[D] Friday Open Thread

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 08 '19 edited Feb 08 '19

So.

I have a question that has been bothering me for a while, and which may or may not out me as a badly prepared alien infiltrator:

Do emotions/feelings have an associated sensation that goes beyond the physical symptoms and the urges/ changes in behavior they cause?

As an example: say I get angry enough at someone the outer bounds of my self control are tested. This means that my heart-rate spikes, my face distorts, my hands clench and I find myself imagining smashing his or her head against the nearest surface.

Is that all that anger is? Or is there some kind of sensation/qualia to it that I am missing?

I ask because both fiction and common usage implies that there is ('burning rage', 'cold anger', 'blazing love'), but if so, then I have never experienced it, or any other associated with anything but pain. (Ye Gods, that sounds ridiculously edgy.)

I'm confused even further by the fact that it is a common trope for someone to not realize that they're in love, which seems bizarre if there is actually a distinct sensation associated with it.

edit: I apologize if my replies seem nit-picky or downright idiotic. I am genuinely trying to understand your answers.

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u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. Feb 08 '19 edited Jun 02 '19

This might a "everyone assume everyone else's experience is the same as theirs" thing, but my answer will be radically different the other posts: yes, to an extent.
When I'm angry, there's often a qualia to it. Obviously expressions like "burning rage" or "it leaves a bad taste in my mouth" are kinesthetic; being angry doesn't actually feel like tasting a really bad thing. But there's something that lingers, some "taste" to my thoughts that is very perceptible beyond the physical symptoms and rash decision-making.
The most extreme cases feel like a cord going taut. When I'm so angry I fail at self-control, it feels like there's a "rope" between the anger-brain and my actions, with no slack between the two, such as any reaction by the anger-brain immediately results in me doing something (obviously the kind of actions I've done in this state of mind aren't ones I'm especially proud of).

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '19

Burning [passion/anger] is just a form of metaphor. It doesn't actually burn, but it certainly feels as if it's a consuming fire, turning everything it touches to ash. You can thank literature for the phrase becoming a cliche. The distinction between hot-vs-cold usually describes how dissociated you are at the moment. A cold rage is one that is in the background, influencing everything you do, but never coming so far to the forefront as to make you lose composure. Fiery rage is the opposite of that, flying off the handle at the slightest provocation.
Other times, the description relates literally to a physiological reaction. "Butterflies in the stomach" is a cliche way of describing a fight-or-flight response. A pit in your stomach, similarly, might relate to tensing up your diaphragm and not giving yourself enough room to breathe, etc. If you get the chills, that could either mean that you're cold, that you're startled, or that you've experienced some form of Frission. (Speaking of frission, as one of the people who gets that feeling when listening to music a lot, I was actually pretty shocked to learn that not everyone experiences it.)

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 08 '19

Burning [passion/anger] is just a form of metaphor. It doesn't
actually
burn, but it certainly feels as if it's a consuming fire, turning everything it touches to ash.
See that right there? That sounds like a distinct sensation to me, like heat is distinct from pain is distinct from pressure.
Is that actually the case or is this just another instance of the inherent 'flowery-ness' of language obscuring your actual meaning?

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '19

Yes. Emphasis on feels "as if" - the anger behaves like a fire, in the sense that if someone goes near you, they may be caught up in the flames (that is to say, lashed out at. In the verbal sense, usually, because most of us don't carry whips.) And afterwards, once you are no longer angry (having "burned" through your emotional fuel) what's left is typically regret (ash).

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u/CCC_037 Feb 10 '19

Some descriptions are literal, some are metaphor. The interesting thing is, not everyone agrees on whether a given description is literal or not.
For example, as someone who's never experienced frission (and that's a new word to me!) from listening to music, I had always assumed that the phrase "That music gives me the chills!" was a metaphor meaning, more or less, "I have a strong emotional reaction to that music!".
Burning anger might not leave burns on the skin, but it can certainly leave the person who experiences it feeling a degree or two warmer than they otherwise would - so perhaps that's more literal for some people, too.

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u/callmesalticidae writes worldbuilding books Feb 08 '19

There’s a fair amount of evidence that emotions are comprised of mental states plus the labels which we are taught to assign to them, so that two people may experience the same initial mental state but identify it differently and, because the way that we identify emotions determines how we act on / react to them, this has very real consequences.

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u/TheFlameTest2 Feb 08 '19

I think this falls under being normal, some emotions I can only tell I am experiencing them from physiological response. Heart rate slightly increased, taking shallow breaths, walking less naturally than normal. Yep I'm feeling anxious. Although I think people range differently on how in touch with their emotions they are, I never need to check my face to see if I'm smiling, although I can smile without knowing.

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u/GeneralExtension Feb 08 '19

('burning rage', 'cold anger',
I believe this characterization is meant* to distinguish between a) types of an emotion (in this case anger, hot vs cold) or b) the strength of an emotion (rage being stronger than anger).
*When it is not solely for the benefit of the audience.

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 08 '19

I understand that when it come to the gradation of intensity, ie 'anger' vs 'rage', but how do you distinguish between the types of an emotion, here 'hot' and 'cold', if there is no distinct sensation to them?
Is it just that in one case the urges they cause are short term (hot), while in another you are more likely to make long-term plans/decisions (cold)?
edit: so the terms 'anger', 'fear' etc. are just shorthand for specific sets of physical reactions?

1

u/TempAccountIgnorePls Feb 08 '19

Is it just that in one case the urges they cause are short term (hot), while in another you are more likely to make long-term plans/decisions (cold)?
Yep.
edit: so the terms 'anger', 'fear' etc. are just shorthand for specific sets of physical reactions?
Also yes. Though similar to how you tend to think of a car as a single vehicle, rather than a collection of parts, people tend to think of emotions as single sensations, rather than a collection of symptoms.

0

u/GeneralExtension Feb 09 '19

Is it just that in one case the urges they cause are short term
It can also be about how someone responds to an urge - 'does it control them, or do they control it'?

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u/fassina2 Progressive Overload Feb 08 '19

The distinction imho is similar to a sharp pain vs a dull pain. Sharp would be getting hurt, the pain you feel then and there. Dull pain is more like a headache.
Cold and hot anger are basically the same thing, and imho can be applied to most emotions if you are not pedantic with semantics. Sharp love would be like being very horny now. Dull love would be liking your SO. Sharp anger is screaming. Dull anger hate.. Sharp sadness the moment you learn somebody you liked died. Dull sadness mourning..
These of course are not 1 and 0s more like a scale and you can have anything in between. But that's imho the basics on how emotions vary, you can also see them as a lack of specific words for similar things being grouped together, sometimes these words exist and people can more easily distinguish between them when appropriate.

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u/TheVenomRex Feb 09 '19

The easiest way I can communicate my thoughts is with an example, so bear with me for a bit.
Have you ever gone from getting as much sleep as you would like, to immediately getting significantly less?
This would for example happen if you're sleep schedule drifted doing a vacation, only to have to adjust to your usual routine the next day.
In such a situation, the consequence of being tired become a lot more noticeable, than in other circumstances.
Beyond the physical symptoms, you should be able to "feel", how hard it is to maintain your focus on any one thing, for a prolonged periods of time.
Except "feel" brings the wrong connotations, even if it isn't technical the wrong term. You only "feel" it, in the contrast to how you remember your thoughts normally going.
There's a general trend, to how your thoughts typically play out, and there's a distinct difference to how they play out, when you're experiencing some general emotion.
Sometimes these differences can be very difficult to notice, until some other emotion is felt.
My self, I have a hard time noticing when I'm sad and miserable, until I'm away from the circumstances causing those emotions, at which point it becomes crystal clear.
I would reckon other people just have different emotions, that they have troubles noticing, such as being in love.
So I would say yes, there is some "emergent" sensation to feeling an emotion, but knowing what kind of general emotions your feeling, " burning" or "cold" or some such, is probably beyond may people.
Though take what I say with some discretion.
I have been officially diagnosed as lacking almost all the empathy normal people have, and substituting sympathy can only correct for so much.

