ussri.substack.com
Well, this is just about exactly what it says on the tin. I've finally mustered up the energy to write a full-length review of what's a plausible contender for my Favourite Novel Ever, Reverend Insanity. I'd reproduce it here too, but it's a better reading experience on Substack (let's ignore the shameless self-promotion, and the fact that I can't be arsed to re-do the markdown tags)
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Notes -
I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.
Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?
A lot of rationalist fiction is fanfic where nobody in the source material ever tries to take over the world by rules lawyering or minmaxing despite it obviously being possible. The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"? The better stories go out of their way to explain why this hasn't happened before and give the hero an equally smart villain to keep the plot interesting.
What, you mean Earthfic? At that point, you are better off just reading biographies of great scientists and entrepreneurs like Richard Feynman or Elon Musk, or nonfiction books about cognitive biases and economics.
From "Rationality and the English Language" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Probably the biggest difference between fictional settings and reality is that fictional settings are almost always constructed in such a way that large effects do not require large capital investments, the way they do in our world. Requiring that things get done by a research team in twenty years instead of by a hero in one minute kills the fun.
The answer to that, if I'm being snarky, is that they are not in fact the "actually smart character" they think they are and there are reasons why 'this obvious way to take over the world' doesn't work out.
Then again, I am not a fan of the type of fiction where it's "just let me get my stats in a row and manipulate this convenient loophole et voila, deus ex machina!" because that's sports betting, not an organic magic system. Magic should be a little bit fuzzy and imprecise and "no it has to be the exact phase of the moon, no I don't know why, and oh yeah if it rains all bets are off" because that's how things work in reality once you leave behind in vitro or in silico experiments.
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I will say that one of my favorite fictional tropes ever is when a small group of people who each have a particular skill/expertise that is world-class in their field get together and coordinate an insanely precise, unprecedented yet completely plausible set of actions and circumstances long enough to achieve a very particular effect, and such effect sort of has the appearance of magic because your average Joe or team of average Joes has no clue on how to replicate it.
That is, all the years of research and development of skill are implied in each character's backstory, and now they just have to apply those to the plot's problem in a unique way, which may only takes weeks or days or minutes, so maintains the 'fun.'
Michael Crichton novels often use that sort of trope, and more recently, Daniel Suarez.
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