Rationalist house

Elo

At the Australia online hangout; one of the topics we discussed (before I fell asleep on camera for a bunch of people) Was writing a rationality TV show as an outreach task. Of course there being more ways for this to go wrong than right I figured its worth mentioning the ideas and getting some comments.

The strategy is to have a set of regular characters who's rationality behaviour seems nuts. Effectively sometimes because it is; when taken out of context. Then to have one "blank" person who tries to join - "rationality house". and work things out. My aim was to have each episode straw man a rationality behaviour and then steelman it. Where by the end of the episode it saves the day; makes someone happy; achieves a goal - or some other <generic win-state>.

Here is a list of notes of characters from the hangout or potential topics to talk about.

No showers. Bacterial showers
Stopwatches everywhere
temperature controls everywhere, light controls.
radical honesty person.
Soylent only eating person
born-again atheist
bayesian person
Polyphasic sleep cycles.

I have not written much in my life and certainly never anything for TV but it sounds like a fun project. I figured I would pick a pilot idea; roll with it and see if I can make a script. I could probably also get Sydney folk to act for a first-round web-cast version.

I was wondering if anyone had any other rationality topics that can be easily strawmanned then steelmanned worth adding to the list. And if anyone had experience worth sharing with writing for TV, as well as anyone interested in joining the project to write or be a sounding board...

Here is a list of notes of characters from the hangout or potential topics to talk about.

No showers. Bacterial showers
Stopwatches everywhere
temperature controls everywhere, light controls.
radical honesty person.
Soylent only eating person
born-again atheist
bayesian person
Polyphasic sleep cycles.

I don't have experience beyond having watched a lot of tv and talked about it but I have watched a LOT of tv, read a LOT of books, and seen quite a few movies.

Insofar as you make average people and situations the enemy of your main cast, you are positioning yourself as critical of normality, in a way similar to Dilbert. I think that's a decent stance to take, though I can't think of a good example that has a wide cast of competent people. But making fun of normality is a LOT easier than presenting a coherent upgrade. This is similar to the problem of writing very intelligent characters: It's not easy to write someone smarter than yourself.

Since your show is explicitly didactic, it's very vulnerable to mistakes on the part of the writing, as well as your own biases. The fact that you're drawing your bottom line before you start also has a sort of gravitational pull on the quality of your story. There will always be a temptation to present normal people as extra irrational and the solutions of your "rational" main cast will work much better than they might in reality. Even if every situation is drawn from real life examples of rationalists and their households, they can still come off as preachy and unrealistic. I don't think you can make this show with this intent and have it be good entertainment, as opposed to a blatant after-school special style program.

"Upgraded normality" is a neat name.

I am going to try to work out how to put the first few steps into creating a plot/script for an episode and see how it goes. (when I get around to it - it will be posted somewhere online)

11

Rationalist house

11

11

11

Rationalist house

11

11