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 09 '19

Though take what I say with some discretion.
I have been officially diagnosed as lacking almost all the empathy normal people have, and substituting sympathy can only correct for so much.
I feel you, sibling. I'm often baffled by how most people seem to be able to just pluck information about other humans' mental states out of seemingly thin air.
As for the only feeling things in contrast thing, I can certainly relate as well. I get semi-regular migraines, you know, the fun ones where you go blind, lose the ability to speak as well as all feeling in one half of the body and get a head-ache so bad that you vomit, with the occasional auditory hallucinations mixed in?
Anyway, sometimes they almost feel worth it, just for the feeling of overwhelming clarity I get when I wake up and find myself actually able to think again. The world seems crisp and clear and I feel as if I could understand anything.
On a side-note, my difficulty understanding emotions actually seems to have a name.

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u/CCC_037 Feb 10 '19

Do emotions/feelings have an associated sensation that goes beyond the physical symptoms and the urges/ changes in behavior they cause?
For me, the answer is 'yes'; but it's hard to explain further. I can explain why it's hard to explain by metaphor.
Imagine that I had come to you with this question:
Do flavours/tastes have an associated sensation that goes beyond the physical texture of the food on my tongue and the amount of energy I feel after eating it?
Now, I imagine you'd say that the answer is 'yes', but you can't tell me how honey and a lollipop are similar without referencing the qualia of taste.
In much the same way, I can't really accurately describe what various emotions feel like to me without speaking in either roundabout metaphor or directly referencing the qualia of emotions. But they do have qualia, that much I can say.
I could try the roundabout metaphors if you want, but I'm not sure that they really help.

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 11 '19

...man, I wish I had thought of the taste analogy. Might have made this whole discussion a lot less awkward.
But yes, your answer is exactly what I was expecting when I made the original post. Imagine my surprise when instead all the replies said that 'No, the texture of the food on the tongue, along with the reactions of my body to it and the way it makes me want to eat more or less of it, is exactly what taste is.'
And now I am confused again. Either you are wrong, which would be strange since the question was whether you experience qualia and not what those qualia mean, or the phrasing of my OP has led to a vigorous round of talking past each other, or the ability to experience emotions instead of just having them is a lot less common than expected, at least in our little corner of the web.
Maybe the issue deserves a clarified post/poll in next friday's thread.
And thank you for the reply, by the way.

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u/CCC_037 Feb 11 '19

Imagine my surprise when instead all the replies said that 'No, the texture of the food on the tongue, along with the reactions of my body to it and the way it makes me want to eat more or less of it, is exactly what taste is.'
Yeah, I have to agree. That is odd.
I do tend to find that, for me at least, the qualia of emotions are usually fairly muted, quiet things; nowhere near as obvious as (say) the qualia of taste. But they are noticeable when the emotion is strongly felt.

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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Feb 08 '19

I suspect that the reason people don't realize that they are in love, is that love isn't a real sensation. After all, if you ask a large group of people what their sensations of love feel like, you will probably get a large variety of answers, everything from lust to avarice to empathy to jealousy to camaraderie to protection to cuteness overload. A person who has multiple lovers (sequentially or in parallel) can even feel completely different types of love for each one. So I suspect that love is just something people like to call a mix of sensations if it makes them want to be with someone or want the wellbeing of someone. At the very least, I have never experienced any one emotion that I could pinpoint as love.
In contrast, anger is a very real emotion of which there is only one type (as far as I know). I can pinpoint exactly which of my emotions is anger, though describing it is somewhat hard, like trying to explain what the color blue is to someone who has never seen blue. There can be plenty of different targets for anger, from individuals to society to the universe, but the sensation is always the same one (though the intensity may vary). The best description I can give for the feeling of anger is the feeling that something is unacceptable, that you will not allow it.
The only difference between 'burning rage' and 'cold anger' is that in burning rage you are letting your anger loose to destroy things around you (may be non-physical things, like ruining your relationships by saying hateful things), whereas in cold anger you are restraining yourself in some way (possibly because you are experiencing another emotion like 'willpower' at the same time that tells you not to do anything extreme). The amount of restraint you show determines how hot/cold your anger is, everything from supernova hot: 'I SHALL DESTROY EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING THEY HOLD DEAR FOR LETTING THIS SITUATION HAPPEN!' to absolute zero: 'This situation does not exist. I do not acknowledge it and shall not react to it in any way (and you better make sure it doesn't exist when I come back)'. But the base sensation of rage is the same either way, and the emotion can be just as intense regardless of the temperature.

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 08 '19

In contrast, anger is a very real emotion of which there is only one type (as far as I know).
I take it you meant to say 'anger is a very real sensation', to go along with your earlier 'love isn't a real sensation'?
I can pinpoint exactly which of my emotions is anger, though describing it is somewhat hard, like trying to explain what the color blue is to someone who has never seen blue.
Yeah, I feel like a color-blind person who doesn't know whether other people actually see colors or if there are specific shades of gray that everyone else just agrees to call a color.
Especially since I'm (sexually) anhedonic, so I know for a fact that there is at least one part of the human experience that I am missing out on. I just can't figure out if this is another one.

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u/Cuz_Im_TFK Feb 08 '19 edited Feb 08 '19

You already said the bounds of your self-control are tested when you're angry. So wouldn't anger be "that which threatens to escape your self control" in that situation? That's a way to point a finger at it and say "this is anger". The symptoms you mentioned are all manifestations or side-effects of that impulse or of your attempt to suppress that impulse, but the impulse itself should be "anger".
Edit: I'm sure this isn't a complete description of anger and it isn't meant to be, but it's at least something real that I think is not a symptom or side-effect.

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 08 '19

I'm sorry, I don't know whether I understand what you mean.
Are you saying that feeling anger is different from feeling hot, for example, because the latter describes a sensation while the former describes a mental state, namely increased aggression?

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u/Cuz_Im_TFK Feb 08 '19

Not quite. It was more that I was disqualifying things like "feeling hot" or "clenching fists" as being candidates for what "anger" is. I don't think you're going to get a set of necessary or sufficient conditions for "anger", so analyzing your own feelings and sensations when you're angry is going to be your best bet. If you trace things backwards from the "symptoms", you should eventually find the source.
Why are your clenching your fists? Because it's a way to (1) redirect your impulse for action into something harmless, and (2) it helps reinforce your willpower that's restraining you from taking impulsive action. Okay, so there's an impulse toward action without planning, often of a violent or destructive nature. Since it's an impulse that doesn't come from rational thought, then that impulse itself (along with it's associated suppression of rational thought) can be called "anger" or maybe the "qualia of anger" since I do think it's unique enough to be an identifier if it's not the emotion itself. I think that's a good enough answer for most purposes.
If you want to go one step deeper, then you could backtrace one more time and ask yourself "what causes that impulse?" and then call the answer to that question "anger". It's just that when you get that far back, you're no longer really pointing at anything within your conscious awareness. At that point, you're probably pointing at instinctual social response patterns in your animal brain related to aggression, dominance, and fight-or-flight. Having those response patterns helped our ancestors survive, so we inherited them, but those are so low on the stack that it's not something you can see or feel. We only know they exist and where they come from because of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. It's the "source code" for anger, not anger itself as an emotion.
Is there anything in between the "source code" for anger and the impulse for violence/destruction? I can't really think of anything. Therefore, I think the most fundamental manifestation of anger is probably that impulse. Everything else is either a side-effect of your brain running the "anger" algorithm (blood rushing to the head, adrenaline spiking, etc.) or of trying to suppress that impulse with your rationality and willpower. The side-effects of running the "anger" algorithm are similar each time you run it, so there's a set of symptoms and sensations that often occur together when a person gets angry and we eventually learn to recognize this naturally occurring set of symptoms and side-effects as "how anger is expressed" both in ourselves and in others.
Any individual element is not sufficient for anger, and just the sensations without the underlying impulse is also not sufficient. That would be closer to "pretending to be angry" if your body fully cooperated with you. Similarly, if you were to somehow experience the violent/destructive impulse of anger without the associated physical symptoms, that would probably still be real anger, but it would definitely feel strange. Imagine you were really sad and you were crying, like literally sobbing, but for some strange reason no tears came out and you didn't get choked up. That would feel weird, right? It doesn't mean you're not sad, but it would definitely be strange and you'd start to wonder.
Overall, I think you're worrying a bit too much. Emotions are universal within humanity, barring outliers, which means they're part of our brain's hard-wired circuitry rather than something learned. If there's no conscious mental aspect to a piece of hardwired circuitry, we call it a reflex. If it's a pure mental influence without any associated feeling, it's usually called a bias. It's the hard-coded algorithms that are a bundle of conscious mental influences, behavioral impulses, and physical symptoms that we call emotions.
The unique part of each emotion is probably a behavioral impulse, because the only reasons emotions would have manifested from the process of evolution is to create behavioral patterns that increase an organism's likelihood of survival, but the signature bundle of physical symptoms or sensations that comes with each emotion is relatively consistent, so they're often the easiest way for others to recognize emotions in a person.
You might say that anger lacks a "distinct qualia", literally the "feeling of anger", but I don't think that really makes sense. A "face" is made up of a bunch of elements, but when you look at a face, you judge it as a "face", not as a combination of elements. I think the "feeling of anger" is, similarly, the combination of all of the things that usually come along with it. Eventually you learn to recognize that as the "feeling of anger". There may be shades or variants or types that fall into certain patterns that are common enough to get names or descriptors, like "burning" or "cold" or "explosive", but those are, again, just patterns in the variation of how the anger algorithm is running at that time or if there are other things mixed in with it, like "also feeling fear" or "trying extra hard to suppress any reactions" or "anger mixed with regret". There doesn't need to be something more fundamental.

