Rationalist Fiction

How about Scooby Doo? It's elementary, but I spent a lot of time on it back when I was 3-4 and would have continued watching for somewhat longer if they hadn't started introducing stories where the magic WAS real.
The moral "it's ALWAYS natural" and the extremely repetitive plots (repetition is, I suspect, very good for kids) are basic but definitely positive.
Only saw one or two episodes, but I think Kimba the White Lion may also have had positive but elementary rationalist messages.

I liked Terry Pratchett's book "The Wee Free Men". It's a fantasy novel where the main character saves herself by having "First Sight" (original seeing; the ability to notice what her eyes are telling her even when she wouldn't have expected it) and "Second Thoughts" (cognitive reflectiveness; the ability to look over her own thinking for biases and distortions).

In defense of Conan Doyle, Wikipedia says:

Sherlock Holmes remains a great inspiration for forensic science, especially for the way his acute study of a crime scene yields small clues as to the precise sequence of events... All of the techniques advocated by Holmes would later become reality, but were generally in their infancy at the time Conan Doyle was writing.

and goes off to claim that later detective fiction actually became less realistic as writers shifted attention to psychology rather than forensics.

The Prince of Nothing. The Prince of Nothing. The Prince of Nothing. I'll say it as many times as I have to to get people on this blog to read it. The Prince of Nothing Trilogy. The Darkness That Comes Before. R. Scott Bakker.

True, Anasurimbor Kellhus is one of the "mutants", even to the point of the author explicitly stating the Dunyain spent a few centuries running a eugenics program to get an intellect of that stature. But the later books of the trilogy also go into some detail about the rationalist training Kellhus undergoes with the Dunyain, the methods he uses, and even a little of the social structure of the Ishual monastery. He's one of the perspective characters, and we see him using his techniques; there's always a strong sense of "I could do that", which remains right up until I actually try. And there's no better work to demonstrate the "sense that more is possible", or the ways in which a real rationalist would be the polar opposite of the "Spock" prototype, or a bunch of other things (disclaimer: many don't become fully clear until The Thousandfold Thought, the last book in the trilogy).

The Dunyain conception of rationality isn't exactly like our own, and rereading it recently there were a few things that bothered me, but overall it's basically the story of a fantasy hero who is as good at probability theory as Aragorn is at swordfighting, with similar results.

It's interesting that "Watchmen" (in theaters now) is the Hamlet of a genre that is strongly anti-rational, yet has numerous rational elements. The most important, I think, is that the Earth is saved only by inhumanly rational people making rational decisions - rational decisions which the typical viewer cannot condone even after the fact, even knowing that they saved the Earth. In so doing, it proves to these viewers, not just consciously but deep in their gut, that they themselves would doom Earth by their irrationality.

On the other hand, Dr. Manhattan embodies the popular culture's prejudice against rationality perfectly when he explains why he isn't interested in life by saying, "A living body and a dead one contain the same number of atoms". People try to imagine why scientists are interested in little things under microscopes, but not in gossip or football games. They can't imagine that the little things under the microscope are actually more interesting, so they conclude that scientists are cold and boring, and thus unable to see how interesting gossip and football really are.

In defense of Sherlock Holmes:

The typical Sherlock Holmes story has Holmes perform twice. First he impresses his client with a seemingly impossible deduction; then he uses another deduction to solve the mystery. Watson or the client convince Holmes to explain the first deduction, which gives the reader the template Holmes will use for the second (likely inferences from small details). The data that Holmes uses to make the second deduction are in the text and available to the reader--the reader's challenge is to make Holmes's inference in advance.

Holmes himself attributes his success to observation, not rationality. (There's a startling passage in A Study In Scarlet where Holmes tells Watson that he can't be bothered to remember that the sun orbits the earth! Visit the link and search for 'Copernican Theory' in the full text for the passage.) The Sherlock Holmes stories are intended to be exercises in attention to detail, which is surely a useful skill for a rationalist.

