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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2346 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I finished al-Ghazali's Banes of the Tongue, which was well worth the read. I can dimly see some aspects of Islam, and in particular the hadith "Beware of the believer's intuition because he sees by the light of God" has caught my eye. There is a sense of leaving uncovered what God has covered and not speaking about what doesn't concern you; in particular, if one is gossiped to, the gossip says more about the gossiper than the one who is spoken about. It has kindled an interest in ways of knowing which might arise from an Islamic mindset.

What is forbidden is supposition [about another's alleged evil ways], and supposition is an expression of what the soul believes is reliable, and the heart inclines toward. God says, O you who have believed, avoid much negative assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin [Q. 49:12]. The reason for its unlawfulness is because the secrets of the hearts are known only to the Knower of the unseen, so it is not for you to believe in another’s wickedness unless it is disclosed to you by observation and cannot be explained away.

The book is quite comprehensive, talking about things like arguments, joking, praising or being praised, and I'm sure to be revisiting this often.

I decided to see what web serials were all about and picked up A Practical Guide to Evil. I've read the first two books (which is like one sixth of the whole story) and I'm done with it. I ain't reading a series that is more than five times longer than War and Peace unless it is at least twice as good. And this book is not.

At its heart, PG2E is a YA novel with obvious influences: you can see when the author channelled GRRM, Yudkowsky, Rosenfelder. And it could've been a good YA novel if it had a good editor that was willing to do two things:

  • get rid of sixty percent of the text
  • bring the quality of the prose of the first chapters to the level of the latter ones

I understand that both goals are really hard if not impossible to achieve when you are self-publishing your work chapter by chapter, but I am not satisfied with the quality of the final result at all. I'll give Mother of Learning an honest try next to see if the genre is salvageable.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

Oh, and I got through How Not to Write a Novel. The authors spent too much effort on writing excruciatingly bad examples. I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid*, but worse†.

If you want the best the web novel medium has to offer, I'd recommend Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales‡.

* Zorian is Sakura, Zach is Naruto, Red Robe is Sasuke, QI is Orochiramu, they are all trapped in a one-month time loop that ends with an invasion, etc.; it's obvious once you know Domagoj Kurmaic listed Time Braid as one of his favorite stories on FanFiction.Net.

† Mother of Learning is slower, the fights are less exciting, the characters are flatter, and there is less fanservice.

‡ Unless glowfic counts, in which case I'd recommend Project Lawful by Eliezer Yudkowsky (LessWrong) and Kelsey Piper (The Unit of Caring).

I'd recommend Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales

I want the best medium-length web novel medium has to offer. Wales is good, but if I remember correctly, he's not known for brevity.

Wales actually has a handful of great short stories. IMHO they're better on average than his long fiction!

Also, although I loved Worth the Candle, it's long and some of its twists and turns are controversial. IMHO every revelation was utterly sensible in hindsight and made a good story even better, but de gustibus non disputandum, and I recognize that if I didn't like a major twist after I'd read 200-odd chapters to get to it I'd be massively disappointed.

You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and deconstructions that lead to unique differences from the canon. 80k words, so more "short-length web novel" than medium-length, though.

You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and

Seeing the Wales discussion, I was going to mention Metropolitan Man. Quite possibly my favorite Rationalist story, not least because it's one of a handful of well-made art pieces that I love for very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with. It's simultaneously the best argument for and against Rationalism that I've seen.

very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with

I'd love to find out what you're talking about here. The obvious candidate that jumps to mind is Lex Luthor's rational but ultimately self-destructive analysis of Superman-as-existential-threat but although that's one of the most fascinating parts of the book, it's a classic villain elucidating a perspective that even the author, albeit non-clearly, disagrees with and once I start thinking of less-obvious candidates ... well, I don't mean "what are you talking about?" in the idiomatic "you sound crazy" sense, but in the literal "there are like five things you could be talking about but I'm not sure which it is" sense.

Is there author commentary somewhere? My read was that Luthor did the rationally-correct thing, that the benefits of Superman weren't worth the existential risk, and the ambiguity just drives home the idea that Rationalism is a gamble, and the best you can do is make smart bets. In what sense would Wales disagree with that position?

What were the other five things? I really ought to read it again.

I haven't read author commentary, so you could be right. My read is that Luthor might have been doing the rationally-correct thing in a world where only Superman exists, but in a world where Superman is just a single example of a whole class of existential threats (which is likely from Luthor's perspective, a priori, and which would be certain if this universe actually matched the DC universe, and which arguably includes Luthor himself futzing around with Kryptonian technology), the risk of Superman turning on us if left alive is less than the extra risk of meeting others among those threats without Superman to help.

IIRC the other big perspectives that might engender disagreement (or stronger disagreement, when there's disagreement presented in-story):

Luthor's characterization here was excellent, and Superman's good, but my only concern with the story is that I think Lois feels like more of a stretch vs her canon characterizations.

It was just too implausible that Kryptonians would look perfectly human but have superpowers, and something like the "spider-eel" form was necessary to keep the story rational.

Superman arguably should be obeying virtue ethics, even if the consequentialist outcomes of that allow for horrors, because the risks of him becoming less virtuous (or, as it turned out, of being perceived as less virtuous) are even greater.

"Clark Kent", though, is a weird and probably suboptimal compromise between the suffering that could have been prevented via extra time spent as Superman and the suffering to Superman himself (and to others if he snaps) if he couldn't even pretend to be a regular person.

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