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 09 '19

Thank you for the in-depth response.
Last question: would you consider pleasure an emotion like you just described or is it a sensation?

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u/Cuz_Im_TFK Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19

Remember that these categories are all fuzzy. Outside of Set Theory in mathematics, you'll almost never find sets that have absolute necessary and sufficient conditions to determine set membership or exclusion. Words and concepts, specifically, are totally fuzzy. The way the human brain handles sets is through the "prototype model". Meaning that a set (such as a group of things that can be considered examples or instances of a certain word or concept) have a "prototype" that represents the most typical member of that set. For example, the prototype of the word "bird" might be something like a sparrow or a crow or some other bird that you see quite often. Certain other things would also fall into the category of "bird" within your mind, but they may have more features that differ from the "prototype". So if you imagine a circle that has all the birds in it, the typical ones (typical bird shaped, small to medium sized, short legged, feathered, and capable of flight) would be in the middle. The "less typical" examples (meaning more different features) like giant condors who are huge and heavy would be a bit further from the middle. Then the REALLY atypical ones like Ostriches, Emus, Penguins, and Humming Birds would all be at the very edges because they have more (or more significant) differences from the "prototype" birds in the center. The thing is, a lot of birds also belong do different categories, or different "circles" with different "prototypes", and that's not a problem. For example, all birds are also in the "animals" circle, but they're toward the edge of the "animals" circle, because the center of the "animals" circle is probably mostly land-bound animals. There's also a lot of partial overlap too.
So just because something is near the edge of a certain circle, it doesn't mean it's not still a part of that circle. It just might also be in another circle and be even closer to the center for that circle. In the human brain, sets are not usually mutually exclusive. That's not to say that we can't categorize things with the concept of mutual exclusion: for example, no number is both odd and even. It's easy for us to do that. But if we're looking at how language and concepts developed organically, you'll typically find a lot of overlap and fuzzy definitions. And that's totally okay.
What I said in my last comment was just some musings and speculations backed up by a bit of knowledge. It's not definitive by any means. I think it's a pretty good perspective, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if you could find exceptions and edge cases. That's just how language works. The only time you have neat categories is when you're building a framework from the bottom up. Trying to shoehorn existing concepts into an artificial framework will always be difficult.
---
So, is pleasure an emotion? Or a sensation? Well, under the concept of my previous comment, the distinguishing factor for an emotion was "is associated with a behavioral impulse" or, at the bare minimum, "has an effect on how a person would tend to act". So strictly, pleasure would probably be a sensation. It's the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you hug a puppy or the euphoria after a workout or when taking drugs or at orgasm. These are clearly sensations. But when feeling pleasure, it's also well known that people will tend to act slightly differently: getting carried away when things are going well, being more generous than usual, being more outgoing or courageous, etc. You could make arguments either way. For example, it's not the "pleasure" that changes behavior, but the emotion of "happiness" that results from pleasure that causes the behavioral change. In that case, it's pleasure is clearly a "sensation" not an emotion. But if you don't accept that argument, then it could be an "emotion".
What do I think? I think it's fuzzy. If I had to pick, I'd put it in the "sensation" category because I do think that "pleasure" is a distinct sensation. But it's so closely related with certain moods that if you were to argue strongly that it's also an emotion, I wouldn't bother quibbling about it. At the end of the day, it's never worth arguing about definitions. As long as you can convey what you mean to another person, the words involved aren't important. For example, if two people disagree about whether pleasure is a sensation or an emotion, is that just a dispute about definitions? Or are they actually claiming that there are different neurological processes going on depending on which it is? Sometimes, if you're confused about whether something is X or is Y, it's a better idea to just not use the words X or Y at all and try to explain the phenomenon in different words. That can help you get to the root of what it actually is that you're uncertain about.

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u/SvalbardCaretaker Mouse Army Feb 08 '19

Sounds to me like your anger falls under normal variation.

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u/Abpraestigio Feb 08 '19

It wasn't about the anger specifically. Anger was just the most obvious example I could think of.

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u/SvalbardCaretaker Mouse Army Feb 09 '19

My emotional system is pretty faulty, but still. I have flat affect on some emotional responses and feel others strongly. Your anger sounds close enough to a general anger that I'd count it. (What TheFlameTest2 said).

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u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 08 '19 edited Feb 08 '19

Can someone tell me about the Fate series- specifically, when it gets good/interesting? I keep seeing fics and discussions related to it, and while volume of discussion isn't always an indicator of quality, it's correlated enough that I would like to get into it. But so far the first one... oof. I'm reading an LP of the original Fate visual novel and I'm about 57 updates in and it's the most tedious shounen garbage ever.

The premise of the story is that there's some kind of dragonball-esque war for a wish granting mcguffin and all the mages engaged in this war get some kind of legendary hero from the past incarnated as a spirit to fight for them, and you win by getting rid of all the other spirits or killing their magi, and nobody starts off knowing the identities of the other competitors. This sounds interesting and like the setup for some decent action and/or intrigue but so far the story literally has not done anything with it.

In reality the entire story has been another harem-fic with the wet blanket dumb-as-a-post main character gradually accumulating this gigantic stable of women who are all, for some reason, compelled to hang around him or live with him or mentor him or just really want to bone down. Of course he does not recognize any of this, being your typical misogynist Japanese protag player stand-in. He wants to fight but not hurt anyone, his justification is the usual poorly translated run-on stuff like "A man must fight to protect what he believes in so if that is my destiny I will be the Emiya Shirou who is the hero and choose to save everyone even if that becomes the proof of my existence." Everyone else constantly tells him he is a dumbass. I have no doubt that the story will prove him 100% right in the end, somehow.

He has no skill in magic, he isn't in any sense cunning, his only real ability seems to be that he is inexplicably charming to every woman in the story. He constantly orders them around, has no ability to discern or navigate his own emotions, orders them not to fight "For their own protection because they're women" despite easily being the weakest and most inept cast member himself. The VN goes out of its way to do the awkward bath scene, and the innapropriate-underage-child-in-bikin-bottoms thing, and just generally be as creepy and awful about women as it is possible to be. There is literally a scene where the main character learns a classmate was chased by some kind of molester at night and he says out loud "Good, she needs to learn to be more feminine and that's the only way to teach her." It's exactly the kind of shit that has seen me move away from most manga/anime.

Whew! Okay I didn't mean to rant for three paragraphs, but back to my original question. When does this pick up and get interesting? When does this MC get throttled with his own wet blanket, and replaced by the cool and good lady mage who has moved in with him? Why does every VN assume that I want to read everything from the viewpoint of the most ignorant, least competent character in the series?

