Rationalist fiction: a Slice of Life IN HELL

I don't see much good in associating rationality with extreme caution.

I am also not sure of how much use will rationality be in a world where reality is out to get you. It is merely unlikely that all the air molecules in a room will decide to be elsewhere leaving hard vacuum in their place -- or that you fall a hundred feet underground through solid rock and then remain entombed there for a REALLY long time...

This could be an interesting way to showcase rationalist principles, especially those regarding safety and planning, in a perpetual Worst Case Scenario environment. There's ample potential for constant conflict,

Wildbow of the Worm fame describes something like that in Pact. The protagonist is unwillingly thrust into the world where he inherited a karmic debt from previous generations and so

reality is out to get them, this is a constant uphill battle, and even the slightest negligence can have a terrible cost.

The serial is not explicitly "rationalist", but irrational (in that universe) decisions bite him in the rear pretty quickly. And so do rational decisions sometimes. Even your best actions against a hostile universe can only get you so far.

Is this similar to what you had in mind?

Please do note the delicious irony here :

I don't see much good in associating rationality with extreme caution.

I don't think that teaching people to expect worse case scenarios increases rational thinking.

Which in essence looks suspiciously like cautiously assuming a bad case scenario in which this story won't help the rationality cause, or even a worst case scenario in which it will do more wrong than right.

If you want to go forth and create a story about rationality, then do it. Humans are complex creatures, not everyone will react the same way to your story, and anybody who thinks they can accurately predict the reaction of all the different kinds of people who'll read your story (especially as this story hasn't even been written yet) is either severely deluded as to their ability, or secretly running the world behind curtains already.

When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.

A silly question: Of all the recurring "employee" characters in Dilbert, which one is reacting most rationally to the situation they're in? Probably Wally...

In terms of little details, I think right away "Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong" must be specified, because if you let rationalists try to think "How bad could it be at maximum badness?" it will get very bad, very quickly.

For instance Situation 1: Imagine every day you spend most of the time outside, you get struck by lightning, and every day you spend most of the time inside, there is an earthquake and whatever you are inside collapses on you.

I can see Rationalist attempting to make and spend most of their time in structures made mostly out of pillows: They collapse, oh well, they get rebuilt in 30 minutes, It turns pain into a daily chore.

On the other hand, Imagine Situation 2: Every day through hellish quantum mechanics enough anti-matter appears in contact with your skin to cause a non fatal, but excruciating, matter-antimatter reaction explosion.

Now, at this point, the rationalist might realize something like "Okay, well, I'll arrange things in such a way that any explosion will fit into one of two categories: It will be fatal, or it won't actually cause me pain."

And while the rationalist is attempting to build the arrangement that does this, A giant bear comes by and breaks it and painfully claws them into pieces (nonfatally).

Situation 3: Rationalists can be rationalist all they want, but they've been captured by the giant bears and had all of their limbs systematically clawed off, plus they've been blindfolded, gagged, earplugged, and are periodically used as claw sharpeners.

Of course, if some parts of hell are like situation 1, and some parts of hell are like situation 2, and some are like situation 3, I expect rationalists to attempt to figure out why that is, unless you want to have Situation 4:

Situation 4: There's one constant rule of Hell: Every someone figures out all of the other rules of hell, those rules change.

Ergo: Once someone figures out "Oh, well, I can avoid the Lightning and the Earthquakes with pillow structures." then the Giant Bears and Antimatter Skin Explosions come. Once you figure out how to get used to being used as a Giant Bear claw sharpener, something else happens, and that thing is even worse.

Basically, there is a range of darkness you can have here, in terms of writing. In terms of difficultly levels, this might be expressed as:

1: Hard.

2: Impossible.

3: You're helpless.

4: Struggling can only make it worse.

I was writing a story about a character starting at rock bottom and working their way up, and I actually had the entity setting this up mention to the character that there had been previous versions of the character that just went irrevocably insane, and were deleted and reset because previous versions of 'rock bottom' had been set to low to ever get out.

Ehh... As the other commenters are saying, it's unclear how it would promote rationality, or what its Ultimate Effect would be...

But I think you should do it anyway. I'd read it.

Hellcity by Macon Blair and Joe Flood is as you describe and a good read.

I don't think that teaching people to expect worse case scenarios increases rational thinking.