Hello Less Wrong,

My first comment ever. I have been lurking on Less Wrong for several years already (and on Overcoming Bias before there was even a Less Wrong site), and have been mostly cyber-stalking EY ever since I caught wind of his AI-Box exploits.

This year 2012, on a whim, I joined the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) last November, and started writing a novel I had been randomly thinking of making, "Judge on a Boat". The world is that humanity manages to grow up a little without blowing itself up, rationality techniques are taught regularly (a certain minimum level of knowledge in these techniques is required for all citizens), practical mind simulations and artificial intelligence are still far-off (but being actively worked on, somewhere way, way off in the background of the novel), and experts in morality and ethical systems, called "Judges", are given the proper respect they deserve.

The premise is that a trainee Judge, Nicole Angel, visiting Earth for her final examinations (she's from Mars Lagrange Point 1), gets marooned on a lifeboat with a small group of people. She is then forced to act as a full Judge (despite not actually passing the exams yet) for the people in the boat.

The other premise is that a new Judge, Emmanuel Verrens, is reading about Nicole Angel's adventures in novel form, under the guidance of high-ranking Judge David Adams. Emmanuel's thinking is remarkably similar to hers, despite her being a fictional character -

The novel was intended to be more about moral philosophy than strictly rationality, but as I was using Less Wrong as an ideas pump, it ended up being more about rationality, really. (^^)v

Anyway, if anyone is interested in the early draft text, see this.

Jimmy, the main character of Fleep is, at least, a very good empiricist. I'm undecided on how artificial the evidence he has to work from is, but it's an entertaining story, and you can probably read it in about ten minutes.

How about The Hardy Boys? I read dozens of these as a young kid, and the thing that stands out in mind now is, there was always an answer to the mystery, one that could be arrived at via clues and deduction. Looking back now, I think they had a major impact on my manner of thinking, reading them as young as I did (kindergarten and 1st grade, I'm talking) such that years later I was inclined to look favorably upon a 'rationality technique' when I encountered the idea of one on OB.

"If You Give a Mouse a Cookie"

A good primer on chaos theory for youth?

"Rendezvous with Rama"

Why have a plot when gradual discovery with expository dialogue will do.

"Contact" -Sagan

More scientific method

"The Diamond Age" -Stephenson

This book even has long discussions of computing

"Sideways Stories from Wayside School"

Anything with jokes is going to be about logic at some point.

"Of Human Bondage" -Maugham

This book has a famous scene where the Phillip goes to Paris to study art; you get the impression that he isn't very good at painting and as time goes on he starts to recognize that his fellow students are not great painters either. After two years, he gradually builds up the courage to have one of his instructors look at all of his work and let him know whether or not he can achieve his goal of becoming great painter. After he receives a negative verdict he commits to a new life plan.

To some extent, I don't believe that "realism", to the point of realistic rationalist techniques, is important.

Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, The Boxcar Children, Sherlock Holmes may fail to convey rationalist techniques, but they certainly convey rationalist values and beliefs, like "intelligence is useful", "observation is important", "there is a right answer". Enthusiasm for the subject is far more important to learning than a head start in knowing the subject.

Greg Egan's Orthogonal series, for the weaker criterion. Most of the characters are scientists, you get to see them struggling with problems and playing with new ideas that turn out not to work. That's not the only rationalist aspect, though: [about the future inhabitants of a generation ship] "They won't feel as though they're falling, they'll feel the way they always feel. Only the old books will tell them there was something called 'falling' that felt the same." [while having to fast] "She... began [working through] the maze of obstructions that made it impossible to [open the cupboard] unless she was fully awake. Halfway through, she paused. Breaking the pattern [3 days eating, 1 day fasting] would set a precedent, inviting her to treat every fast day as a potential exception. Once the behaviour that she was trying to make routine and automatic had to be questioned over and over... [it would be] a dozen times harder." When launching their rocket, they make plans for every survivable catastrophe they can imagine, and practice them. They explain their ideas to each other: "Why aren't we testing this on voles?" "We would need smaller needles, and we don't have those." One person talks about the difficulty of feeling urgency for a danger when evidence of it is not immediate, despite civilization being at stake when time is limited--- perhaps, she says, she's expecting too much of her animal brain. The rationality is not constant, but is there and noticeable. The characters really do think about things, and we get to see it.

