Johnicholas comments on Rationalist Fiction - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 March 2009 08:22AM

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Comment author: Johnicholas 19 March 2009 03:25:12PM 6 points [-]

I agree with your descriptions of the books. My point was that fiction celebrates various community values, and that some books celebrate rationalist values more than others.

Compare Encyclopedia Brown to Harry Potter. Both solve mysteries, but Harry Potter is explicitly skilled at sports and personal defense and explicitly incompetent at schoolwork.

If you require such specific rationality techniques as "Bayesian probability but not formal logic", your kids will not have many books to read.