prolonged fued of this nature is rare.
Death Note is a brilliant anime, but not really a great of an example of rationality. Tvtropes calls it Xanatos Roulette.
First you start with a smart plan. That can be rational. Then you complicate the plan. It makes characters look even smarter, and still quite rational. At some point the plan is so overcomplicated, so many uncertainties are just assumed, that it's no longer rationality but plain omniscience and characters "knowing the script of future episodes". That's what Death Note is. Light and L overplot, and it's really fun to watch, and they look really "smart" when it's well done, but it's way past any reasonable pretense of rationality.
TvTropes has more examples, like Saw series. They're all great fun, and not much rational.
I really liked the Death Note anime. However, I think it's much more Sherlock-Holmes-ish than what Eliezer is asking for here. It's been quite a long time since I saw it, but I remember at the time I was annoyed often when both the protagonist and the antagonist would make "very lucky guesses", deducing something which is possible given the evidence at hand, but far from being the only possibility from said evidence. I haven't read much Sherlock, but from what I've heard, Sherlock similarly makes amazingly lucky guesses. Certainly, EY's summary of "magically finding the right clues and carrying out magically correct complicated chains of deduction" seems to indicate so.
I'd have to watch the Death Note series again to give any specific examples. Maybe I will do that, but probably not within the next month.
Maybe some of Ted Chiang's stories?
Also, I don't remember them well and they're probably more about irrationality techniques than rationality techniques, but Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" are fun and struck me as having a rationalist spirit or at least being food for rationalist thought.
Economist Russ Roberts' The Invisible Heart uses fiction to explain how to think logically about several economic issues. (I always assign the book to my intro micro students and they love it.)
Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent. Its relevance to rationality lies in its criticisms of various kinds of self-deception rather than positive accounts of methods of rationality. A variety of sub-themes orbit the core theme of self-deception: status-obsession, escapism, nostalgia for idealized imaginary past, hypocrisy, externalization of responsibility.
Note though that Paranoia Agent drives the message home not by didacticism and realistic portrayal of situations but by appeal to gut-level feelings and ample nightmare fueling.
The Dune series and Neal Stephenson's latest novel Anathem both come to mind. The Dune series includes a number of plot devices involving mental discipline (although it's all semi-mystical.) The world of Anathem, on the other hand, is split into two factions, one of which is specifically rationalist. It gets pretty philosophical and weird toward the end, but it mostly involves rationalist characters using math/science/etc to overcome the hurdles in their way. The world it describes sounds pretty similair to what I've read of Eliezer's Bayesian Conspiracy.
I always thought the Ixian and Tleilaxu(who, it should be noted, can clone unlimited copies of the most powerful mentats they could find samples of) would have done much better in a fair Dune universe.
One thing I've never seen in these threads about rationalist literature is RPG handbooks. The 2nd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide had an enormous influence on me, because it suggested that the world ran on understandable, deterministic rules, which could be applied both to explicate dramatic situations, and to predict the outcome of situations not yet seen.
One of the first things I ever did (I lacked friends to play D&D with) was to assign stats to fictional characters and make pre-existing stories I felt were unsatisfying play out in a more "realistic" manner. A better word would be internally consistent. But I felt very strongly after that point that it was logical to expect that 9 times out of 10 that the entity with the most advantages would come out on top, contrary to the manner of stories, although the dice-rolling kept total predestination at bay.
How about Jules Verne's “The Mysterious Island”?
It doesn't have any “rationality ninjas”, but the overall arch of “know your world, understand it, and force your will upon your future” seems a very valuable basis of thought for any rational person. This book was probably the most powerful root of that idea in my mind.
As a bonus, pretty much everything the characters do would actually do work in real life.
(Actually, quite a few other stories by JV are really nice. This one is just the one most tightly connected in my mind with the basic idea of reason.)
Here is a (very paraphrased, non-spoiler) snippet from the beginning of "Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson. The problem is that the evil space aliens are blockading a trade route, capturing the ships and crew of the trading ships. The Traders are meeting and deciding what to do.
Trader 1: Why don't we just send in our space fleet and destroy them?
Trader 2: Revenge and violence are un-Christian thoughts. Also, they don't pay very well, as it is hard to sell anything to a corpse. Anyway, getting that done would take a long time, and our customers w...
