Specific Fiction Discusion (April 2011)

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Apr 14, 2011

Seeing some recent comments on my links comment, I think this thread might be warranted.

This is a thread for discussing specific works of fiction; books, movies, TV shows, webcomics, fanfictions, whatever. It's purpose is to provide a rationality perspective on shows that are not necessarily aimed at rationalists (but by the correlation of target audience I predict many of them might be anyway...)

To keep this organized, please follow these guidlines when posting; Top level coments shuld with NO exception (I'll make a single meta comment where discussion about this thread itself can go) fit into one of the following templates:

For a single work, the top level comment should consist of the full title, a link to where the work can be found online if applicable, and the TV tropes page for it OR a short description ONLY if there is no TV tropes page for it.

For certain authors that have written a lot of books popular on LW, such as for example Vernor Vinge, discussion of each one might tend to dominate the thread, therefore there should be one post for ALL the works of such authors, and they can be made entire own threads if discussion grows to big for that. The format for these comments is: Authors name, link to their wikipedia page (or homepage if they don't have a wikipedia page), and a short bibliography to make it easier to avoid making separate top level comments for their books.

Also, pleas refrain from discussing things written by Eliezer or otherwise already having a discussion space on LW, for similar reasons you should avoid discussing a certain institute and because it'd be redundant.

If this thread grows large and popular, I'm thinking this might become a monthly thing, hence the (April) part.

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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/user/MenloMarseilles#g/c/F44B36D569D8C463

Description: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic

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11 points

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I have started drawing ponies. They are fun and easy to draw. If anyone wants a pony version of emself (or of someone or something else), ask me (samples of the ponies I have already drawn will be publicly available soon once they've been scanned and colored).

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9 points

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Sample ponies:

Luminosity, a pegacorn pony of me (pegacorn because I'm greedy like that)

Cosmic Ray, a unicorn pony of MBlume (note: tufted tail and goaty beard and ruffly legs nonstandard variants)

Flicker Spice, a pegasus pony of Lindsey

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7 points

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More ponies:

Comet, a pegasus pony of Michael Anissimov (request was relayed secondhand; apologies for any errors)

Elfwhinny, an earth pony of Aris_Katsaris (now with added spectacles)

Indigo Dawn, a unicorn pony of Adelene Dawner

Levity, a pegasus pony of my alphabeta*

Resilience, an earth pony of Zack M. Davis

Tuesday, a pegacorn pony of Wednesday's mother

*I refer to beta readers of my fiction as "[greek letter]beta", so alphabeta is the first person to sign on as a beta, betabeta is the second, etc.

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16 points

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Yet more ponies:

Clippony, the long-awaited pegasus version of our mascot.

Silver Spiral, an earth pony of Yvain.

Enlightenment Sky, a pegasus pony of Harvey.

Lightsaber, a unicorn pony of my best friend.

Excelsior, an earth pony of Cyan with a surprisingly non-cyan color scheme.

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7 points

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New batch of ponies up. I had to come up with names for all of these because nobody named their ponies ahead of time; I will change names accordingly if people don't like their assigned pony names.

Calamus, a unicorn pony of Jaime Astorga.

Equilibria, an earth pony of badger.

Pa'li, a My Little Na'vi of Eliza.

Pianissimo, a unicorn pony of Emil.

Pomme, an earth pony of MixedNuts.

Query, a unicorn pony of ata.

Seafoam, a hippocampus pony of my friend Gwen.

Strange Loop, a unicorn pony of Douglas Hofstadter.

Tempus, a unicorn pony of Leonhart.

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4 points

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Love the Hofstadter pony.

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Clippony is awesome :D

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I find it amusing how I instantly rationalize how a pony's appearance reflects the LW member's personality.

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Luminosity, a pegacorn pony of me (pegacorn because I'm greedy like that)

I am amused to note that the pony fandom often refers to unicorn pegasi as "alicorns".

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7 points

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You should do Clippy! :D

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8 points

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Okay, I'll do Clippy in the next batch. (If Clippy would care to weigh in on how it should be ponied, splendid; otherwise I'll make something up.)