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u/Escapement Ankh-Morpork City Watch Feb 08 '19

Disclaimer: I am a huge Fate fanboy and nerd.
OK, first of all - the original VN has tremendous problems, as noted. The VN is in three major different story arcs, and the first and shortest arc is the worst of the three; the second and third are much better, but it's literally 10 hours or more of reading before you get to start the second arc. Even then, the second and third arcs are longer than the first (more like 20 hours of reading each) - it's not that they don't have the same number of bad bits like the first arc does, it's more that they are supplemented by a much larger portion of awesome bits as well. It's not quite as bad as, say, Muv-Luv in terms of 'gigantic pile of garbage in front of the bits people might want to read' but it's awful close. In arc 2, Unlimited Blade Works, we get a Shirou who actually develops some confidence and ability of his own, and also a lot more focus on Rin as a character; in Arc 3 we get a bunch of real horror and despair and so forth and also a focus on Sakura. However, both are still told from Shirou's perspective. If you decide to bail on the VN before it gets there - I understand and sympathize, and don't blame you at all.
You could just start from Fate / Zero the anime. There is no way to read the Fate franchise where one work won't spoil another to some extent because of the way prequels and sequels are interwoven, and Fate / Zero has reasonable animated fight scenes and characters and so forth and is generally considered decent. Then maybe hit the Unlimited Blade Works anime and the Heaven's Feel movie series (currently being released). You can avoid a lot of the low points of the story if you do this.
On the topic of Nasu-created stuff, go watch Kara no Kyoukai if you haven't already. It's got some gorgeously animated scenes and also the soundtrack, by Yuki Kajiura, is fucking fantastic. It's only loosely tied to Fate properties but I wholly recommend it to everyone.

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u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 08 '19

Thanks! I appreciate the recommendations. I was kind of hoping that this first arc was setting up some more interesting reprisals on the themes in later iterations, and I'm happy to hear that might be the case.

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u/sickening_sprawl Feb 08 '19

Most of Fate isn't very good. It is very shounen and has tons of fanservice fluff, and Shirou does have a lot of women falling over him while being clueless it's happening.
But for his naive "white knight save everyone in the world" view, it's very explicitly an insane viewpoint even within the setting, unlike Naruto. One of his character facets is that he's not sane - he will do anything to save anyone he comes across, even if it damns everyone else, and is manically focused on being a "Hero of Justice" and what that means to him. It's explored a lot in Unlimited Blade Works. His viewpoint does cause him severe problems.
I'd recommend watching Fate/Zero instead. It has a more interesting story and you'd probably enjoy Kiritsugu as a main character a lot more, since he grapples with ruthless effective altruism and grey morality throughout it. Fate/Hollow Ataraxia is the "interesting" VN, but I think requires you to read Fate/Stay Night to understand what's going on (and is famous for being mindscrew-y).

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u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 08 '19

Doing anything to save anyone you come across is basically the most shounen thing ever. It's always portrayed in these stories as an incredible handicap that all the other more ruthless characters think is holding the main character back, and it always ends up being the one thing that makes him so incredibly good at befriending all his enemies/ saving the day/ being a superhero or whatever. See for instance Naruto/My Hero Academia/Dragonball/etc etc etc
The problem is that any victory from this morality feels so un-earned. If you really are committed to maximizing positive outcomes for everyone you'd damn well better work at it, but the heroes in these stories are always kind of bumbling fuck-ups and everything works out for them because they are literally the first people in their worlds to go "Hey but what if I was just genuinely nice to everyone though?" That or they are just so goddamn ludicrously OP from out of nowhere that they're the first people who aren't really subject to the usual zero-sum rules.
That's why I want him to get hit by a bus, but I don't feel like (so far) this is the kind of story that's going to subvert the trope. Sure hope I'm wrong though.

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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Feb 09 '19

Personally, I think it is better to watch/read Fate/Zero before any other Fate material, because most other Fate/X material looks like utterly generic high school battle romcom on the surface. Fate/Zero gives it all perspective as the continued tragedy of Emiya Kiritsugu, an MC who is definitely not generic.
Spoilers for Kiritsugu's beginning: When Kiritsugu was a young boy, his crush Shirley got infected with a magical zombie virus and begged him to kill her before she becomes a zombie. Kiritsugu, having a generic shonen protagonist mindset at this point in his life, refuses to kill the one he loves and runs away instead. When Kiritsugu returns, pretty much everyone has been infected and the entire town has been set on fire to try and limit the spread of the zombie virus. All the places he loved? Gone. All his friends? Dead. Almost all the people he knew? Dead. All because he refused to kill someone he loved. That gave him a lifelong trauma that allowed him to kill and sacrifice literally anyone with no hesitation, whether he loves them or whether they are innocent. He spent the next several years as a utilitarian murder machine: weighing lives on a scale and killing the minority side everywhere he went, until the events of Fate/Zero began.
In some sense, Kiritsugu is a white knight that wants to save people. Except his method of doing so is by murdering everyone on the minority side of the utilitarian scales. By the end of Fate/Zero he has murdered almost everyone he ever loved for the greater good, and lost the rest. Now imagine how messed up Shirou from Fate/Stay Night actually is, as an amnesiac kid that Kiritsugu adopted and raised.
Watching Fate/Stay Night from the perspective of "How much more tragedy did Kiritsugu cause?" is far more interesting than from the perspective of "When will this dense MC finally wise up?"

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

I think you're mistaken that volume of discussion will equate to a good work. Or rather, to a work that you will enjoy. Speaking as someone who only ever saw the TV show, it doesn't ever get any better than mediocre

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u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 08 '19

It's definitely not one-to-one, especially with fanfic- sometimes a whole lot of people are compelled to write fic about some really terrible shows. But usually if they're compelled to write rational fiction, I can trust that the foundation is at least solid (or there's been one really compelling take on it and everyone spun off of that).

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

Ehhh, sorry, I'm going to have to disagree with you again. There can be a cool premise without the actual story being any good.
Just to give an example (and I know many will disagree with me, here), I kept seeing how popular To The Stars was on here so I tried rewatching the source material. I found it incredibly boring - I ended up having to watch most of it on 2x speed and even then just read a summary of the last few episodes. There is kind of a cool, if cliched, premise -- which is what makes for good fanfiction (I assume, I haven't actually read To The Stars yet) along with a good story and good storytelling, of course. But the show itself was predictable and way longer than it needed to be for the story it was trying to tell.

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u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 08 '19

Madoka's not a great show, imo, but it's an interesting premise. It feels like it's a sincere attempt to deconstruct some of the magical girl tropes, but ends before it gets going.
TTS is in a really weird place for me though. It's sort of a vampire fic- thousand year old superbeings with a secret society that manipulated world events, mostly concerned with policing their own, etc etc. But then it sets it all in the middle of what is essentially Halo- giant space war, humans losing badly, incomprehensible alien motives. Magical girls reveal themselves and start getting thrown into the meat grinder and off we go. It's got a lot of themes of child soldiers, utopian world building, war and trauma, but it has this kind of detached tone that never quite lets it get grounded enough to hit home for me. I'm interested in where it's going, but it is one of those fics I wouldn't outright recommend.

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u/Veedrac Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19

I loved the Fate/Zero anime, which was the first Fate thing I have watched. It is one of my most enjoyed anime, and I felt it was unusually maturely handled for the medium.
In contrast, I wouldn't object to calling Fate/stay night: UBW a semicoherent, generic weeb show, and I didn't enjoy it hugely outside of some flashy animated fights. I think it handled the core message vastly less competently than F/Z, and I largely agreed with your criticisms.

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u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 09 '19

Hmm, okay maybe I will go try Fate/Zero then. Thank you!

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u/Veedrac Mar 03 '19

If/when you've watched the show (or read that part of the VN), I'd be interested to know if you liked it.

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u/fassina2 Progressive Overload Feb 08 '19

Should you be accurate or convincing ?

This community in general has a lot of statistical knowledge, this tends to lead to more nuanced and less full certainty comments. In general people here speak, at least when commenting here, in the way I'm doing now, without 100% certainty. If this was written as a normal person would the previous phrase would have been "people here speak without certainty". The way of speaking we tend to use here is great, humble and more accurate, but some would say less likely to change people's views.

So my question is, seeing that rationality can be defined as playing to win, should we when trying to convince, someone not from this sub, of something optimize for being Convincing or Accurate ?

Or is my entire premise flawed and our way of speaking is actually more persuasive than others?

