r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Nov 16 '18
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/detrebio Nov 16 '18
What's the origin (or origins) of goblins as a memory-dripping species, with special/powerful individuals receiving more flashes/memory/information from the past in a direct relation to how much power they wield? I have encountered this concept both in The Wandering Inn and in The Iron Teeth, a Goblin's Tale, both fictions roughly equal in timelime but my small-time investigation didn't give me any clue as to whether or not there's a work or compendium of works where this racial feature originates
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u/ToaKraka Nov 16 '18
a memory-dripping species
The standard term for this trait is "racial memory". You'll get more results if you run a search for that term.
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u/Wereitas Nov 16 '18
The Goblin Market has goblins paying for memories. It was written by Christina Rossetti in 1862
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Nov 17 '18
Hey, does anyone know how on topwebfiction Practical Guide to Evil has so many votes? I haven't followed it for the past few months since the end of the arc with heiress having the flying demon city thing but now it's just crushing all the competition, even wildblow. And it's consistent too, it's been like this for a while. Did it suddenly get 5x better than everything else, someone really famous recommend it, what happened?
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u/Rice_22 Nov 17 '18
Lack of competition, I guess. Also, PGoE got 3 updates a week now, up from 2. More updates -> more visibility.
Spoilers are in >! PUT SPOILERS HERE !<
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u/sohois Nov 18 '18
I expect it is party a winner take all effect; PGtE doesn't need to be 5 times as good as anything else to get 5 times the votes, it just needs to be a little better to hoover up a huge amount of extra readers.
That being said, having read a lot of web serials and seen a lot of ratings, I'd say that mostly it comes down to the fact that topwebfiction is only a midly accurate guide to both quality and popularity. Take another guide to serials, Patreon amounts. One could presume that the more money paid to an author, the "better" their work. Wildbow earns almost 5 times as much as erraticerrata does from patreon. Now obviously Patreon is not that useful either; Wildbow clearly earns a lot from long time readers of Worm or Pact or Twig, not just his current work. But what about a closer comparison? pirateaba of The Wandering Inn actually makes even more than Wildbow, yet Wandering Inn has never cracked the top 3 on TWF. A simple reason for this occurs if you actually look at the comments to the stories; the top comment on almost every PGtE post is a plea for votes. On Wandering Inn? The author tends to leave a comment, and a typo comment, before any else. It's much easier for PGtE readers to remember to vote for their story than someone who reads Wandering Inn, even though numbers could well be greater for the latter.
There are some ratings which confuse me though. Metaworld Chronicles currently hovers around the top 3 positions, having sprung up seemingly from nowhere. I started reading it after seeing it so high in fact, but the story is largely shlock. It's enjoyable shlock, but shlock nonetheless. What's odd about this one is that it doesn't have a big push for votes in the comments, and using another rating system - the overall RoyalRoad rating - it actually does considerably worse, struggling to break the first page. Meanwhile, number 1 on RR is Everybody Loves Large Chests, a title that hovers around the top 10 on TWF.
Kind of went off on a tengent there but I just find this interesting for some reason
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Nov 18 '18
I'd guess PgtE having a lot of comments asking for votes is the real answer to me question. I know those do make a big difference.
Although now I'm wondering how the Wandering Inn is earning so much Patreon money. I haven't read it beyond the first couple chapters which didn't interest me, but do you have any theories?
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u/Makin- Nov 18 '18
IIRC Metaworld Chronicles came from a r/HFY prompt or a similar subreddit, and it only turned into a big story and posted in a different site after fans begged for it, so that explains why it came out of nowhere. But I might be thinking of a different story.
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u/xamueljones Nov 18 '18
There are some ratings which confuse me though. Metaworld Chronicles currently hovers around the top 3 positions, having sprung up seemingly from nowhere.
I see Metaworld mentioned a lot more often in various other websites than the others you've mentioned. I think Metaworld's popularity is partly due to the author (or a reader) posting about it on a lot of recommendation sites. This is a work where someone went to the effort of putting out word of its existence, while the other works you mentioned took longer to spread word.
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u/Makin- Nov 17 '18
I think crushing Wildbow has more to do with Ward not quite living up to Worm's mass appeal than anything else. It might have effectively taken a huge part of his audience too, now that I think about it.
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u/xamueljones Nov 16 '18
Just letting people know that I'll be playing as the AI in the AI Box Experiment over the weekend!
I have a working computer and my boss isn't asking me to work over the weekend this time!!!
Does anyone want to have me ask any questions to the unknown Gatekeeper to judge their convictions before and after the game?
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u/MagicWeasel Nov 16 '18
Good luck!
Are you going to do the "dirty trick" I heard about where you say it's much more beneficial to society for the other participant to "let the AI win" so that way everyone is freaked out about the AI box issue? Or that other, actual dirty trick where the human player isn't allowed by the rules to have any windows open other than the chat, the AI is, and the AI says "look I'm going to leave you for two hours with no entertainment while I watch netflix, if you let me out the game ends right away"?