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14 points

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I should be a pony that's good at making paperclips.

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5 points

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Hey! That was my idea! :p

Speaking of that, I made another one of the virtues:
http://i53.tinypic.com/jtp3rq.png
And here's the previous one: http://i54.tinypic.com/20jnz1g.jpg
2/12, 10 to go... And then I might have actually learnt how to draw them euclidecaly and make proper, vectorized versions.

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45 points

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http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/5459/demponies.png I apologise in advance.

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7 points

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The next rationalist fanfiction of Less Wrong contributors should be called "My Little AI: Friendliness isn't Magic!" :-)

Excellent work, Leonhart!

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17 points

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No, no; the fic has to be My Little Pony: Friendship is Science.

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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No, no; the fic has to be My Little Pony: Friendship is Science.

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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Friendship is Science has now been revised to contain a bit more plot.

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8 points

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Okay, there's probably no point in nitpicking a parody, but Fluttershy doesn't have a horn, she's a pegasus, not a unicorn.

Edit to add: but seriously there's no point in fussing over perfecting such an omake. Frankly I thought the first version was somewhat better, as "Mary Sue" parodies are a bit cliche.

8 points

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6 points

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Seconded on the first version being better.

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4 points

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This is making me increasingly worried that I only like the rest of those omake files due to halo effect from your person and not being as enthusiastic about the originals.

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9 points

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Cooperation is Instrumental.

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5 points

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bwhahahahahahahahahahahaha

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21 points

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I blame you both. I never used to have ponies in my utility function. And now it's 2AM.

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5 points

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It is so amazing. <3

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I don't get it. Is it mocking somehting?

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8 points

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The indigo one is Eliezer and the yellow one is Robin Hanson.

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5 points

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Why is this pony named Bacon?

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9 points

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My brother is one of the actors on this show.

This brings me absolutely no inside knowledge or wisdom, but a great deal of pleasure when somebody brings it up on a rationalist message board.

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4 points

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Who does he play?

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12 points

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Pray forgive me that I dodge this question. My brother prefers to keep his personal & professional lives separate; now that I've outed myself as his sister on a Googlable forum, I feel awkward identifying precisely whose sister I am.

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8 points

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The "Feeling Pinkie Keen" episode may be fun to analyze from a rationalist/Bayesian perspective. Was Twilight Sparkle being rational to jump based on Pinkie Pie's sense at the end? What would have to be the priors at the beginning of the episode for it to be the correct decision at the end, after all the accumulated evidence? :-)

8 points

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10 points

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I just watched that the other day and had the same reaction. I was annoyed that the ending moral was "okay, I can't understand it and it's just mysterious and that's okay," rather than "okay, I don't understand how it works NOW, but clearly there's something to this. I should continue to study it and in the meantime treat it as a valuable source of evidence."

I wasn't that annoyed though, because a few episodes prior Twilight had been totally right about a "curse" not being magic at all, with a "scientific explanation" instead.

Also amused that Twilight has a secret science lab with an MRI machine that she never uses again.

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5 points

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Semi relevant; I posted the following LWish thing in a discussion thread on a forum:

"we here have an enormous amount of extremely strong and general evidence that excludes huge areas of hypothesis space. This is the STRONGLY DOMINANT reason you shouldn't believe certain kinds of things even if someone you trust sincerely tells you to. Things like "physical laws don't have exceptions, no exceptions", "¨there are no irreducibly mental (=supernatural) phenomena", "Due to huge flaws in the way human brains work, billions of people CAN be wrong, and frequently are. You can't even trust your own brain.". We have no reason to believe Equestria and ponykind have similar overriding principles. "

(Please note that this was not written for LW, so therefore I were sloppy and also oversimplifying things due to inferential distance.)

5 points

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That show doesn't need a "Rational" fanfic: it's pretty rational all by itself. In fact, the characters go more intelligently about their problems and drama than most characters in fiction, even adult fiction.

5 points

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