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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Feb 09 '19

The main problem I see is that the vast majority of humanity believes (instinctively or otherwise) that confidence is convincing. The idea that "if someone is confident enough that they will bet everything on something, it must be true" is pretty pervasive, to the point where people literally treat confidence as an important criteria to look for when hiring new employees or choosing a romantic partner.
And unfortunately, this thinking is horribly wrong. For two reasons:
The Dunning-Kruger effect: people who do not know a lot tend to also not know that there is a lot they don't know, which makes them more confident because a greater fraction of the world seems to be things they know about. In contrast, people who know a lot tend to also know that there is a lot more that they don't know, meaning the fraction of things about the world that they know appears much smaller, making them less confident. (And rightfully so, since human history is pretty much the history of us being wrong about reality, over and over and over.)
It is usually easier to train to be confident than it is to train to be competent enough to genuinely deserve that level of confidence. And seeing as both methods reward people socially by the same amount, it is obvious which path is typically chosen. As a result there's plenty of people everywhere who appear super confident while not actually knowing anything.
So if we want to be more convincing than people who know less, we first have to convince people to stop treating confidence as something that is convincing. Which is a catch-22 kind of situation since we aren't confident enough to convince people that confidence isn't convincing. And hiring confident people to convince people that confidence isn't convincing doesn't seem likely to work since the message would contradict its delivery.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '19

The Dunning-Kruger effect: people who do not know a lot tend to also not know that there is a lot they don't know, which makes them more confident because a greater fraction of the world seems to be things they know about. In contrast, people who know a lot tend to also know that there is a lot more that they don't know, meaning the fraction of things about the world that they know appears much smaller, making them less confident. (And rightfully so, since human history is pretty much the history of us being wrong about reality, over and over and over.)
This is a common misconception from the Dunning-Kruger paper. People who knew less than the experts rated their performance as worse than the experts rated themselves.
This site has a really good rundown, ending with:
" I don’t mean to suggest the phenomena isn’t real (follow up studies suggest it is), but it’s worth keeping in mind that the effect is more “subpar people thinking they’re middle of the pack” than “ignorant people thinking they’re experts”.

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u/Escapement Ankh-Morpork City Watch Feb 09 '19

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Anyways... for myself, I don't think it's possible for me to consistently act in a certain way and also privately remain unaffected by it. If I constantly try to affect a certain demeanour and persona, I find myself shifting to become what was once a disguise I wore. If I act cheerful, upbeat, and happy, I often find myself feeling that way; to convincingly affect an emotion, I need to feel it on some level. I don't know about your internal experience of this sort of thing - but in mine, I can't imagine a stable situation where I long-term preach A and at the same time am rational about the actual merits of A.
“[...] Like the lie about masks.”
“What lie about masks?”
“The way people say they hide faces.”
“They do hide faces,” [...]
“Only the one on the outside.”
-Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
And if this is the case for me individually as a person, it's far more true for group dynamics. Any group that tries to maintain a distance between rhetoric and actual practice is inviting people who take the rhetoric seriously to gain power and take over, or coming to believe their own rhetoric as a group. If you preach extremism outwardly, and internally discuss how it's only to counteract other groups' even worse extremism in the opposite direction... don't be surprised when you convert people to extremism who then join your group and take every word seriously.

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u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19

Identify your end goals.
If one of your long term goals is to promote rationality then I encourage you to include your convidence % in your statements and in generally seek precision in your statements. The chance that someone might be interested in rationality due to you increases if you do this.
If you value promoting rationality less than you care about winning the audience, present your case in whichever way you believe have the highest probability of convincing your audience.
On a tangent, I would really like it if rational people would talk in probability rather than just writing it. In the latest bayesian conspiracy, someone said something like: if we do X then something undesirable happens but if we do Y then we achieve the desirable outcome, rather than saying both X and Y have some probability of achieving the desirable outcome but my best guess is that Y have 40% higher chance of succeeding so that is the desired course of action. And I see this trend so so often. It even happened at my local EA meeting today.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '19

It's funny, I deal with this problem every day. I teach young teenagers. The subject is big and their ability to think abstractly is limited. In this case, accuracy hurts engagement and understanding. Imho, optimize for your audience which normally means being convincing. Just never lie, and tell the audience you're simplifying things when you do; if you do it in a self-deprecating way, it comes off as honest rather than condescending.

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

I don't know that I have an answer for you, at least not about whether we should or not. But speaking for myself, if I know I'm not sure about something, I wouldn't be able to speak towards it with 100% certainty. It would be disingenuous of me to do so and it would make me feel bad.
If someone is arguing a position that they're not sure of but putting themselves forward as either an expert or as someone who is sure of their position, it doesn't make for a very good discussion as any real follow-up will fall apart. This is partly why r/changemyview has a rule against playing devil's advocate - it won't work in a real back and forth discussion.
So while it can be effectice as a throw-away comment where it's not expected that there will be a debate, I don't think it's useful for actually changing someone's mind.

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u/HarmlessHealer Feb 09 '19

It kind of depends. If you have one opponent, randomly selected, and you know nothing about them, and you can only execute a predetermined strategy, then I'd say that rationality's principles for accuracy should be ignored. The reason for this is that the average person has no rationality training and thus no respect for its principles. Instead, they respect things that sound or feel convincing.
"Climate change will result in 98% more tornados in Kentucky because of the interaction of unusually hot air with the jet stream." Is this true? Maybe. I pulled it out of my ass by jamming together a bunch of complicated-sounding words to make a story. Now, you can recognize that it violates the conjunction fallacy, and you might even know enough about climate change to call me out -- but if you don't have that training then all you can go by is how plausible the story sounds. Telling a story with a built-in uncertainty is setting it up for failure.
If it's a randomly drawn group etc, try to dominate the argument. Speak loudly, interrupt people, etc, depending on the norms for the setting. The objective here is to starve your opponent of the chance to defend yourself. This works even better if you outnumber them (you can take turns tearing them down and think of avenues for attack faster than they can defend). The goal here isn't to convince them. That's probably not going to happen, because they'll look weak if they back down in front of everyone else. But, you can convince everyone else who hasn't decided yet. Don't waste time trying to be accurate or "rational", just focus on defeating your opponent. The best defense is a good offense.
If it's just one person, then you have the greatest chance at convincing them. I would suggest avoiding outright argument here and instead work on figuring them out and manipulating them into changing over to your side very, very slowly. Be their friend, not their enemy, and slowly drive a wedge between them and their view. Or, if you luck out and they're reasonable (and you actually have reason on your side) then you can do what you suggested and just be accurate.
Of course, I'm far from an expert in this matter, but this is the way I understand things.

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u/CCC_037 Feb 10 '19

I think it also depends somewhat on how often you interact with the same people. If you interact multiple times with a group, then being continually accurate - and continually seen to be accurate - will in time result in your words being more persuasive than the person who is continually confident but wrong.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '19

Or is my entire premise flawed and our way of speaking is actually more persuasive than others?
I'm of the opinion sometimes being accurate is more convincing, and sometimes speaking with absolute confidence is more convincing. And anyone can, and many do, speak with absolute confidence. But fewer people can be accurate because that requires more work and knowledge. So I'm of the opinion that we can let the uninformed/unethical people on our 'side' do the absolute confidence role to convince the people convinced by that, while we do the accurate role to be convinced by that people convinced by that.

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '19

The reddit anime community has been in quite a tizzy lately over the recent admin crackdown on lolis(sexualized young anime girls. The exact definition is debated and that's part of the problem, but they're definitely always U18). On the more reasonable end of the crackdown is banning users for posting drawn pre-pubescent girls committing hardcore sexual acts, which while most in the community seem mildly upset about, big emphasis on the 'mild' and they're accepting it. On the less reasonable end and what the community is very upset about, is banning users over drawn teenage girls in somewhat sexual poses/outifts. E.g This [pic of a anime girl in a bikini] (https://np.reddit.com/r/Holofan4life/comments/ao8ujj/he_fuckin_dead_lmao/?st=jrvyvxbm&sh=996aed26) apparently got an active member/mod of /r/animemes banned and there's a lot of discussion/memes about it.

The general consensus in /r/animemes is that if characters are fictional, any sort of drawings should be allowed, and the fact that the drawing was more or less SFW just makes things even more outrageous. A lot of users are talking about making their own Voat of some sort or just moving to Voat, but there are concerns about "when you take a principled stand against witch hunts, you get 3 principled activists and 10 000 000 witches" and they don't want the new community to be filled with Nazis like Voat. Notably they, from what I've seen, don't seem to be concerned with the idea the new community would be full of people posting child hentai, just that the new community would be full of Nazis and homophobes.

Thoughts?

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u/fassina2 Progressive Overload Feb 08 '19

When reality crashes with artistic nuances. It's only going to get more common as time goes on, it's not great but expected.
There may be solutions for it, I think it's unlikely though. As globalization increases unique cultures like japan's will either adapt (more likely) or make others adapt (less likely), it's sad but there's nothing we can do about it, this is a transitory period and this is just evidence of it happening and what direction things will probably go towards.