(Postscript: This is my first comment. I wish I could have described more abstractly what the characters were doing, and why I think it counts as rationality. Even if my evidence fails to convince you that the books should be called "rationalist fiction", you should still consider reading them; I think they are good books in their own right. I have not yet read the third in the trilogy, but would be surprised if it were much worse than the other two.)

The manga/anime series "Death Note"

It's a long mental battle between two clever people, not much for rationality techniques, but characters think rationally, and the magical parts have well defined rules, similar to Lawrence Watt-Evans' fiction.

I would be terribly thankful to anybody who could reccomend me some more stories involving these sorts of fights. Trickery and betrayal is common enough, but a prolonged fued of this nature is rare.

Maybe some of Ted Chiang's stories?

Also, I don't remember them well and they're probably more about irrationality techniques than rationality techniques, but Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" are fun and struck me as having a rationalist spirit or at least being food for rationalist thought.

Economist Russ Roberts' The Invisible Heart uses fiction to explain how to think logically about several economic issues. (I always assign the book to my intro micro students and they love it.)

The Dune series and Neal Stephenson's latest novel Anathem both come to mind. The Dune series includes a number of plot devices involving mental discipline (although it's all semi-mystical.) The world of Anathem, on the other hand, is split into two factions, one of which is specifically rationalist. It gets pretty philosophical and weird toward the end, but it mostly involves rationalist characters using math/science/etc to overcome the hurdles in their way. The world it describes sounds pretty similair to what I've read of Eliezer's Bayesian Conspiracy.

How about Jules Verne's “The Mysterious Island”?

It doesn't have any “rationality ninjas”, but the overall arch of “know your world, understand it, and force your will upon your future” seems a very valuable basis of thought for any rational person. This book was probably the most powerful root of that idea in my mind.

As a bonus, pretty much everything the characters do would actually do work in real life.

(Actually, quite a few other stories by JV are really nice. This one is just the one most tightly connected in my mind with the basic idea of reason.)

Here is a (very paraphrased, non-spoiler) snippet from the beginning of "Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson. The problem is that the evil space aliens are blockading a trade route, capturing the ships and crew of the trading ships. The Traders are meeting and deciding what to do.

Trader 1: Why don't we just send in our space fleet and destroy them?

Trader 2: Revenge and violence are un-Christian thoughts. Also, they don't pay very well, as it is hard to sell anything to a corpse. Anyway, getting that done would take a long time, and our customers would find other sources for the goods they need.

Trader 1: Why don't we just arm our merchant ships?

Trader 2: You think I haven't thought of that? We are already on shoestring margins as it is. If we make the ships more expensive, then we are operating at a loss.

(Wow, I write so much worse than Poul Anderson :-) The writing in the story is much better. The "un-Christian thoughts" line is one of my favorites).

This was one of the scenes that showed how to think logically throught the consequences of seemingly good ideas (here, economic decision-making, long-term thinking). You can actually figure out the solution to the problem using one of the techniques that I've heard on OB (I don't want to spoil it by saying which one).

Does this apply?

Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent. Its relevance to rationality lies in its criticisms of various kinds of self-deception rather than positive accounts of methods of rationality. A variety of sub-themes orbit the core theme of self-deception: status-obsession, escapism, nostalgia for idealized imaginary past, hypocrisy, externalization of responsibility.

Note though that Paranoia Agent drives the message home not by didacticism and realistic portrayal of situations but by appeal to gut-level feelings and ample nightmare fueling.

How about Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" for a rational horror story.