I'm surprised David Gerrold's "War Against The Chtorr" didn't get mentioned, but it never did get widely read. It includes a "Global Ethics" class in the first book, and "Mode Training" in subsequent books, which have the character going through what is basically a rationality dojo - and there are numerous full sessions of these classes in the books. It's where I got the idea that rationality was a teachable/learnable skill, and learned quite a few techniques for handling my biases, irrationalities, etc..
The core theme of the ...
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. It's unfinished, and at current rates of production and apparent rates of plot resolution, never-to-be-finished (sadly, I'm feeling more and more that way about the paradigmatic rationalist fiction as well). And there are an average of slightly more than one new strains-credibility premises per book. But the characters use some serious swashbuckling rationality. Chief among the "rationality techniques" these books teach are the social ones that underpin scientific progress: honesty, transparency, etc. Which is a nice counterbalance to all the individualist rationalism that you'll get from most of the other suggestions here.
Check out Erfworld. It starts off as a webcomic, moves to narrative for the parts that are best done in a narrative style, and then jumps back to webcomic format for battles. It hits all of those marks you mention, as well as a standard that I hold personally. I think that rationalist fiction is at its most compelling when it creates a world with new rules, and sends the empiricist out to learn them. It's easier to show how to learn things empirically when there's still low-hanging-fruit to be plucked, and there have to be people in the story who don't...
Not full-blown rationalist fiction, but I would like to mention The Salvation War (an ongoing trilogy of web novels) as promoting some rationalist values. It's military fiction in which Earth is invaded by the legions of Hell and musters its armies to defend itself. Since it is set in the modern era, there is a fair ammount of focus on science and evidence and the rejection of faith and dogma, and how humanity's curiosity and knowledge led to it gaining power in the form of technology and engineering. Sample passage below (note, "" is a character...
I found Piers Anthony's novels, such as the Adept series, to be good preteen rationality books. His characters are constantly trying to figure out the world around them, describe their reasoning, make complicated (for preteen) moral decisions, and solve puzzles. I don't think his books describe specific techniques that are useful, but they do portray "trying to figure out the world using reason" in a very positive light.
Isaac Asimov's "The Black Widowers" short stories are very rationalist, especially the character of Henry the waiter, who often exemplifies the principal of Occam's Razor. That is, when the rest of the group are coming up with wild and convoluted stories to explain the facts, Henry is usually the one to come up with the simplest and most obvious solution. Some of the stories are a little Holmesian (i.e. superhuman powers of deduction) but many are just a question of looking for prosaic ordinary answers instead of going overboard with speculation....
L. E. Modesitt has written consistently rational fiction, and improved steadily as a writer. He scores on both counts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._E._Modesitt
I'm recommending Patricia Briggs' fiction (epic fantasy earlier, and more recently paranormal romance) as rationalist in the mild sense-- characters are apt to think about what they're doing and it helps them win.
One sort of "rationalist" book is the kind whose story depends on a lot of plotting and strategizing. It's one of the few ways that fiction can actually be challenging to understand in a technical sense. And it's a way that you can show characters being actually smarter than the reader, and give the reader a sense of what it might feel like to be smarter.
Ender's Game, Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, and the G.R.R. Martin books are what comes to mind, though certainly any book where geopolitics is involved could be strategy-heavy. Narrativ...
I second Stiegler's novels. I didn't think much of Vogt's Null-A novels - also Gosseyn was a mutant, among other things he had two brains.
Heinlein's juveniles in general. Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle" .
I'm more than a little ashamed to admit I'm only reading this now, after writing about half of a first draft of what is nominally a piece of "Rationalist Fiction," Erica's Adventures In The Multiverse.. I say nominally, because reading this I realized that I didn't even know what "rationalist fiction" is, despite having read and loved HPMOR and having other, even more embarrassing reasons, to school myself in this regard.
The good news is, I'm going through what I've written so far, and I think I can salvage what's good about it while re...
I enjoyed Singularity Sky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky) and Entoverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_series). However, Entoverse may be a bit tiresome if you don't like a novel to lecture you on laissez-faire.