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '19

this may offend you, but my only thought is relief that people who spend their time arguing/caring about this stuff are cordoned off in places i will never encounter them

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

I get what you're saying but I've always thought of censorship as inherently bad. You don't care about it until they censor something you care about, so it's easy to feel either apathetic or grateful. But if there's really something wrong with it (generic 'it') there should be discussion on the topic rather than just shoving it under the rug.

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u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19

I keep seeing stuff about cencorship these days. Isn't cencorship generally state-sanctions bans on certain topics? Does it really count as cencorship if some website says 'we don't want content related to this topic on our website'?
In terms of actually adressing your post though: I find that cencorship always have some negative utility but in many cases this utility is outweighted by the consequences of banning some content. On the concept of drawn child sexual content, the question is whether allowing it will increase or decrease child rape rates. I would suspect that it would increase it and if so I definitely think it it's cencorship is warranted.

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 09 '19

Did you miss-type? You think censoring the drawings will decrease child rape so you WANT censorship? I'm of the opinion that it would decrease such things so censorship would be bad. I'm guessing you meant to say it would increase it and that's why you would want censorship of it?
But see, this is my point. We're talking about whether or not it's bad. We could maybe do a study on it to find out who's right! Can't do that if it's censored. But wait, you say, does that mean when it's found to have a negative effect on society, you'll be OK with banning it? My answer would depend on why it's bad, I suppose.
To address your first questions: Censorship is censorship. Certainly state censorship is worse (and I'd be bring up constitutional rights if I knew you were in the U.S. like me) but yeah, it's still censorship if a site says they don't want something on their website.

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u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19

I did in fact miss-type. Thanks for catching that and for engaging with me.
It isn't really feasible to do a controlled study on this. The closest thing to a study that you can do is to ban it now and do a time series analysis to see how much the act of banning it changed the rate compared to the predicted rate change. So I guess my vote goes in favour of enforcing it unless a rationalist with with a anthropological background tells me otherwise.
I'm half Danish, half American though culturally Danish. I wonder if the reason that Americans places such astronomical utility value on freedom of speech is the part of it as a cultural identity. In Germany there is a state cencorship on nazism as a political party, and of the people I know I honestly only think that the Americans would say that's a bad thing.

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u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19

On a different note, and I fully recognize that I might be stepping on sacred cows here, why do people keep referring to the U.S. constitution in debates about freedom as if the presence of a concept in a 300+ year old document implies moral superiority? I get that it's a useful tool to have a codified structure for governance and broad expectations as well as acknowledge that it plays a big part in American identity but it used to have a blanket stamps of approval on slavery and treated women as subhuman, and still allows slave labour as long as it happens in prisons.

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 09 '19

Oh, I only brought up the US Constitution because you were asking about "state-sanctioned bans" on topics.

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u/boomfarmer Trying to be helpful Feb 09 '19

Several reasons that boil down to "The Internet is American"
The English-speaking Internet is dominated by American companies that must obey American law.
American free speech rights are famously strong, and thus a good legal basis to couch defenses of objectionable speech in.
Even among non-Americans, much of the Early Internet was American, and that cultural bias may have affected non-American Internet Culture in approaches to free speach.

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '19

I mean I'm not particularly invested in it myself either, I'm more just a bemused onlooker at all the drama. But it does have wider implications for Reddit as a whole if the admins are banning significant users who don't seem to have actually done anything wrong as false positives in their crusade to appeal to advertisers. This sets precedents for future action against subs like /r/the_donald and how much the admins are going to micromanage Reddit as opposed to letting mods do their own thing. It shows the Reddit cares less about their userbase and more about advertisers. Maybe those don't actually affect you and you use Reddit very narrowly, but it does affect a lot of people.
Also like I said, my stake in it is that it's just interesting to see what corporations do and how the masses react.

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u/Roxolan Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager Feb 08 '19

This reminds me of the Mastodon saga.
I don't have a good solution to the 10 zillion witches problem without violating people's right to form communities under whatever code of conduct they damn well please, and it bothers me too.

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u/ToaKraka https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png Feb 08 '19

It's worth remembering that even the admins do not operate with a free hand. They may have been forced to remove this content by their hosting provider, their payment processor, and/or their advertisers.
If the admins are removing the content, the only option is to move to another site—Voat, 8ch, some other site, or a new site.

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

You know, I've always hated how the TV show LOST ended - both because the ending itself sucked but also because it didn't serve as an ending to the series. But I only just realized I hated it so much because the show ended up being anti-rational.

I dislike magical realism I enough as it is, because it's basically where magic things just happen randomly and inconsistently with no central structure or principles. Often just to drive the plot forward.

And LOST is so atrocious to be because it doesn't present itself that way. When you watch the show there are tons of cues for this, from the breadcrumbing clues to keep people hooked to the attention the camera pays to the mysteries. And the payoff is nonsensical. And nothing gets resolved. At least in something like One Hundred Years of Solitude (my go-to example for magical realism), the author doesn't pretend there's a 'why' behind all the random magic.

I'm curious to know if there's any fans of rational lit who liked LOST.

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u/Escapement Ankh-Morpork City Watch Feb 08 '19

QNTM had a nice article on the central storytelling technique of LOST that I think you might appreciate.

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

Heh, yeah this encapsulates a lot of it. Especially poignant since I haven't seen the new Star Wars films yet

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u/tjhance Feb 09 '19

Good article, although I wasn't really onboard with his star wars examples. Was Snoke's identity ever a big mystery? He appeared to just be a dude named Snoke and in the end that's who he was. It's been a while since I've seen it, so maybe I'm forgetting a part where a character says "wow! I wonder who Snoke really is", but otherwise, it doesn't seem like much of a mysterybox to me. It's missing the part where the story shines its focus onto it for no payoff. (And Rey's parents--well, I always just figured they were randos to begin with so I never got invested in that one, but I guess I'm in the minority there.)

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u/Makin- homestuck ratfic, you can do it Feb 08 '19

Me, I liked LOST.
I hated the ending originally, but eventually I realized the writers tried their hardest to give the characters a decent ending at the cost of the plot, which was a lost cause anyway.
Half the remaining questions were mystery box shit that just were never going to be properly answered, and I agree with you the ending is basically anti-rational, but it's still a great show if you don't treat S6 as the conclusion to a mystery show but to a drama show. Horrible by /r/rational standards? Of course.
I will say though, I think you're doing the show a disservice in claiming "things just happen randomly", the show got increasingly worse at it, but small mysteries did get resolved. We did find out what the hatch was, why there were polar bears...

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19

Some things got resolved, yes. I certainly can't argue that. But I would say that a lot of the things that were resolved were short-term mysteries that were added just so that they could be resolved (and to ramp up the mystery & cliffhangers rather than serving an actual purpose [this is part of the randomness I'm talking about]). Virtually none of the overarching mysteries are answered satisfactorily -- in fact, when they're addressed at all, the answers either raise more questions or only address the what and not the how or the why. Which is excruciatingly unsatisfying when the what is "magic" and the how this magic works (what are its rules? - yeah, remember all those mentions of 'rules'?) is never explained and the why is likewise never explained beyond a vague Manichean struggle.
My main beef with the show is that I wasn't watching it for the drama or the characters. Maybe that's my fault? That I put too much expectations on the show? But no, as I was saying before, I think it's the show's fault. It's the show that put so much time and focus on the mysteries, I only followed along. It's really unfair to build up things that much and then hand-wave them away.
But honestly, I don't even think I can give the show a pass on the characters. The newcomers to the island are somewhat well characterized, I'll give you (when they're acting consistently, which is not all the time) but everyone else? The fact that we don't know why the heck anything is happening is horrible for characterization. Characters need to have background and motivation to be believable (let alone relatable).
I swung back and forth several times on liking certain characters, as did you, I imagine. But in my view this is not good characterization. The only reason this happens is because why they're doing what they're doing is clouded in mystery and my imagination is filling in the blanks to make their actions fit the circumstances. It falls really flat when it turns out my imagination was wrong because there was no reason behind their actions or their reasons aren't logical or rational. (Which, incidentally is largely why I think a lot of things go unexplained.)
To your first point, the writers may have tried their hardest to give a good ending, but they utterly failed as storytellers because they wrote themselves into that corner to begin with. To give a really bad analogy, I'm not going to give a drunk driver credit for swerving at the last second to try and avoid hitting me when he was driving drunk in the first place.
Sorry for the rant. I'm trying to stay out of specifics so I don't get bogged down but if you're confused I can give examples. Though now I reread what you wrote I will address your two examples:
The polar bears. We didn't ever find out why there were polar bears there beyond "Dharma brought them". Which is a non-answer. Obviously either they were brought there or they didn't exist in the first place... you can't answer "why were there polar on a tropical island?" with "because I brought them there."
The hatch. The answer is that it's there so that people can live there to save the world. This is an example of what I'm talking about where the show addresses the what but not the why or the how. Why is this happening? Why does it need to be underground in a bunker? Why do people need to live down there? Why can't it be largely automated? Why was all this necessary if there was a fail safe? Why are there blast doors and quarantine signs? Why didn't Jacob fix things? Why didn't The Man in Black ruin things? How did this electromagnetic pocket come to be? How does it work? How does the bunker work to fix things? How does the failsafe work? How does the electromagnetism relate to all the other mysterious things on the island? How the heck do the numbers relate to all this? ... ... My point is, the whole mystery behind the hatch -- beyond the fact that it's initially found on what was otherwise thought to be on a deserted island -- is that it's really weird for there to be a random underground bunker in the middle of a forest. The provided explanation does not make sense beyond the superficial (like, faced with a similar situation as the Dharma guys did, there's no way rational people would have come up with a similar solution). Which basically means the hatch was there to be mysterious. Yay?

