As a graduate philosophy student, who went to liberal arts schools, and studied mostly continental philosophy with lots of influence from post-modernism, we can infer from the comments and articles on this site that I must be a complete idiot that spouts meaningless jargon and calls it rational discussion. Thanks for the warm welcome ;) Let us hope I can be another example for which we can dismiss entire fields and intellectuals as being unfit for "true" rationality. /friendly-jest.

Now my understanding may be limited, having actually studied post-modern thought, but the majority of the critiques of post-modernism I have read in these comments seem to completely miss key tenants and techniques in the field. The primary one being deconstruction, which in literature interpretation actually challenges ALL genres of classification for works, and single-minded interpretations of meaning or intent. An example actually happened in this comment section when people were discussing Moby Dick and the possibility of pulling out racial influences and undertones. One commenter mentioned using "white" examples from the book that might show white privilege, and the other used "white" examples to show that white-ness was posed as an extremely negative trait. That was a very primitive and unintentional use of deconstruction; showing that a work has the evidence and rational for having one meaning/interpretation, but at the same time its opposite (or further pluralities). So any claim of a work/author being "post-utopian" would only partially be supported by deconstruction (by building a frame of mind and presenting textual/historical evidence of such a classification), but then be completely undermined by reverse interpretation(s) (work/author is "~post-utopian", or "utopian", or otherwise). Post-modernism and deconstruction actually fully agree, to my understanding, that such a classification is silly and possibly untenable, but also go on to show why other interpretations face similar issues, and to show the merit available in the text for such a classification. As a deconstructionist (i.e. specific stream of post-modernism), one would object to any single-minded interpretation or classification of a text/author, and so most of the criticisms of post-modernism that develop from a critique of terms like "post-utopian" or "post-colonial" are actually stretching the criticism way beyond its bounds, and targeting a field whose critique of such terms actually runs parallel to the criticism itself. It's also important to remember that post-modernism/deconstruction was not just a literary movement but one that spans across several fields of thought. In philosophy deconstruction is used to self-defeat universal claims, and bring forth opposing elements within any particular definition. It is actually an extremely useful tool of critical thought, and I have been continually surprised by how easily and consistently the majority of the community on this site dismiss it and the rest of philosophy/post-modernism as being useless or just silly language games. I hope to write an article in the future on the uses of tools like deconstruction in the rationality and bias reduction enterprises of this site.

Insufficient: the colony ship leaves no evidence.

Please don't learn anything from the black arts threads. That's why they're called "black arts", because you're not supposed to learn them.

I'm not sure about others, but while I initially felt that way ("Thank .... who?") whenever something like that happened, careful thought-screening and imagining situations (i.e. simulation) helped weed it out. I'd be surprised if I slip something like that these days, unless it's really really nasty.

"It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on." - Amos Tversky

"Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that - where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed." - Marvin Minsky

I just finished my NaNoWriMo novel, Judge on a Boat (latest revision kept here), last month in November, and this month I'm going through the process of fixing it up and improving it. I described it on LessWrong yesterday.

Why this project? Well, I've been lurking on Less Wrong (and before that, Overcoming Bias) for years, and yet I recently realized that I've not been very rational in actual practice. So I decided to write a novel about rationality and moral philosophy, just to make sure that I managed to actually understand the topics well enough to put them in my own words. Hopefully the attempt to explain them to a lay audience will help my own understanding.

I'd like to get some help from others in the LW community, since I suspect the novel is not very well-written, and I need some ideas on how to improve it. Why should anyone help me? Well: two of the best recent rationalist fiction that I know of are Alicorn's Luminosity and EY's HPMoR. I am nowhere near those levels (for one, their characters are not flat). The only advantage I have is that my novel has (in current law, anyway) a slightly higher chance of being published, unless J.K.Rowling suddenly has an aneurysm and gives the copyright to the public domain, or if suddenly everyone listens to rms and start repealing copyright laws internationally: the novel is original and won't get sued into oblivion if published.

My goals are... a bit iffy. I imagine publishing this in actual real-world physical book form, because those things are easier to give as gifts and might help raise the sanity waterline (badly needed in my family, and least they read books). But with the current level of quality I suspect I have about a snowball's chance of passing unscathed through the sun.

Alternatively: how about an open-source novel? I could put it up into a CC-BY-SA and try to actively recruit people to help improve it, try to leverage the community, but that probably will make it difficult to publish physically, as legally speaking (IANAL) that would require contacting all the copyright owners. Maybe a fiduciary agreement a la FSF-Europe, but I know of no big, trustable entity that would act as a fiduciary for fiction.

What do you think about David Brin's "disputation arenas?"

Maybe we could get a group of scientists to try out some form of disputation arena (Delphi Method for example) and see if they can be more effectively managed that way?

Hello Less Wrong,

My first comment ever. I have been lurking on Less Wrong for several years already (and on Overcoming Bias before there was even a Less Wrong site), and have been mostly cyber-stalking EY ever since I caught wind of his AI-Box exploits.

This year 2012, on a whim, I joined the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) last November, and started writing a novel I had been randomly thinking of making, "Judge on a Boat". The world is that humanity manages to grow up a little without blowing itself up, rationality techniques are taught regularly (a certain minimum level of knowledge in these techniques is required for all citizens), practical mind simulations and artificial intelligence are still far-off (but being actively worked on, somewhere way, way off in the background of the novel), and experts in morality and ethical systems, called "Judges", are given the proper respect they deserve.

The premise is that a trainee Judge, Nicole Angel, visiting Earth for her final examinations (she's from Mars Lagrange Point 1), gets marooned on a lifeboat with a small group of people. She is then forced to act as a full Judge (despite not actually passing the exams yet) for the people in the boat.

The other premise is that a new Judge, Emmanuel Verrens, is reading about Nicole Angel's adventures in novel form, under the guidance of high-ranking Judge David Adams. Emmanuel's thinking is remarkably similar to hers, despite her being a fictional character -

The novel was intended to be more about moral philosophy than strictly rationality, but as I was using Less Wrong as an ideas pump, it ended up being more about rationality, really. (^^)v

Anyway, if anyone is interested in the early draft text, see this.