Rationalist fiction brainstorming funtimes

I'm not sure I'd agree with this as a generalization. Tolkienesque fantasy is a pretty large subgenre, but outside of it I don't think fantasy is all that ethically unified.

Even within the set of stories that invoke The Chosen One as a device, the implications can vary quite a lot. Where on the one hand you have stories like the series set in the Tortall universe, which feature classic Chosen By The Gods characters who're destined for greatness, you can also get works like the Keys to the Kingdom series, which features a Chosen One who is very explicitly chosen simply because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The central moral conflict isn't the righteous elect versus the depraved reprobates, but adaptiveness and consideration versus a mechanical and inconsiderate bureaucracy (embodied in a population of beings of astronomical age which are nigh incapable of adapting their intellects to tasks beyond the narrow scope for which they were created.)

Rather, fantasy -- along with several related subgenres not usually categorized as such -- is tied to its internal ethics in a way that most other fiction is not, and the more I learn and think about the way those ethics are built up, the less comfortable I am with them. It's not so bad while I'm actually reading -- it's easy to submerge yourself in the consequential universe of a work, unless you're actively trying not to. But once I've come up from that and started working out the implications, there's usually some quite unpleasant cognitive dissonance for me to deal with, unless the author's good enough to have worked some of this out in the text (rare) or is deliberately subverting genre expectations (common, but lazier).

Care to elaborate on that?

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Well, for starters, Austen was mainly concerned with making good decisions about whom to marry, which for women of her time, place and class was by far the most important thing to worry about ever-- their husbands all but owned them, and divorce was punishable by shunning. If there was an 80,000 Hours for young ladies in Regency England, it would have been called "400,000 hours" or maybe "Literally the Rest of your Life or Until the Bastard Dies," and Jane Austen would have been its founder. People who think Austen wrote romance novels are badly misreading her: in Sense and Sensibility she mercilessly punishes Marianne for following her heart when her heart was stupid, and in Persuasion she vindicates Anne's hard choice to turn down a poor man she loved on the advice of a trusted friend. These books are about winning.

But more than identifying the right problem, Austen actually is quite a keen observer of cognitive biases. She didn't call them that, of course, since they technically hadn't been named yet, but Emma is basically about confirmation bias-- "She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it,"-- and the central conflict in Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth's need to change her mind about Darcy at the cost of appearing inconsistent to her friends and family. Austen isn't interested in stupid or wicked characters, but in intelligent, well-meaning people who make bad decisions for predictable, preventable reasons. There are more examples (I seem to recall a nice planning fallacy in S&S) but I don't want to spend too much time digging up quotes right now.

Having trouble parsing your comment. Do you actually think this sort of preference changes with age?

What would make it less of one?

Elves.

He's casting aspersions on all literature that is not to his taste. "Earthfic" as a derogatory term for non-SF/F stuff.

It's obviously Alicorn's term in that very story that Eliezer is referring to...

I was at a science fiction convention today where the following exchange (paraphrased) took place:

"In the future, as humanity expands out into the stars, there will be all these different areas and domains with different social norms, so when a person goes from one to another they will have to learn what is allowed there."

"... you know, we have that now, it's called nations."

Sometimes fans forget just how much alienness there is to be had on Earth.

(And in any event, Sturgeon's Law can be expected to apply to earthfic just as much as to sf.)

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When I recently played Fable 3, I considered playing my character as one who wants to spread their "heroic genes" as much as possible.

The basic story for the game is that long ago a "great hero" became king and brought peace to the kingdom with sword and magic. Generations later, he has two remaining decendents. The king in charge now is basically ruling with an iron fist and working everyone to death in the secret hope of preparing their defenses to repel an ancient evil that will invade the realm in a years time (he doesn't tell the population about this for morale reasons).

His younger sibling (the protagonist) is given a vision by an ambiguously divine oracle who tells them they have to wrest control of the kingdom from their older brother to save it from the coming attack, both because he's mentally traumatized from the knowledge and he can't make the right choices. Younger sibling then starts unlocking their "heroic destiny" which results in (among other things) them getting access to powerful magic in a world where nobody else seems to have any magical ability. Incidentally, the combat system in this game is pretty much broken to nonexistance due to normal melee and ranged attacks being slow, unwieldly, and prone to getting blocked by every other enemy you encounter.

Basically, Heroes in this game seem to consist of a single bloodline whose members can spam area-of-effect attacks at will with no mana cost when everyone else is stuck with weapons that blocked at every turn.

My particular character was of the opinion that the world was in pretty bad shape if she was apparently the only person who could do anything to stop the apocolypse and was rather interested in finding a way to "shut up and multiply" and thereby increase the number of potential AOE spamming heroes in the future. Assuming she can survive the current crisis and save the world so future generations can exist at all.

I guess it would kind of be like living in a world where everyone is a "muggle" and one select bloodline of mages exists. Said bloodline then has to do everything in its power to multiply and form stable populations to fight all the monsters and horrors the setting throws at it. Then maybe fast forward a few generations when there is a stable and decadent elite ruling over the muggles and someone has to rise up against the "AOE spamming oppresors".

I guess its that alot of the "Rational" fics I've seen before have one super brilliant Rationalist come across a civilization of entrenched non-rationalists and beat them all at their own game because they can rapidly exploit all the magical loopholes that nobody else in the setting apparently noticed despite living in it for centuries. Imagine seeing the person who had to build that whole magical civilization and was probably trying to spend their time producing an heir instead of designing the next magical atom-bomb.

If we require that people actually be interested in this story, I think small scale corresponds to a small thing that a character in the story cares enough about to make the story interesting. Though we also can't forget small "universal" scale - no cheating by choosing things that the character finds boring but audiences find interesting. Winning a single hand of euchre, perhaps.

I'll tell you what I was reading that came out 17 years ago. Animorphs. :P