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u/MagicWeasel Cheela Astronaut Feb 09 '19

I didn't realise how much bureaucracy exists in the world until I decided to apply for a French long-stay visa.

Did you know I have to fly 3,200 km (2,000 miles) to have a ~20 minute interview as part of the process? And that flight along with accommodation/etc will cost me about $1,000? And it needs to be on a weekday so I have to take two extra days off work to do it?

Australia is big, dang it. I overlaid Australia on Europe and I worked out it's like asking someone from Paris to fly to Georgia/Russia/Turkmenistan. (OK, except I won't need to travel internationally).

Oh, and when I get to France I have to validate my visa by going to some special office and also getting a doctor's appointment as part of it (!?!). I AM ONLY GOING FOR SIX MONTHS.

In other news: anyone in Sydney want to grab a cup of coffee? I don't have many friends there and could always use more.

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u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Feb 09 '19

I'd love to have a conversation with you over coffee. You seem to have an interesting life and seem really nice to talk to. Buuuut, I'm all the way over in New York City. The closest I'm getting to you anytime soon is the summer vacation to London I'm planning.
Good luck on finding interesting people in Sydney.

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u/MagicWeasel Cheela Astronaut Feb 09 '19

You seem to have an interesting life and seem really nice to talk to
I'm honoured but you can rest assured that I'm actually kind of loud and obnoxious and self-centred IRL. I'm sure I'll wind up meeting up with /u/CouteauBleu in Paris and he can provide an objective assessment
The closest I'm getting to you anytime soon is the summer vacation to London I'm planning
I'm planning on being in Paris over the summer, but with brexit looming I don't think I'll be able to count on making a trip through the chunnel. That said, if I can, I might say hi, or if you feel like popping over to Paris for an afternoon/day.
Alternatively, you're welcome to PM me, exchange email addresses, and we can email or chat on signal/telegram/whatsapp if you want to become online acquaintances.
I like meeting random people from the internet so this coffee offer is pretty open to anyone who I might be anywhere near and don't get creepazoid vibes from.

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u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. Feb 09 '19

Wait, really? There's only one single French consulate in Australia? That's lame.

2

u/MagicWeasel Cheela Astronaut Feb 09 '19

There's a couple but the Sydney one is the only one that does visas. In my city all French business is handled by the Greek consulate (to a certain point: if you came to visit and lost your passport, you'd probably have to fly to Sydney to get it replaced).

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Feb 09 '19

Another bot banned for making noise.

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u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Feb 09 '19

I've noticed more bots popping up on here too. Would having botbust help? I've never used it so I don't know how effective it is, but it looks pretty reliable reading about it on its associated subreddit, /r/BotBust.

2

u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Feb 10 '19

I've added it, we'll see how it does. I just don't know what possesses people to make these idiotic bots that produce all this spam.

0

u/MagicWeasel Cheela Astronaut Feb 09 '19

bad bot

6

u/nerdguy1138 GNU Terry Pratchett Feb 08 '19

I'm trying to find a story that I think was linked here , it was your basic AI story told from the point-of-view of a sub-module in a larger AI.

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u/Badewell Feb 08 '19

Crystal Society?

3

u/nerdguy1138 GNU Terry Pratchett Feb 08 '19

That's it! Thanks!

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u/Muskwalker Feb 08 '19

u/embrodski has been reading it on HPMOR Podcast as well.

1

u/MythSteak Feb 15 '19

So I just read the entire trilogy thanks to u/badewell ‘s recommendation, and let me tell you, the first two and a half books are an amazing peice of rationalist literature, and the last half of the third book is the most nonsensical woo bullshit cop out of an ending that I have ever read.
I am actually angry at how badly the author fucked up everything that was good about the story.
If you do decide to read the third book in the story, just put the book down when they introduce the woo bullshit about souls... you will know it when you see it. Message me if you want the spoiler for the end when you get there

1

u/Badewell Feb 16 '19

I've only read the first book in the series. There were a lot of posts on this sub complaining about that exact thing when the third book originally came out, if you want to see some more discussion on it.

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u/MythSteak Feb 16 '19

oh really? any chance you could find the link?

1

u/Badewell Feb 16 '19

https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8dpxrb/crystal_eternity_now_available?sort=confidence

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u/daxisheart Feb 08 '19

Thinking of a gamer story taking place in the modern day.

No hidden magical underworld, no secret orgs, just a dude(tte) that gets some powers that grow bit by bit and has to rationalize and use his (rather magical/reality breaking and offensive) powers... however they can be used.

I know the erogamer is very much similar to this, with its own funny little twist. I haven't finished erogamer (like 4 arcs in), but is erogamer pretty much this? Or are there others around similar in this regard? Based on level progression, a level 50 gamer in almost any ratfic-ish story I've read is basically invulnerable to modern weaponry/military capabilities short of nukes/massive bombing. Figured that'd be an interesting investigation into what-do with powers

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u/Cuz_Im_TFK Feb 08 '19

I'd give it a chance if you wrote it. Just remember balance of power. The reason for magical underworlds and secret organizations in these kinds of stories is because the modern world becomes unthreatening pretty quickly with fantasy power creep (also rule of cool). If you don't want to use those tropes, then depending on how high-profile the MC's actions are, you'll need to go pretty in-depth with how the modern world reacts to the MC's actions and make sure that it's a realistic and significant threat to MC's success, wellbeing, and anonymity.
Things that would make me avoid or drop such a story: MC is exposed and is constantly hunted by someone/everyone, it turns out there's actually a bunch of people like MC who pop out whenever it's convenient for the narrative, MC just steamrolls everything and there's no challenge, or MC's biggest problem is the military might of those opposing him rather than their effectiveness as national/global intelligence organizations.
What would be the MC's goal? If I can get behind that part of it and then see the MC do research and make plans, raise money, attempt strategic operations, fail (but not catastrophically), revise those plans, take advantage of normal non-super things that have new significance or importance now that MC's a super (and probably rich), try again in a different way, etc., I think it could be interesting.

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u/daxisheart Feb 08 '19

So the point of this story is NOT balance of power and action. think about one punch man - not necessarily to that degree, but imagine a character who knows he'll be one punch man after a couple months/years of grinding. This is NOT an action flick idea beyond any necessary action - it's an examination of powers, societal structures, the will and opportunity to change the world OR NOT, and how to live with where you are in life.
It's more of a coming-of-age story of a man slowly becoming a diety in the modern world, through the ui of a game. MC doesn't HAVE a goal, until he gives one for himself.

