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Superrational
- tleilaxu 3y agoI absolutely adore how this is written. It’s such a hilarious fusion of styles. Thank you for submitting it!
- taylorius 3y agoThat's interesting - I found that same fusion super-jarring, to the point that a part of me actually started feeling embarrassed for the author. Even though I know it's a satire, and done in that way purposefully - it was visceral, I just couldn't help it.
- noman-land 3y agoThis was strangely hilarious.
- everybodyknows 3y agoA new fiction sub-genre is born: Efficient-Market Theory Teen Romance.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoUnfortunately, every such book is rather short: "Nobody is dating you now, so obviously you're undatable. Goodbye."
- Mtinie 3y ago/awaits sounds of departure /hears none /looks up “Oh. You are still here and obviously don’t agree.” /listens to a hint of an argument “Fine. Prove me wrong. You’d like to use a sophisticated data model to prove your dateability? By all means.” —- “And that friends, is how the Data Science disciple came to be. It naturally evolved from this simple state of social study to include other quality of life enhancing topics like optimizing ad delivery networks, SharePoint page utilization estimates, and developing ML prompts for generative adult genre fiction.” (Hugs to my brilliantly nerdy data science friends)
- aatd86 3y ago:) looks familiar.
- tgv 3y agoAtlas Shrugged meets Twilight. It offers its consumers more for the same price and number of words than either of those works, so it must be a hit.
- jacquesm 3y agoAyn Rand was there a while ago.
- Vecr 3y ago> "An average blue whale weighs two hundred thousand pounds. How much do you think I weigh?" Would that actually work on someone in that situation in real life though? I know the author is going for "anchoring" from Kahneman 1974, but the incentive to not insult someone you want to be cooperative in the future in that scenario is so strong, and the person would probably think longer to avoid an infoleak.
- concordDance 3y agoIt wouldn't, that's the joke.
- jamilton 3y agoI could maybe see saying the weight of some celebrity or other mutually-known person could actually cause anchoring, but yeah, that was a joke.
- ftio 3y agoStory aside, the adverbs in this piece alone are perfect in both quantity and quality. Hilarious.
- tempodox 3y agoYou forgot to appropriately adverbialize your utterance.
- Groxx 3y ago>I gazed into his breathtakingly dark eyes. There was something deep and familiar about them, glimmering in his eye sockets like two spherical cows. Marvelous.
- johnfn 3y agoThis is amazing. Their next one, [1], is somehow even better. I'm not sure if it's HN-relevant, but it is hilarious. [1]: https://skunkledger.substack.com/p/my-opening-speech-at-the-event-im https://skunkledger.substack.com/p/my-opening-speech-at-the-...
- concordDance 3y agoAmusing bit also alienating to those from other subcultures and I do think the memes we have to share are important enough that we shouldn't be putting people off.
- howenterprisey 3y agoI've gone back and forth on this a bit. Currently I don't think they're that important. I've seen quite a lot of good thinking get done without those concepts. Rationality certainly has the potential to be enjoyable to some people, but I think of it now as more of an optional side quest than some sort of gospel that needs to be spread to everyone.
- concordDance 3y agoInteresting perspective. I've found the techniques and concepts most useful at work, where they've been amazingly helpful.
- dumdumchan 3y agoSource for the image https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5dTcc1eS4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5dTcc1eS4w
- tempodox 3y agoReading this I'm definitely feeling underquirked.
- travisjungroth 3y ago> Feel free also to help yourselves to the Modelos in the cooler. Great line. Modelo is the most popular beer in America, but I doubt most people would realize that. It’s like… a Normie inside joke. Is that possible?
- mschnell 3y agoHilarious! If you have ever read about Game Theory, a book by Kahnemann or Taleb this should be funny.
- tempodox 3y agoHere's one (Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases; PDF): https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyKahneman1974.pdf https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyK...
- morsch 3y agoIf you liked this, you'll probably like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality https://hpmor.com/ https://hpmor.com/
- saulpw 3y agoIf you like a satire, will you probably like that which is being satirized?
- bmacho 3y agoIf you don't already know the original, then yeah, chances are that you will like it, it has the same theme and genre as the satire.
- tgv 3y agoI've spent years with a child and wife in love with the Harry Potter books, I read them (in Spanish, to improve my understanding; very rational), I've seen the movies, and I must say: the start is certainly good.
- epiccoleman 3y agoI mean, sure. I like Harry Potter and I also liked HPMOR. Although imo it goes off the rails in the second half or so and kinda fails to live up to its promise. Satire / parody doesn't necessarily have to be a merciless polemic against the target - and as a matter of fact, it would be pretty hard to read HPMOR and not come away with the feeling that the author was a pretty big Harry Potter fan. Another thing that comes to mind is the horror movie Cabin in the Woods, which sends up lots of horror tropes but is still fun and enjoyable for fans of the genre.
- ihm 3y agoThe parent was saying "Superrational" is a satire of HPMOR, not that HPMOR is a satire of Harry Potter.
- noobermin 3y agoI'm amazed at the replies, the writing is atrocious to me. I'm hardly breaking the first few paragraphs without wanting to gag.