I'm surprised David Gerrold's "War Against The Chtorr" didn't get mentioned, but it never did get widely read. It includes a "Global Ethics" class in the first book, and "Mode Training" in subsequent books, which have the character going through what is basically a rationality dojo - and there are numerous full sessions of these classes in the books. It's where I got the idea that rationality was a teachable/learnable skill, and learned quite a few techniques for handling my biases, irrationalities, etc..

The core theme of the series is that Earth is being invaded by an alien biology attempting to terraform (or "Chtorraform" if you will) the planet. It starts with ~90% of the human race being wiped out (this isn't a spoiler, this is really how it starts), and humanity having to win at any cost.

It also involves a lot of rational, knowledgeable people suffering at the hands of irrational people and petty bureaucrats. The alien ecology also refuses to yield to "best attempts" - information on the Chtorr is extremely hard to come by, and we're only seeing a tiny portion of the puzzle, so a lot of theories collapse due to wrong assumptions - even ones that are major aspects of the plot. It very much avoids the classic "mystery novel" issue of having a single clear, easily determined answer, while at the same time making it clear that if humanity does not find the correct answer fast enough, it dies.

I really can't think of anything that captures LessWrong better than that!

The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. It's unfinished, and at current rates of production and apparent rates of plot resolution, never-to-be-finished (sadly, I'm feeling more and more that way about the paradigmatic rationalist fiction as well). And there are an average of slightly more than one new strains-credibility premises per book. But the characters use some serious swashbuckling rationality. Chief among the "rationality techniques" these books teach are the social ones that underpin scientific progress: honesty, transparency, etc. Which is a nice counterbalance to all the individualist rationalism that you'll get from most of the other suggestions here.

NO... SPOILERS.

Check out Erfworld. It starts off as a webcomic, moves to narrative for the parts that are best done in a narrative style, and then jumps back to webcomic format for battles. It hits all of those marks you mention, as well as a standard that I hold personally. I think that rationalist fiction is at its most compelling when it creates a world with new rules, and sends the empiricist out to learn them. It's easier to show how to learn things empirically when there's still low-hanging-fruit to be plucked, and there have to be people in the story who don't know things in order to show the advantages of knowledge.

One of the catchphrases that develops is, "We try things. Sometimes they even work."

Not full-blown rationalist fiction, but I would like to mention The Salvation War (an ongoing trilogy of web novels) as promoting some rationalist values. It's military fiction in which Earth is invaded by the legions of Hell and musters its armies to defend itself. Since it is set in the modern era, there is a fair ammount of focus on science and evidence and the rejection of faith and dogma, and how humanity's curiosity and knowledge led to it gaining power in the form of technology and engineering. Sample passage below (note, "" is a character's name, which I have removed for the sake of avoiding a spoiler).

“As I said, it is what Yahweh and Satan both said. Why should they lie? They are Gods, they demand faith,”
“And I’m a General, I demand firepower. And we’ve seen what happens when your faith meets my firepower. The truth is , you don’t know any of this. You’ve got no proof for any of it. You’ve been sold a bill of goods, just like we were for so many thousands of years. You’ve been fooled, just like we were.”

stared at the pictures taken by the RF-111C, thoughts churning in his mind. He’d never thought this through before, those to whom he owed allegiance had demanded he accept their words and he had. But now he owed allegiance to humans and humans demanded proof. Those were their eternal replies when somebody claimed something. ‘Prove it.’ “How do you know?’ ‘What’s your proof?’ “If you can’t prove it, then it isn’t so.’ And the answer he could give to all those was ‘I can’t.’ For everything he believed was unproven. And that meant so many things.

spoke very slowly as the words formed in his mind, breaking the mental blocks of millennia. “No, I don’t know any of this. I just believed it. And if my belief was false.” His great clawed hand waved over the pictures. “Then all of this, all of it, was for nothing.

Armageddon?

Pantheocide

I found Piers Anthony's novels, such as the Adept series, to be good preteen rationality books. His characters are constantly trying to figure out the world around them, describe their reasoning, make complicated (for preteen) moral decisions, and solve puzzles. I don't think his books describe specific techniques that are useful, but they do portray "trying to figure out the world using reason" in a very positive light.

