novalis comments on Rationalist Fiction - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: beoShaffer 29 May 2011 04:45:17PM 0 points [-]

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 made clear that this is a property of the protagonists' rather than inherent to the phelmtonium. Lastly and far from least, most characters actually learn from their own and others experiences then modify there behavior accordingly. Furthermore, how good they are at this is one of the strongest factors in how effective they are. It does have some weakness, for example the characters are somewhat prone to generalizing from fictional example, but I think it comes out as a net positive.

*More or less all of SG-1, including the directed to DVD movies and the parts of Atlantis that I've actually seen.

Comment author: novalis 05 June 2011 06:22:15AM 2 points [-]

Actually, a lot of Stargate's plots are about who has the idiot ball this week. In particular, their grasp of security is just terrible. They've never even heard of a duress code! I keep waiting for someone to do for Stargate's security what MoR has done for HP's rationality. Also, whoever does this should probably take the opportunity to play up the S&M subtext of Stargate (how many times can Teal'c be tied up and tortured?).

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 05 June 2011 07:36:09AM *  1 point [-]

Yeah, that's probably the thing about SG-1 that annoys me the most: despite how central the military is to the stories, the writers do not understand security, nor do they consider it important enough to have a consultant help them with it.