a good idea should be independently inventable or findable.
I'm only aiming to write my protagonist as being an aspiring Bayesian rationalist, not a Yudkowsky-level or HJPEV-level one. In a later chapter, while her emotions are being artificially manipulated, her inner monologue reads:
I'm so jealous of... of... the people who are actually smart. I'm well aware that I'm not nearly as smart as I like to think I am. All my seeming cleverness - it's all just tricks, things that anyone can do if they knew. I can't do anything that requires real intelligence, like come up with a truly new theory - the best I've been able to do is come up with 'new' insights that others have come up with so many times before. What I wouldn't give to develop an actual new idea, think a thought that hasn't been thought before - to be the first one to understand something...
... which, I hope, describes what I've been aiming for reasonably well.
Still feels like a hole.
Then it quite probably is one.
ch34: use of Laplace's law painfully didactic.
Well, at least I know I was able to get across the idea that she was being painfully didactic. What I seem to have failed at is explaining that it was the didactness she was going for at that point, and Laplace's law was simply one of many possible topics for her to natter about.
Well, at least I know I was able to get across the idea that she was being painfully didactic. What I seem to have failed at is explaining that it was the didactness she was going for at that point, and Laplace's law was simply one of many possible topics for her to natter about.
They're ponies; they know nothing about statistics. You say many have barely a gradeschool education, and this is a guard pony to boot. Any statistics will confuse them and be painfully didactic, but by making it simply unclear and assuming all sorts of stuff without justification, you waste a chance for the reader to actually understand the material and learn from it.
For the past two months, I've been writing, and posting, roughly two thousand words a day of "Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me", a story set in a "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fanfic universe, "Chess Game of the Gods". Outside of the sheer NaNoWriMo-like exercise of pushing out near-daily chapters, I've also been trying to keep in mind the various principles I've learned from Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and to try to present them in a way that people who like reading MLP fanfics might be able to appreciate.
I've just come to something of a minor climax with chapter 60, and while I'll definitely be continuing the story, this seems like a good time to mention it here, for whatever feedback and constructive criticism anyone cares to offer.