Isaac Asimov's "The Black Widowers" short stories are very rationalist, especially the character of Henry the waiter, who often exemplifies the principal of Occam's Razor. That is, when the rest of the group are coming up with wild and convoluted stories to explain the facts, Henry is usually the one to come up with the simplest and most obvious solution. Some of the stories are a little Holmesian (i.e. superhuman powers of deduction) but many are just a question of looking for prosaic ordinary answers instead of going overboard with speculation. In this vein, I particularly recommend:

• The Acquisitive Chuckle
• The Obvious Factor
• Northwestward

All three of these are collected in The Return of the Black Widowers. "The Obvious Factor" in particular taught me a really important lesson in rationality I've used with significant effect over the years. It took me somewhat longer to learn the more subtle lesson of "Northwestward"--indeed I'm still working on that one--but if anything it's even more important.

L. E. Modesitt has written consistently rational fiction, and improved steadily as a writer. He scores on both counts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._E._Modesitt

I'm recommending Patricia Briggs' fiction (epic fantasy earlier, and more recently paranormal romance) as rationalist in the mild sense-- characters are apt to think about what they're doing and it helps them win.

One sort of "rationalist" book is the kind whose story depends on a lot of plotting and strategizing. It's one of the few ways that fiction can actually be challenging to understand in a technical sense. And it's a way that you can show characters being actually smarter than the reader, and give the reader a sense of what it might feel like to be smarter.

Ender's Game, Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, and the G.R.R. Martin books are what comes to mind, though certainly any book where geopolitics is involved could be strategy-heavy. Narrative history, of course, has the same quality, especially military and diplomatic history.

For a long time, I actually avoided these books, because competitive strategy tended to confuse me. Now I'm starting to find it fascinating.

I second Stiegler's novels. I didn't think much of Vogt's Null-A novels - also Gosseyn was a mutant, among other things he had two brains.

Heinlein's juveniles in general. Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle" .

I'm more than a little ashamed to admit I'm only reading this now, after writing about half of a first draft of what is nominally a piece of "Rationalist Fiction," Erica's Adventures In The Multiverse.. I say nominally, because reading this I realized that I didn't even know what "rationalist fiction" is, despite having read and loved HPMOR and having other, even more embarrassing reasons, to school myself in this regard.

The good news is, I'm going through what I've written so far, and I think I can salvage what's good about it while reconstructing what needs to be reconstructed to transform the thing from fake rationalist fiction to something hopefully worthy of the label. It's invigorating, actually.

I enjoyed Singularity Sky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky) and Entoverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_series). However, Entoverse may be a bit tiresome if you don't like a novel to lecture you on laissez-faire.

The first two Gormenghast books, by Mervyn Peak, feel weirdly appropriate for me. They have a villain whose effectiveness depends on his rationality, when all about lack same. The more potent advocate for rationality, however, is the compelling depiction of a world devoid of it, where the shackles of convention enslave the castle's populace.

I dunno, ymmv, but I implore you to give them a shot. They made a lasting impression on me, in a way that many books don't.

But when you look at what Sherlock Holmes does - you can't go out and do it at home. Sherlock Holmes is not really operating by any sort of reproducible method. He is operating by magically finding the right clues and carrying out magically correct complicated chains of deduction. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that reading Sherlock Holmes does not inspire you to go and do likewise. Holmes is a mutant superhero. And even if you did try to imitate him, it would never work in real life.

To me, he just sounds like an extremized example of the attitude Jaynes describes in the first chapter of PT:TLoS ("Bayesianism as opposed to Aristoteliansm and Wilsonism" as Yvain puts it). But then again, I read it many years before I read Jaynes, so I might just have been misremembering it.

Ralph Hayes Jr. is writing an anti-deathist My Little Pony fanfic: The Great Alicorn Hunt.

