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glomerulus comments on Bridge Collapse: Reductionism as Engineering Problem - Less Wrong
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Rational!Harry describes a character similar to the base except persistently Rational, for whatever reason. Rational-Harry describes a Harry which is rational, but it's nonstandard usage and might confuse a few people (Is his name "Rational-Harry"? Do I have to call him that in-universe to differentiate him from Empirical-Harry and Oblate-Spheroiod-Harry?). Rational Harry might just be someone attaching an adjective to Harry to indicate that at the moment, he's rational, or more rational by contrast to Silly Dumbledore.
Anyway, adj!noun is a compound with a well-defined purpose within a fandom: to describe how a character differs from canon. It's an understood notation, and the convention, so everyone uses it to prevent misunderstandings. Outside of fandom things, using it signals casualness and fandom-savviness to those in fandom culture, and those who aren't familiar with fandom culture can understand it and don't notice the in-joke.
I always figured it was like the scope resolution operator ("::") in C++, but in some weird functional language that AI people liked.
Yes, that's why I favor the hyphen (in response to shminux above).
Yes. I used it in an earlier version of this post reflexively, without even thinking about the connection to fanfics. My thinking was just 'this is clearer than subscript notation, and is a useful and commonplace LW shibboleth'.