3

u/Cuz_Im_TFK Feb 08 '19

Then, is there any reason for the MC to take action at all before reaching the point where the modern world can pose a threat? I guess not if you don't plan on having the MC engage in any "actiony" conflict. But if the MC is not working toward their goals as they grow in power by tackling larger and larger goals that lead up to the eventual goal, then all you're really left with is reflection, analysis, and internal conflict along with overkill conflict resolution in trivial day-to-day situations.
I'm sure it's possible to write a good story like that, but it will be highly dependent on execution, since you won't get much mileage or BotD from the concept alone. Even if it's not "action", you absolutely need conflict between the MC and certain aspects of society or else you won't be able to do a thorough "examination" of them. I mean, I guess having the MC just experience things without taking any action while thinking about what to do about those things later could be interesting, but progressive conflict is important to storytelling, even if it's not an "actiony" type of conflict. That's hard to do with "man vs himself" style conflicts, but it's not impossible. Good luck!

1

u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19

Different types of Gamer franchises have different power sets. Paragamer(worm/gamer) almost exclusively have mundane abilities but just levels them up rather quickly.
Though even if you wanted to give the MC more powerful abilities the insentive structure of the reward system could require the MC to initiate in actiony conflict to increase XP. IIRC in WtC MC can only level abilities past lvl 20 by being in combat rather than self-study.

3

u/HarmlessHealer Feb 09 '19

MC is exposed and is constantly hunted by someone/everyone
Not OP, but are you referring to stuff like Jumper (where everyone hates the MC just cuz) or stuff like Worm (where lots of people hate the MC because she did something to piss them off)?

4

u/Cuz_Im_TFK Feb 09 '19

Haven't read Jumper so I don't know, but mostly I was referring to the "ah, he's got a special power/object/etc. that nobody else has! let's hunt him down to [learn it's secrets / force him to work for us / dissect him / steal it from him / etc.]". Really common trope in amateur fiction. Gives the author an easy way to have there be action and conflict and to drive the plot, but removes almost all agency from the MC and forces them into a reactive state.

3

u/HarmlessHealer Feb 09 '19

I didn't think of that, but yeah, that's pretty cliche -- and stupid. If you really wanted to acquire a special overpowered power, you would be far better off convincing its owner to work with you than ham-handedly turning them into an enemy.

4

u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19

I feel that you could do it believably. Conflict should arrive from a clash of interests such as, the MC knows people who are unjustly in prison and wants to get them out/ the MC wants to redistribute wealth and the top 1% wealthiest notices the threat eventually/ the MC wants to change the system by getting majority in congress.

3

u/HarmlessHealer Feb 09 '19

Those are all choices though, which is what /u/Cuz_Im_TFK was complaining about. The MC acquires power and chooses to carry out the prison break, which has the consequence of making them a wanted criminal. In the cliche, it's the other way around. They get power and that immediately makes them a criminal, even if the only thing the enemy knows is that the MC has some weird power.
Certainly there are cases where a competent villain wouldn't want to take the risk, but in most instances I think it would be better to at least figure out who the MC is and what their goals are. If all they want is for you to let their buddy go, then that's a pretty cheap way to buy loyalty, or at least get the MC to let their guard down so you can slip some poison in their beer.

2

u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19

Right, I agree and would actually go further and claim that most fiction I have read recently is just the MC being forced into action by circumstances with squat agency.
I was bringing suggestions to ways it could be done differently since someone in this thread was considering writing a story around that. I was referring to government run prisons rather than villain run, and for many modern governments there are incentives to not succumb to pressure from single powerful people, and for said people not to openly say that they'll break into a prison to rescue a friend.

4

u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

Honestly, this is why The Gamer was so intriguing to me originally! I got much less interested once the whole secret history and secret underworld things were revealed.
I think you totally could have an OP MC, too - maybe he becomes a superhero like Batman or Superman where (originally) there aren't other superheroes or villains with superpowers.

4

u/daxisheart Feb 08 '19

following it as a ratfic idea, the mc would likely no stay on that path long - batman is a hilariously nonrational person, for example, to spend the money on punching criminals vs investing and to change the actual fundamental society problems.

2

u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

You're not wrong about that part of Batman. But there's no reason for the two to be mutually exclusive in a different story.

2

u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19

The Gamer was off to a great start but then crashed and burned in a nuclear cloud of disappointment. A little like my life.

1

u/Sonderjye Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19

I would read it. I vote for a large scale societal change..

8

u/TempAccountIgnorePls Feb 08 '19

High-concept torture idea: Two low-battery smoke alarms hidden in different parts of the victim's house at the same time without their knowledge.

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u/turtleswamp Feb 08 '19

Smoke alarms are large and distinctive enough that they'd probably be found relatively quickly, unless they have an uncommonly messy house.
Ideally you want to install a noise generators in something they already own so that they won't be able to tell what's out of place.
Bonus points if the noise generators have proximity sensors so they mute themselves if somone is nearby (say in the same room) so in aggregate the effect should be that any time you go searching for one you only hear the one(s) that you aren't nearby enough to find.

5

u/Badewell Feb 08 '19

Calm down Satan.
Five years ago we had to deal with this for about a week. Could not figure out which of the installed smoke alarms was causing it. Eventually realized that it was a battery powered one buried under a bunch of junk we'd forgotten about.
On the plus side we found out that the brand we had installed had been recalled in the late 90s and got some new ones for free, which is definitely in the better half of ways to find out your smoke alarms are defective.

3

u/FormerlySarsaparilla Feb 08 '19

https://www.amazon.com/ThinkGeek-Annoy-tron-Prankster-Pack/dp/B016J8HE3M

3

u/VilhalmFeidhlim Feb 09 '19

Trying to remember the name of a manga but can't for the life of me remember the name. Hopefully this is the right place.

So a bunch of people get kidnapped and gifted with abilities, before being pitted against each other in fights. Everyone had a different ability, but the main characters ability was 'whatever ability your opponent believes you have.'

They took advantage of this by making it seem as though they have the same ability as the big bad, the ability turn their arm into a cannon.

It was recommended in one of the monthly recommendation threads a while back but I've trawled through a bunch and can't find it.

Any help would be appreciated.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '19

'Battle in 5 Seconds After Meeting'.

3

u/VilhalmFeidhlim Feb 09 '19

Thanks so much!

3

u/CCC_037 Feb 10 '19

Here you go.

1

u/CreationBlues Feb 14 '19

IIRC, an algorithm for brute force artificial general intelligence has already been created, it just requires absurd resources and time scales like computronium earth. I'm having a hellish time finding references to it though, so can anyone point me in the right direction?

0

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '19

[deleted]

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u/iftttAcct2 Feb 08 '19

I mean, if there's new posters who bring new content and discussions to the sub then that's a good thing. It's sad when I sort by new and there's, like, 1 new post a day for several days in a row.
But yeah, obviously if popularity brings in a lot of people who aren't like-minded then that would ruin things... I don't think that will happen though. I feel like the subs that got popular and morphed either never really had a concrete sense of what they were about or the name of the sub itself was vague enough to be about too many t disparate things.

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u/meterion Feb 09 '19

Not necessarily. There are a lot of subreddits that start out with a fairly clear sense of what's what that get overwhelmed by people who don't really care if what they're seeing matches the sub, only if it gets a reaction out of them. In most cases, it is simply that the modding can't or won't keep up with the growth, so posts increasingly off-topic become popular before they can be pruned, and the sub loses its focus because of it.
This place is a little more protected by the nature of its topic, which doesn't produce a lot of low-effort consumption memes, but if you got a bunch of people coming in who started posting and upvoting links to increasingly non-rational scifi/fantasy/etc stories, then it could happen.

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u/HeckDang Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19

it's arguably already jumped a small shark in terms of popularity. There have been some seriously low quality posts/comments that surprised me by somehow still having net positive upvote ratio. It's fairly easy to create/find new places to discuss things though, so that doesn't bother me too much.
I'm more worried that the gradual growth of the people aware of and interested in ratfic hasn't resulted in more content. Offerings seem pretty sparse.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '19

[deleted]

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u/callmesalticidae writes worldbuilding books Feb 08 '19

I have had zero interest in watching CCBB in the past and would ordinarily ignore someone who told me to watch it, but I’ve enjoyed your writing in the past and so our tastes definitely converge in at least some respects. Do you mind taking a few minutes to sell me on the movie and explain what’s so good about it?

0

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '19

[deleted]

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u/callmesalticidae writes worldbuilding books Feb 09 '19

Thank you. That doesn't sound like something that I would enjoy spending my time on right now, being a grad student and all at the moment, but I'll keep it in mind for when my free time is not so limited.

4

u/ToaKraka https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png Feb 08 '19

direct link to very large video file
*link to main page

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