The geth in Mass Effect had a huge effect on me in this regard. I know that might sound crazy, but for me, they definitely meet your criteria of "a powerful experience of using rationality." Now, of course I can point out a few instances where I don't feel the geth don't exactly act very rationally, but the mere suggestion of such an existence blew my mind. I started wondering, in a way I had never done before, "what, really, IS the purpose of existence? If I were a geth, why would I bother to exist, let alone fight for my survival? Is the intention to survive really just purely irrational?" and so on and so forth. Imo, there is a direct line of causality tracing from my exposure to the geth to being on this very website.

Yay geth! :3

And this post from the ever useful DailyKos makes several suggestions: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/12/981390/-Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Club:Magic-and-Fantasy?via=siderecent

And this post from the ever useful Daily Kos makes several suggestions: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/12/981390/-Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Club:Magic-and-Fantasy?via=siderecent

And this post from the ever useful Daily Kos makes several suggestions: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/12/981390/-Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Club:Magic-and-Fantasy?via=siderecent

I agree until the last paragraph, I seem to remember thinking that there was a way it could have been done better, and that I could excuse his error because he wasn't overcoming an impossibility.

Unfortunately, I dont remember how I thought to fix it.

It seems unlikely that there are going to be very many examples of fiction containing characters using an interesting technique of rationality since - as far as I know - the idea of a real-life "rationality technique" analogous to a martial art technique is original to you, Eliezer. An author might write a story about some group or individual achieving great things and tell us that this group or person studies rationality, but they won't be able to describe rationality techniques in detail because the concept of rationality techniques didn't exist before the establishment of Overcoming Bias. All they're going to be able to do is talk vaguely about monasteries and Grand Master Rationalists. We ought to be careful about interpreting stories to suit our agenda because it would be so easy to fall into the trap of generalising from fictional evidence. Perhaps learning rationality in a monastery under the tutelage of a Grand Master is a terrible way to learn to Think Better, but if we've spent all our time discussing books that contain this trope, we might have trouble rejecting it as a bad idea.

(Stiegler has another novel called Earthweb which is about using prediction markets to defend the Earth from invading aliens, which was my introduction to the concept of prediction markets.)

Would it be rational to use prediction markets to defend the Earth from aliens? Using Rationality Tools in an irrational way turns them into Irrationality Tools. The writer is just presenting an idea, he has no way of knowing if that technique would work in that scenario, it might even make the situation worse (does that make it Irrationalist Fiction?)

It doesn't explicitly promote rationality, but in terms of demonstrating rationalist virtues in action I believe that the Stargate franchise, or at least the parts I'm thinking of* do a pretty good job. It strongly emphasizes curiosity, both for its own sake and in an instrumentalist knowledge = power sense. Secondly, there are large amounts of seemingly supernatural events that are reliable shown to be explainable by non-supernatual means. Admittedly the phelmtonium involved sometimes advanced enough that it effective works a magical black box, but its made clear that this is a property of the protagonists' rather than inherent to the phelmtonium. Lastly and far from least, most characters actually learn from their own and others experiences then modify there behavior accordingly. Furthermore, how good they are at this is one of the strongest factors in how effective they are. It does have some weakness, for example the characters are somewhat prone to generalizing from fictional example, but I think it comes out as a net positive.

*More or less all of SG-1, including the directed to DVD movies and the parts of Atlantis that I've actually seen.

I highly recommend the works of Dan Brown, particularly Angels and Demons and Deception Point. I hesitate to say why I recommend them, because I can't really do that without massive spoilers.

I will say this: just because the characters in the books are not particularly rational does not mean the story itself is not rational. These books have a very important lesson to teach, and even though the characters may or may not learn that lesson, an observant reader should.

Another way of alluding to what's going on here: experience has taught us to reason about plots and attempt unravel mysteries in fiction according to certain tropes. However what's frequently true in fiction is often almost never to never true in real life. You will make more sense of these books if you come to the same conclusions from the scenes you read as you would were you to encounter those scenes in real life, rather than to the conclusions you would usually come to in a standard work of suspense fiction.