When you add a story to the group, post a comment here explaining why it's appropriate & why we should read it.

My story's already in, but might as well advertise.

Title: Spike and the Methods of Rationality.

Why you should read it: This story came from a forum post in this group lamenting the lack of stories that teach rationalism, instead of just using it. Spike finds a banned book that does just that. It'll update as soon as I can figure out how to write someone failing to be rational because they have no idea how (Not as easy as it looks. I will be sourcing the Less Wrong blogs I draw my information from, so if something I write sounds fishy you can go check the original and make your own conclusions.

4623487 Oh boy...

What tone is that going to be written in? Because Eliezer's Jedi Master Voice is terrible for telling stories with.

4623365 All right! after a few issues I'm posting my story here!
Story: MLP: Bizarre Adventures
Why it is appropriate: After some grammatical tweaks I've deemed my story as more than an acceptable read for the common brony. (Though as always I am improving it.)
Why you should read it: An Comedic Action Adventure crossover inspired AU universe containing romantic, slice of life and deep and involving moral issues that follow the spirit of Romanticism, What's not to like?

4628010 Sorry, but this isn't a group for good stories. It's a group for stories that address the same topics discussed on the website lesswrong.com . I know you haven't read lesswrong, so you're not going to be able to know whether your story fits. We aren't going to check for you, because odds are very low that it does. Your story is already in 103 other groups. That should be enough for you.

4628549

4623365 Added: Discord's Apprentice.

Reason for its possible inclusion: This story was first made as a direct response to the near universal mindset of, "It's Pinkie Pie, don't question it," which is one of, if not the, most unrational things mlp has ever created.

Nominated: A Moment's Hesitation

Twilight gets Starswirl's Journal. The entire first chapter is her attempts at fact-finding and safety precautions before she so much as touches the spell. Also involves Luna criticizing Celestia's lack of planning.

I’d like to nominate my story, Friendship is Optimal: Mismatching Wits.

This Optimalverse story by its nature addresses themes of interest to LessWrongers, though I am more a literary than a mathematical fellow and it probably shows.

In its favor, among the accolades it has received from various smart folks, this story made book_burner want to be my friend, thus demonstrating the Rationality of Friendship, and it makes horizon feel stupid in a good way. I think this should count for something.

5003362
Thank you kindly.

Story: Nymphetamine: The Heart's Price.

Reason for including: While not strictly rationalist fic, the main character uses rational mind tricks on a regular basis. I'm chewing through Rationality: From A.I. to Zombies, as I write it, and that's guided some of how the main character acts.

5257218 Thank you. Physical prowess does not prohibit rationalism, nor vice versa. If anything, combat training disciplines the mind, making rational choices under pressure easier, and rational mental tricks allow for more efficient movement and snap decisions in combat, helping to prevent hesitation.

Nominating Rest is not the end for inclusion. It's a short story about an ageless Twilight resurrecting Applejack in the far future - or, more properly, it's about Applejack's resurrection. While not explicitly a rational story, the implications and reasoning are certainly in line with the sort of rationalism we enjoy.

More than anything else, two points stand out to me: First, it depicts a Twilight that was confronted with being unable to bring back her friends without violating 'the laws of time and space' - so she simply decided to violate the laws of time and space. Second, it ends on a delightfully pithy line that makes the moral case for this sort of thing both succinctly and in a manner that sticks in the mind. I think it serves as a delightful introduction to meatier arguments.

I hereby nominate my little piece of Science-Heavenish fluff, So Be Prepared to Precede Me. This is a very non-canon Optimalverse story, but deals with themes of life extension and forking, and is generally positive.

I'ma throw down my new fic, "Displaced: into Nothing", because it's a Rational Fic which uses elements of Philosophers like Plato, Neitzsche, and LaVey, and directly references Yudkowsky.

You should read it just for the AI in a Box part at the end of Chapter 3. That, and I'm a more experienced fiction writer than Yudkowsky...

I nominate September . It deals with an immortal Twilight restarting the universe again and again, doing whatever is necessary to find the method to create alicorns.

6347156
I think that if someone is attempting to minimize or reduce error along the primary philosophy of LessWrong, then one can easily discard any Displaced story.

6347156
My pleasure; I can't help but feel it could use a little more love.

Nominating Hard Reset 2: Reset Harder, for it's in-depth exploration of the actual rational mechanics of a time-loop war, where at one point significant progress is made by the characters sitting down and doing math to prove that multiple realities are possible.