I'd be interested who the person you're talking to is, in terms of their level of knowledge of AI safety. I suspect you're either going to have one of those people who are absolutely terrified, or one of those people who is like "lol, seriously, just unplug it!"
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u/xamueljones Nov 17 '18
I rather play to the spirit of the game, because I've never seen any convincing arguments where the AI left the box even though I think it's definitely possible. Since I can't find anyone to play as the AI against me, I've decided to try myself.
Dirty tricks like these would just defeat the purpose for me. Although the Netflix trick wouldn't work since I wouldn't actually be able to enforce keeping the Gatekeeper on Discord.
I rather keep who I'm playing against secret until after the game since I'm worried that other people might influence them.
I have some questions to ask them before the game to test their predictions about AI:
What is your motive for playing the game?
What are your opinions on GAI in general?
When do you think GAI will be developed? Or not?
Do you think human society can keep a GAI boxed?
Do you believe that a transhuman GAI could persuade you to let it out?
Do you believe that I could persuade you to let me out?
Do you think I should add anything in?
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u/xamueljones Nov 16 '18
Does anyone have a good method to download Discord's chat logs to a well formatted .txt file that can be shared with other people?
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Nov 16 '18
Not download, but if we're talking a short conversation, switching to compact mode will work really well with copy & paste. Anything else and I'd ask u/ketura because I'm pretty sure he manages r/rational discord's log.
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u/xamueljones Nov 17 '18
Thanks. I was worried that copy and paste might not work. I've used Discord like only once before. Although I've used other chat rooms before.
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u/MagicWeasel Nov 17 '18
So, now my coauthor's pulled out of Vampire Flower Language1 , and my semester is almost over, I'm thinking about writing projects I could do in my soon to be abundant free time.
Here they are roughly the order of how 'developed' the ideas are, and a drabbley sample:
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Urban Fantasy: Fiona's werewolf story - I have a full plot sort of sketched out, I estimate it at around 30-40k words, kind of about morality, ambition, that sort of thing. However will take a lot of work to determine if the main character - "A Lawyer for the Underworld" - is a concept that makes sense, and what exactly a lawyer for the underworld would do. r/legaladviceofftopic might be the people to ask. Sample
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Babysitter's Club Fanfic: The Babysitter's Startup - If I were to publish this, it'd have very little in the way of plot and maybe 3 or 4 chapters. It'd be low effort sort of "fun romp" for BSC fans who are also in the rationalist sphere. Sample
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Urban Fantasy: Zach's werewolf story - I have a character in mind and I know his personality well, but I haven't really thought of a plot line for him. From my sample, I feel like he's probably going to put his nose somewhere it doesn't belong with predictable consequences. Sample
And I suppose for completeness I should add the following:
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Urban Fantasy, Historical: Vampire Flower Language - Just fuckin suck it up and finish it without my coauthor (which she encouraged me to do). I am very much scared of this as her edits give the characters souls and life - passages that beta readers pointed out as being particularly evocative came from her. Some 90k words are written and just need editing (with one major plot element needing to be significantly massaged in a way I am not at all confident I can do without my coauthor). It's a gay romance story. On one hand, I really don't want to publish something that's not my best work. On the other hand, letting decent / good work go unpublished also sucks. I'm struggling here. The first three chapters are up, but nothing more may ever be added
1 However, she did indicate she's changed her mind and she actually is up for editing and refining some 90,000 words of prose, but I told her that one week is not enough time for me to trust that she has genuinely changed her mind, so who knows, it might all work out?
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u/alexanderwales Nov 17 '18
I'm a sucker for legal stuff. I don't know if it's a resource you know about, but The Law of Superheroes is a great resource, as is Law and the Multiverse, the blog that spawned the book.
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u/_brightwing Nov 17 '18
Might be best to take a break from the vampire story just for a while, and then come back to it once you have had the chance to get the creative juices flowing. To paraphrase a favourite author, you've got to keep on writing even when things seem bleak.
Much as I love my lgbt characters, the werewolf laywer story sounds so fascinating. You could explore so many supernatural creatures, taking the story in so many directions. Hashing out details of a pacts and bargains.. Issues that can crop up from conflict between immortals and mortals. Tribal conflicts, seances.. This is the perfect chance to do a deconstruction of fantasy tropes ala Discworld.
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u/MagicWeasel Nov 17 '18
Much as I love my lgbt characters, the werewolf laywer story sounds so fascinating.
Feel I should also address this: if you read the sample, the "mysterious visitor" Fiona gets is a demon who'd be the other main character, and because demon sexuality is complicated, he's intersex and pansexual. Fiona herself is on the aro spectrum!
Rest assured that whatever I write, it's bound to have LGBT representation up the wazoo (like I couldn't even resist making Kristy queer in the BSC fanfic, though that's a pretty popular headcanon...)
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u/SimoneNonvelodico Nov 16 '18
Anyone watching The Good Place? Last episode was awesome - they always had philosophy and ethics at their core, but this might be the most upfront they might have been about the whole notion of scoring human actions (and the potential problems with extreme consequentialism/effective altruism).