The first two Gormenghast books, by Mervyn Peak, feel weirdly appropriate for me. They have a villain whose effectiveness depends on his rationality, when all about lack same. The more potent advocate for rationality, however, is the compelling depiction of a world devoid of it, where the shackles of convention enslave the castle's populace.
I dunno, ymmv, but I implore you to give them a shot. They made a lasting impression on me, in a way that many books don't.
But when you look at what Sherlock Holmes does - you can't go out and do it at home. Sherlock Holmes is not really operating by any sort of reproducible method. He is operating by magically finding the right clues and carrying out magically correct complicated chains of deduction. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that reading Sherlock Holmes does not inspire you to go and do likewise. Holmes is a mutant superhero. And even if you did try to imitate him, it would never work in real life.
To me, he just sounds like an extremized example of the a...
Ralph Hayes Jr. is writing an anti-deathist My Little Pony fanfic: The Great Alicorn Hunt.
The geth in Mass Effect had a huge effect on me in this regard. I know that might sound crazy, but for me, they definitely meet your criteria of "a powerful experience of using rationality." Now, of course I can point out a few instances where I don't feel the geth don't exactly act very rationally, but the mere suggestion of such an existence blew my mind. I started wondering, in a way I had never done before, "what, really, IS the purpose of existence? If I were a geth, why would I bother to exist, let alone fight for my survival? Is the i...
And this post from the ever useful DailyKos makes several suggestions: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/12/981390/-Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Club:Magic-and-Fantasy?via=siderecent
And this post from the ever useful Daily Kos makes several suggestions: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/12/981390/-Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Club:Magic-and-Fantasy?via=siderecent
And this post from the ever useful Daily Kos makes several suggestions: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/12/981390/-Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Club:Magic-and-Fantasy?via=siderecent
I agree until the last paragraph, I seem to remember thinking that there was a way it could have been done better, and that I could excuse his error because he wasn't overcoming an impossibility.
Unfortunately, I dont remember how I thought to fix it.
It seems unlikely that there are going to be very many examples of fiction containing characters using an interesting technique of rationality since - as far as I know - the idea of a real-life "rationality technique" analogous to a martial art technique is original to you, Eliezer. An author might write a story about some group or individual achieving great things and tell us that this group or person studies rationality, but they won't be able to describe rationality techniques in detail because the concept of rationality techniques didn't exis...
It doesn't explicitly promote rationality, but in terms of demonstrating rationalist virtues in action I believe that the Stargate franchise, or at least the parts I'm thinking of* do a pretty good job. It strongly emphasizes curiosity, both for its own sake and in an instrumentalist knowledge = power sense. Secondly, there are large amounts of seemingly supernatural events that are reliable shown to be explainable by non-supernatual means. Admittedly the phelmtonium involved sometimes advanced enough that it effective works a magical black box, but its...
It doesn't explicitly promote rationality, but in terms of demonstrating rationalist virtues in action I believe that the Stargate franchise, or at least the parts I'm thinking of* do a pretty good job.
I've counted nearly a dozen features of physics and technology that can be used to create clones in the Stargate universe. The most straightforward (and least 'fantasy physics' based) example is the robot clones of SG1 that were running around the universe for several years. Yet while the Stargate team have access to that kind of technology I don't see 10,000 each of McKay and Carter working in a research lab. Nor do I see 1,000,000 clones of Daniel Jackson sitting in rooms meditating to ascension.
If the fate of the universe is at stake and you have the chance to become a demigod then you take it. If that isn't enough then you make yourself into an entire pantheon. You utterly obliterate, neutralize or render laughably insignificant any threats.
Although I think you are on to something. There is one character in particular in Stargate that seems to behave rationally: Ba'al. And not just because he created an army of Ba'als and tried to take over the galaxy. There are all sorts of lessons that can be learned from him. Not least of which is the ability to cooperate effectively with people with vastly different objectives when it makes sense to do so.
Nor do I see 1,000,000 clones of Daniel Jackson sitting in rooms meditating to ascension.
One of the things I love about Naruto Shippuden is that there's an episode where Naruto (whose signature move creates shadow clones of himself) does precisely this. It's revealed in the episode that when the shadow clone jutsu ends, the consciousness of the clone merges with the caster, and so training can be parallelized -- and because Naruto has more chakra than practically anyone else, he can do it the best.