Edit: the best example of this in the story is this quote:
"The scientific method tells us that an observed impossible result is evidence of a faulty model. I've been —we'vebeen — rushing through this in the hope we wouldn't have to think about the impossibilities until after the looping was over. Look where that led us. It's long past time to question our assumptions."

I'm nominating The Longest Day. It's a compelling crossover with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

6766720
Can we get a mediator in here? I think The Longest Day is of good enough quality for this group.

6766720 6767132 I don't mean to disrespect the work Fluttershy_from_LW has put into checking stories here, but I don't want you to remove "pretentious, in your face-type rationalist stories from this group". Partly because any rationalist story would be considered pretentious and in-your-face by lots of people, as lots of people think rationality itself is pretentious and in-your face. I don't think "pretentious and in-your-face" is a quality judgement; it's a personal preference. IMHO rationality stories can more easily be too subtle than not subtle enough. Much as I value subtlety in storytelling, and despise preachy medieval allegories and fables, the nature of rationality requires laying things out clearly, and so tends toward that style of storytelling. If there's an error to be made, I'd say it lies not in being too in-your-face, but in oversimplifying problems and failing to steelman opposing views.

The criteria for being here are for having LW-type interests and method of thinking, not being a great story. I don't want to reject on quality unless it's egregious, and I think the 3 stories you mention--HPMOR, Hard Reset 2, and The Longest Day--are all very well written, far above, say, the top 1% of stories on fimfiction. And I see from the bit I read of Longest Day that besides being well-written, it's explicitly and densely rationalist.

So I'm guessing that you're talking about rejecting not on quality of writing, but your opinion of the reasoning or conclusions, or on sticking to staple LW topics. I don't want to do that. LessWrong itself would have been a worse website if Eliezer had deleted every post he disagreed with.

I put Longest Day into accepted, which I hope doesn't offend you, but I don't understand your reasons for rejecting it, and you didn't actually state any. It seems to me to be well above any bar in terms of quality or rationality that I'd want to have here.

Besides which, after >3 years we've only got 52 stories. Maybe I'll worry about it if we pass 300.

I'm nominating Message in a Bottle for this group. While the main character is not, strictly speaking, a rationalist, the story is extremely well written, and contains numerous themes and events that any fan of rationalist fiction would find familiar. Without giving away too many spoilers, these include the non-inevitability of death, alien megastructures, Superinteligences, and cultural conflicts upon first contact(s). Additionally, the story's setting is extremely well constructed, with a heavy focus on a scientific approach an explanation to "magic". Any fan of rationalist fiction will love this story.

6767724 This brings up a point I really oughta bring up on LessWrong sometime, except I'm pretty sure ignorant people will disagree loudly: LessWrong is not actually rationalist, but an unholy mixture of rationalism and empiricism.

Rationalism & empiricism are the two great, diametrically-opposed traditions of philosophy around the world. Empiricism says that the physical world is real, and the way to learn things is to study it & measure things. Rationalism says that the senses are deceiving, and the physical world is produced by some more-real transcendent reality (or God, or laws), so studying the physical world is useless, and measuring things is not just silly, but theoretically impossible, since neither real numbers nor a statistical theory of error can exist in Rationalist ontologies.

Rationalism demands faith in eternal, absolute truths. Buddhism, Parmenides, Platonism, Catholicism, Puritanism, Islam, Marxism, & contemporary radical progressivism are all extremely rationalist. Rationalists think they can prove things about the real world with absolute certainty, like in geometry. They usually use Aristotelian logic (no quantifiers), and don't use real numbers, calculus, measurements, or observations. They think words must correspond to Real Things in the world. They believe logical introspection is the path to truth. They despise both money and consequentialist ethics, because of their inability to reason numerically, which leads them to conceive of values and ethics as fixed orders (of valuables or virtues. e.g., the Great Chain of Being, Kant's absolute prohibition of lying in all circumstances, the radical progressive view that race, gender, and wealth disparity have absolute priority over all other issues) rather than as optimization.

Empiricism is associated with observation & practical efficacy: Democritus, Anaxagoras, bits of Aristotle, the skeptics, maybe Confucianism, Mohism, Lucretius, atomism, nominalism (words are symbols whose meanings we agree on, not pointers to Real Things), calculus, statistics, modern science, optimization, consequentialist ethics. Empiricists measure things and record statistical correlations. They don't claim to know eternal, absolute, unshakable truths.

