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tenshiko comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is there anyone around who has some money to throw around for anyone who'll write Tenga Toppa Gurren Rationality 40K? I'm afraid I don't at the moment and lack the skills/canon familiarity to do so myself. Fiddling with Ramna Reasoning 1/2 but can't find a good title.
Inspired by the omake:
A fragment from a lost folio of Hamlet.
I beg to be allowed to post this (with attribution of course) in Omake Files #3.
I'd be honored!
Very nice.
P(Ranma)=1/2.
I assume in this context it would mean P(~Ranko)=1/2?
Never watched it myself.
As the basic premise involves gender-bending, "Ranko" is an alternate name occassionally adopted by the protagonist in female form (the equivalent of Jacob to Jacqueline).
Concur that that is the most amazing crossover I have ever imagined.
I'd really like to write a Buffy fic called "Once More, With Thinking" and have it focus on cooperative rationality, but I lack the skillset and have no idea how to plot it.
Unless you're going to completely neglect individual rationality, then you're probably going to have to rewrite a lot of the Buffyverse too. (Not just because of out-of-universe caused things, like the 'guns=bad' thing it had going, but also because of the characters routine neglect of in-universe methods of quick and easy victories.)
Though it might be interesting to just write a '24 hours to victory' type scenario.
It would have to be a heavily-AU, from-the-beginning-but-everything's-different kind of fic. I have a pretty good idea of how I'd want to tweak each of the main characters (and villains) to be much, much scarier.
Which bit of it?
In-depth knowledge of the theory and practice of rational cooperation skills, though to be honest I'm not even sure what that category describes.
What specifically do you think the characters should be able to accomplish that you doubt you can write - what black boxes are there in your mental model of the perfect "Once More, With Thinking" fic, and what are the inputs and outputs around those black boxes?
I know the goal of a chess master - to win. But I do not know the moves he will make. WrongBot may know the goals of his Buffy characters. But he does not know the moves they will make. How do you write a character smarter than yourself, even if you know their goal?
You write their universe in such a way that you can account for all the factors therein on your character's behalf.
You can write a story about a chessmaster without ever showing your reader the sequence of moves in a chess game. You can even have the story be about a chess game and still do this, as long as the narrative is focused at a higher level of abstraction... if your character is thinking in terms of luring his opponent to move his defense out of optimal alignment, or setting up a three-way interlocking attack on a key piece, or equally evocative-but-ultimately-meaningless constructions.
Alternatively, you can go ahead and show the sequence of moves: look up a few chess matches among chessmasters, and steal them.
To write a character smarter than me, I would probably start by deciding exactly what situations were going to arise, and do a lot of detailed research on optimal strategies and relevant background information on those situations, and then present the character as coming up with those strategies/information in real time without warning -- that is, imply that she could just as effectively responded to any situation, without preparation.
And then have them succeed, a lot. And when they do fail, have them recognize failure before the reader does and then adapt their strategy accordingly.
A character who is smarter and more focused than me is much harder to write; at that point I'd fall back to the "high-level chess strategy" approach.
As a reader, I hate hate hate this strategy, and I always know when it's being used. This sort of copout is an instant fail in my books, no matter how highly reviewed it is. The Master of Go is fine because the author is fictionalizing a real match, which he actually reported on live. The Player of Games is not, because Banks has not worked out Azad in any real detail.
So, weak superintelligence. That might work - does seem pretty much to cover Eliezer's approach for Harry & Quirrel in MoR.
I don't know about "hate" but it always feels empty and hollow, every time I read about a fictional supergenius, and that is where MoR came from.
I think it depends on what the core of the story is... what it's a story about.
If it's a story about chess, then never showing the reader the sequence of moves "feels empty and hollow," as you say.
If it's a story about something else for which chess functions as a setting, it won't necessarily feel that way.
Of course, what I consider a story to be about is in part a result of what I care about. If I really really care about intelligence, then any story involving a supergenius will to a significant extent be about his or her superintelligence, and "not showing the moves" will always feel like a copout.