Even better, there's an in-universe reason why everyone doesn't do this: most people can't create more than three or four shadow clones at a time without killing themselves.
Mind you, Naruto Shippuden doesn't exactly promote rational values...
I highly recommend the works of Dan Brown, particularly Angels and Demons and Deception Point. I hesitate to say why I recommend them, because I can't really do that without massive spoilers.
I will say this: just because the characters in the books are not particularly rational does not mean the story itself is not rational. These books have a very important lesson to teach, and even though the characters may or may not learn that lesson, an observant reader should.
Another way of alluding to what's going on here: experience has taught us to reason about...
Followup to: Lawrence Watt-Evans's Fiction
Reply to: On Juvenile Fiction
MBlume asked us to remember what childhood stories might have influenced us toward rationality; and this was given such excellent answers as Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth. So now I'd like to ask a related question, expanding the purview to all novels (adult or child, SF&F or literary): Where can we find explicitly rationalist fiction?
Now of course there are a great many characters who claim to be using logic. The whole genre of mystery stories with seemingly logical detectives, starting from Sherlock Holmes, would stand in witness of that.
But when you look at what Sherlock Holmes does - you can't go out and do it at home. Sherlock Holmes is not really operating by any sort of reproducible method. He is operating by magically finding the right clues and carrying out magically correct complicated chains of deduction. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that reading Sherlock Holmes does not inspire you to go and do likewise. Holmes is a mutant superhero. And even if you did try to imitate him, it would never work in real life.
Contrast to A. E. van Vogt's Null-A novels, starting with The World of Null-A. Now let it first be admitted that Van Vogt had a number of flaws as an author. With that said, it is probably a historical fact about my causal origins, that the Null-A books had an impact on my mind that I didn't even realize until years later. It's not the sort of book that I read over and over again, I read it and then put it down, but -
- but this is where I was first exposed to such concepts as "The map is not the territory" and "rose1 is not rose2".
Null-A stands for "Non-Aristotelian", and the premise of the ficton is that studying Korzybski's General Semantics makes you a superhero. Let's not really go into that part. But in the Null-A ficton:
1) The protagonist, Gilbert Gosseyn, is not a mutant. He has studied rationality techniques that have been systematized and are used by other members of his society, not just him.
2) Van Vogt tells us what (some of) these principles are, rather than leaving them mysteriously blank - we can't be Gilbert Gosseyn, but we can at least use some of this stuff.
3) Van Vogt conveys the experience, shows Gosseyn in action using the principles, rather than leaving them to triumphant explanation afterward. We are put into Gosseyn's shoes at the moment of his e.g. making a conscious distinction between two different things referred to by the same name.
This is a high standard to meet.
But Marc Stiegler's David's Sling (quoted in e.g. this post) meets this same standard: The Zetetics derive their abilities from training in a systematized tradition; we get to see the actual principles the Zetetics are using, and they're ones we could try to apply in real life; and we're put into their shoes at the moments of their use.
I mention this to show that it isn't only van Vogt who's ever done this.
However...
...those two examples actually exhaust my knowledge of the science fiction and fantasy literature, so far as I can remember.
It really is a very high standard we're setting here. To realistically show your characters using an interesting technique of rationality, you have to know an interesting technique of rationality. Van Vogt was inspired by Korzybski, who - I discovered when I looked this up, just now - actually invented the phrase "The map is not the territory". Marc Stiegler was inspired by, among other sources, Eric Drexler and Robin Hanson. (Stiegler has another novel called Earthweb about using prediction markets to defend the Earth from invading aliens, which was my introduction to the concept of prediction markets.)
If I relax the standard to focus mainly on item (3), fiction that transmits a powerful experience of using rationality, then I could add in Greg Egan's Distress, some of Lawrence Watt-Evans's strange little novels, the travails of Salvor Hardin in the first Foundation novel, and probably any number of others.
But what I'm really interested in is whether there's any full-blown Rationalist Fiction that I've missed - or maybe just haven't remembered. Failing that, I'm interested in stories that merely do a good job of conveying a rationalist experience. (Please specify which of these cases is true, if you make a recommendation.)