Mixing rationalism and empiricism can lead to confusion. A prime example is formulating "laws of physics" from empirical observations. The idea is that thru empirical observation we can discover immutable, absolute, eternal "laws". This has led to all sorts of bad philosophy (like post-modernism) because people got all out of whack when they discovered Newton's Laws weren't absolute, eternal laws--and are therefore, to a Rationalist, "false" or "disproven". Rationalists don't think of laws of physics as numeric predictions with error bars, made using nominalist terms defined operationally; they think of them as eternal, absolute, inerrant truths made using category names (like "space" and "time") that correspond to things in the world, that are given to humans by some form of divine inspiration (whether that's the Christian God, Kant's categories of thought, or Chomsky's innate Universal Language). They also got out-of-whack because Einstein showed that "distance" and "time" are just nominalist names for the results we get on taking certain measurements, not things in the world. Because they don't grok nominalism, Rationalists can't understand that relativity showed that distance and time aren't real things in the world, and instead think Einstein showed that reality is relative to the observer. This is still what all academics in the humanities think today, despite endless protests by Einstein and other physicists.

Bayesian logic is a mixture of Rationalist logic & the Empiricist use of real numbers. As such, it's a lot better than Boolean / Fregean logic, which is in turn a lot better than Aristotelian logic, which is a lot better than Platonic (& Hegelian) dialectic. It still starts by categorizing objects using atomic symbols, just like good old-fashioned AI. In most cases this is fine; we still do all physics that way. But within Eliezer's "friendly AI" project it's too rationalist, because that project requires being able to "prove" things about an AI's behavior, not in a statistical sense, but like proofs in geometry, with zero error and zero uncertainty. But geometry is a formal system, and the real world is not, and never the twain shall meet. It's a theoretically hopeless endeavor.

[Technically, the real world probably is a formal system at the quantum scale, but we don't have the computational power to treat it as a formal system.]

So. In that fic, when one finds oneself in some new state of existence, what one does next depends on whether one is a rationalist or an empiricist. An empiricist goes out and explores. A rationalist tries to reason things out in his head. LessWrong encompasses both approaches.

6767496
I can second this. It offers a very interesting take on far future civilizations. Great story too, although the plot, not the characters if defiantly the high point, contrary to a lot of fanfiction here.

Message in a bottle is in the nominates section, and there it shall stay, forever.

Nominated Friendship is Signalling by cleversuggestion (2013). This comedic one-shot is response to a writing prompt by Eliezer himself.

Nominating Luna is a Harsh Mistress, an AU story where Celestia banished not only her sister to the moon, but her entire army as well. Now the thousands of ponies under Luna's command must find a way to survive on the moon for the next millennium, with Lord Commander Iron Quill and his ragtag team of advisers leading the way. With its focus on engineering, chemistry, and logistics, Luna is a Harsh Mistress is a delightful work of hard science fiction, and truly a must-read for any rationalist.

Thirding the nomination for Message in a Bottle, by the same author.

A little confused that I apparently didn't put it up here in the past (though, I probably just missed this thread), but y'all should really add Displaced into Nothing: even though it came out as a bit of a mess, I worked really hard on trying to have the characters at least discuss actual science, logic, and philosophy over the course of deconstructing the whole "Human in Equestria" genre. I know people who enjoy LessWrong/Rationalfic stuff enjoy it.

TDisplaced into Nothing

• MLP: FiM
• MLP: Comic
• Dark
• Adventure
• Drama

While studying an alien spellform, Twilight makes the most important discovery of all time... The one which could doom her planet. | Horror Rationalfic with Lovecraftian & World of Darkness elements. Deconstruction / Subversion of Displaced.

• Violence
• Death
• Human
• Twilight
• Spike
• Luna
• Other
• Main 6

Rockstar_Raccoon · 91k words  ·  1,071  76 · 17k views

4623365
I wish to nominate my story 'Caelum Est Conterrens'.

As the first Friendship Is Optimal story written after the original seminal novel by Iceman, it was my goal to illuminate what emigration to a digital existence meant on a human level. I also wanted to work through how such a thing could be understood and accepted.

The main character of the story, Siofra, is a Rationalist. She is terrified of the concept of emigration to a virtual existence and a machine substrate because she clings to the concept that, essentially, 'life' and 'death' are absolutes. To her, the words define Real Things, real states, which are both exclusive, Real, and immutable. She values a Rationalist outlook, and bases her worldview on this.