- deedree 3y agoIf you had allocated one second to rational thought you would have realised you are not the intended audience because you don’t understand it and thus won’t find it funny. Before reacting to what might seem like flame bait, I tried to stay in style to the article and would like to point out that the ‘gag worthiness’ is intended and part of the joke.
- noobermin 3y agoThanks, now that I understand, it is in fact clever
- Vecr 3y agoYes, that's kind of the point. It's written in what I assume is the style of a unintentionally or intentionally[0] bad Twilight fanfic. [0]: see My Immortal if you want to witness Harry Potter and Twilight get butchered at the same time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JeremyNT 3y agoThere's a fine line between being a parody of a style and just being bad. I'm not certain where this one falls, but it's not really working for me either. Perhaps a subset of HN is just excited to take the "rationalist" movement down a peg, which I suppose is a positive development.
- epiccoleman 3y agoI'm not convinced it's positive, though I definitely understand the impulse. (And specifically wanting to take down LessWrong, which has turned very weird and navel gaze-y). But it's a lot like the vitriol I see towards effective altruism. There's a good idea there (i.e. wanting to train oneself to think rationally, or wanting to do charity in a way that achieves the most good for the amount of money given). It's a bit sad to me that because the representatives of these ideas are flawed (rationality, LessWrong, Eliezer), or because they've been used as cover for shitty behavior (effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried) that the consensus becomes "there's nothing good here and it's all bullshit". This pattern of throwing out the baby with the bathwater seems absolutely pervasive in modern discourse, you can see variations of it in people's thinking on vaccines, racism, democracy, journalism, freedom of speech, and global warming, to think of just a few examples. Sorry, this became kind of a rant, but I really wish our internet discourse could do a better job of filtering babies from bathwater than it currently does.
- AnnikaL 3y agoThis is hilarious -- I hope the author writes more like it!
- tempodox 3y agoNashwell Maxington. Hilarious!
- LaundroMat 3y agoThis is great (for people who want to signal they're in the know).
- schoen 3y agoI love the "principal agent problem"!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hliyan 3y ago> If we model individuals in a shared sociocultural milieu as adapting to similar selection pressures, many stable strategies incorporate altruistic cooperation I have always formulated this for myself as follows: Any sufficiently strategic self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism. Empathy is just evolution's way of encoding millions of years of this observation into our emotional response system.
- MatthiasWandel 3y agoI have come to that conclusion myself over the years too. But "bad people" or aholes also have usefulness. You sometimes need people to challenge things that only an unreasonable person would challenge. And you need the occasional Steve Jobs too. But unlike altruistic people, we generally don't give the aholes as much credit. So, ironically, perhaps altruism is the better self serving strategy.
- jacquesm 3y agoYou can't have too many altruistic people. You can however have too many assholes and the number of assholes where this effect starts to dominate is not all that high. The fact that our societies reward asshole behavior as much as they do is a huge problem.
- naasking 3y agoNot sure that's true. You're assuming altruism has no failure modes or pathologies. I know plenty of people whose altruism is driven by various anxieties and neuroses, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation, at the very least. A whole society of altruists could easily be very fragile and thus vulnerable to the slightest defector or adversary (cf. Galaxy Quest). Some degree of assholes and psychopaths make for robust systems that protect against abuse, intentional or accidental.
- jacquesm 3y agoInteresting viewpoint. I'm sure some assholes and psychopaths would love to have a figleaf to explain their behavior. But in my experience: you can have 90% nice people and 10% assholes and it will wreck your life. Even 1:30 is probably still too many. And the failure modes and pathologies you describe are external: an exploiter is by definition not part of the group of altruists and that makes them a perfect example of how few assholes it takes to ruin things.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gipp 3y agoThe "two marshmallows from the food court" joke was brilliantly understated
- lusus_naturae 3y agoAs a TOTREP, Victoria would have know that people think at the margin and so she would never have asked whats-her-face for her shoes at that moment. The writer fell into a classic trap of creating a contrived situation just to get the main to meet her love interest. Good effort overall, but reads like a first draft. /s
- travisjungroth 3y ago> Nashwell smiled rationally. There’s something about that line that captures the essence of the whole story for me.
- dogcomplex 3y agoReview: For those who found themselves too intellectual to enjoy the teen romance magic school vampire genre perfectly embodied by the fanfic My Immortal (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6829556/1/My-Immortal https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6829556/1/My-Immortal), Superrational presents a more sophisticated rationalist re-imagining of the magic school universe. May it make the great Yudkowsky proud.
- photochemsyn 3y agoReminds me of William Gibson's short story, The Gernsback Continuum. > "...Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."
- mensetmanusman 3y ago"I almost spilled my consumer surplus all over the floor." Does this writer know my deepest thoughts while I'm at the mall!
- mock-possum 3y ago> I gazed into his breathtakingly dark eyes. There was something deep and familiar about them, glimmering in his eye sockets like two spherical cows. …I’ll be in my bunk.
- Modified3019 3y agoOnline games often have various particle effects that fire off when using an ability, which alone is a nice way to clearly and quickly indicate that something has occurred. However, what often ends up happening is when you get multiple people firing off dozens of these effects non-stop, you end up with an incomprehensible rainbow puke filling the screen. This beautiful story has made me realize the same thing happens when using "intellectual" jargon.