I've come up with a possible concept:
A news report reveals that a being called "Omega" has established a new Casino in the United States to help find his next test subject(s) for a torture simulations. Here's how it works:
The Casino has a large number of Roulette Wheels, and a large amount a standard 2-star hotel amenities, such as Food, Rooms, etc.
Humans can either agree to play as the "Casino", or as the "Player", in a series of Martingale bets. For the purposes of these bets:
Humans must agree to use a Martingale Betting system, but they can stop at any time.
Humans can only play against other Humans. If no Human is willing to act as the "Casino" or the "Player" for you at your betting level, you can't make bets.
Omega is supplying effectively infinite lines of non transferable credit which can be used in the Casino for Martingale Bets, for amenities, and for teleportation directly to the casino.
Omega remembers your betting level as a Player or as a Casino, also. You can't choose make an official Omega infinite credit line bet at a different level, although you may side bet however you want with whoever you want, and you may switch between being a Player or a Casino whenever you want. (Both betting levels are tracked seperately.)
Anyone who attempts to leave the Casino while in debt to Omega, to attack the Casino/it's patrons/steal either of their money for any reason, or to physically block(arguing someone into not going is fine.) people from entering the casino, or to force people to enter the casino, will seamlessly uploaded and be subjected to a torture simulation where they are stuck in a prison with no human contact until they die, then they are revived again, with memories of the previous death, to starve to death again, until Omega determines they have "Gone sufficiently insane." They will then be redownloaded into their body.
From an outside perspective this effect is unnoticeable, the person just goes insane. This has already happened to 10 people: 9 have gone full on catatonic, one of those continuously mumbling "It's not real." The tenth person yelled "I'm not starving again, never again!" and commited suicide by gun.
Hundreds of people have already made millions of dollars in gold coins.
Hundred of other people are trapped inside the Casino with large debts, some of more than 10 million dollars, refusing to leave or play other people (or other people are refusing to play them) and slowly increasing their debt by using amenities. Not all of these people are unhappy. One person outright says "I was starving anyway. It's better than being homeless!"
And more people are currently still deciding every day to visit the casino and try their luck, both as "Casino" and "Player" bettors. (You can teleport in from anywhere on the planet, after all. Some people are paying Omega just for the Novelty of teleporting to Vegas.)
Any time the Casino fills up, Omega takes a minute to add another floor. Omega is currently at a 14 floor casino. Omega has also already promised and shown his ability to change his payment method from Gold coins to another system if Gold Coins stops being convenient. At least one person is already attempting to win enough money to find out what that alternate payment method is.
What do you do?
For instance, people might try to convince two trapped people that if they play for a while, one of them can leave.
Or they might decide to play themselves.
Or they might try to convince people to stop going.
Or they might try to figure out how to make money by exploiting the ability that anyone can make one way teleports to (not from) Vegas at approximately 100 dollars a pop.
The title should make things clear enough, so let's start with my description of the target, rationalist fiction: fiction that tries to teach the audience rationalist cognitive skills by having characters model those skills for the reader.
So for example, Luminosity is to a large extent about the questions "What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former?" Oh, and using empiricism on magic.
Another example is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which goes more in-depth about the laundry list of human biases. In fact, many of the more iconic moments (measured by what I remember and what other people like to copy) are about biases to avoid, rather than about modeling good behavior.
This thread is about ideas, from general to specific, for rationalist fiction. I'll give some obvious examples.
General idea: having a rational character encountering magic or amazing technology is a great chance to showcase the power of empiricism. (Has anyone gotten on this one yet? :3 )
Story idea: Okay, so we take the Dresden Files universe, and our rational protagonist is some smart kid who just started a summer job as an assistant radio technician or something. It turns out he's got one in a hundred magical talent, enough to cut off his budding career, he manages to find the magic community, figures out just enough, embarks on heroic quest to run a magitech radio station. (Okay, this last bit isn't obvious - for one, more character development would probably have him wanting something else. For another, the obvious thing is to take over the world if Luminosity and HPMOR are anything to go by.)
Specific idea: A character could model the skill of testing stuff by testing stuff. When characters are performing a big search, have someone actually stop to think about false positives, or more generally "how could things be going wrong, and how can I prevent that?", and have it actually be a false positive once.
But really, there's an explosion of possibilities out there to explore, and I feel like we have "Rationalist meets magic. Rationalist does science to magic. Rationalist kicks butt with magic" fairly well-covered. We have all these different biases categorized, with corresponding right ways to do things, and there are plenty of good behaviors we can try to teach an audience without the empiricism-fodder and high stakes that is a fantasy setting. Or even if you do a Dresden Files fic, you could ignore the empricism stuff and just, like, pick a habit from Anna's checklist and write a short story :D. Here's an idea I quite fancy, I'll save everything else for comments:
General idea: Giving people the benefit of the doubt and managing to lose arguments when they need to be lost is the closest thing to a rationalist superpower I have. Can I work that into a story somehow?
Story ideas: A James Herriot sort of thing, where the protagonist has their daily life (Maybe veterinarian, or materials scientist, or line cook, or model rocket hobbyist), and relatably goes about it, occasionally giving people the benefit of the doubt and losing arguments, and sometimes using other rationalist skills, and usually ending up on the right side of things in the end. At this point it might be too subtle to actually teach the audience, one solution to this would be a designated person in-story to periodically notice how awesome the protagonist is.