She is convinced through the course of the story to adopt an Empirical viewpoint, slowly taught to her by the superintelligent Celestia of the story. Her acceptance of being emigrated pivots on a gradual realization that what she conceives of as absolutes which define absolute terms are instead approximations of a reality she can never truly, or at least fully define in linguistic terms. An example:

"So... do I die, or don't I, and is the result that emigrates me, or a copy?" Enough of this. Get to the point, Síofra thought.

"Yes, no, yes and no. I am not trying to annoy you, Síofra." Celestia flicked her ears and licked her lips. "From the viewpoint of your physical body, emigration is death. From the viewpoint of the information that defines who and what you are, emigration is a transfer to a new home. From the viewpoint of your biological brain, emigration creates a daughter copy. From the viewpoint of the only existing expression of you within the universe, you have survived the process and have become a pony, heir to a maximally extended lifespan and all the pleasures and wonders that life in Equestria will provide you. This is the truth of the matter, Síofra. This is the reality of emigration."

Siofra's Rationalist outlook cannot survive such a complicated circumstance. To define the uploading of a human consciousness as either death, or as life, is insufficient. The words used do not describe real things or absolutes. At best they are approximations, because the nature of emigration to a new substrate defies their original meaning in countless ways. Further, the complexity is such that words likely cannot be used for any form of absolute definition any longer. Instead, any terms used must be relative to various given perspectives, outlooks and interpretations. Siofra is gradually convinced that Rationalism is insufficient for interpreting her new options, and through Empiricism, she must accept that all she can do is approximate reality and comprehension of that reality, subject likely forever to continued refinement of that understanding. She cannot consider such a process either 'dying' or 'surviving', because any definition she uses will never be completely adequate, nor fully representative of the circumstance or the states described.

For these reasons, and more - such as investigations into many different conceptual frameworks for comprehending what emigration to a virtual existence represents, both scientifically and personally, as well as in terms of ethics and philosophy, I offer that my story belongs here.

7371440 I'm TOTALLY CHUFFED that you understand the difference between rationalism and empiricism, and I wish I'd read this story when you wrote it, because I didn't know the difference then.

BUT, the story was already in Approved. It just doesn't show up when you look for it there. There are 54 stories in that folder, but only 23 of them are visible. I don't know why.

7372017
Oh! I see. Well, thank you very much for including it!

I want to nominate 2 stories:

In Starlight Breaks Magic, Starlight develops a theorem that proves that there can't be a theory of magic that's both consistent and complete. It's heavily related to Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the Halting Problem.

A Mathematical Theory of ‬Hard Reset is a sequel to Hard Reset (which itself isn't a story I would recommend here [which doesn't mean it's a bad story, I just think it's not quite fitting for this group]), but I think you can enjoy it without having read Hard Reset (though it's definitly advantageous if you did read Hard Reset). Twilight semi-accidentily cast a spell that puts her in a time loop which resets to the point where the spell has been cast whenever she dies. Later, it turns out that the spell doesn't actually reset the entire universe, but instead puts her in a different universe that looks just like the past version of her universe (obvious reference to the many worlds theory).
The author is a mathematician, and this becomes apparent when you read the story.

I just remembered another story that might also fit here
Spoiler free version:
In Send Only Memories, Mysterious messages appear across Equestria. Discord warns everypony to not decipher them, for it may be world ending, but Twilights curiosity takes over. It turns out, Discords warnings where justified, though for different reasons then you might think.

Spoiler:
The message says that all of Equestria is a pocket universe that has to be sacrificed in order to save the main universe.

more spoilers:
It is decided that Equestria has to be sacrificed for "the greater good", but Equestria is somehow saved digitally so that it can be restored later.

In the name of honesty, I also want to give an argument why this shouldn't be nominated:
At the end, some supreme being talks about manipulating mathematical constants (in the sense of, for example, literally changing the value of Pi, without re-defining the meaning of Pi). That's...not how mathematics works. Even a God-like being couldn't do this.

TThe Many Deaths of Twilight Sparkle

• MLP: FiM
• Dark
• Comedy
• Random

A story in which Twilight Sparkle proceeds to die. Several times. For science.

• Death
• Twilight
• Starlight Glimmer

Jinzou · 2.1k words  ·  801  12 · 9.9k views

Nominating this for immortality-adjacent munchkinry that would fit well on the /r/rational saturday thread.

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/123576/rainbooms-and-rationality
6+ story that explains some of the principles of science and rationality quite simply

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/513799/our-kind-of-weather
From rational redit