#outside of ratfic anyway

[katherinakaina]

I keep seeing once in a while people pondering on an apparent contradiction in Daniil’s character – he is said to be a rationalist but he is evidently extremely emotional. Those things do not go together, right? People notice their confusion. They find all sorts of interesting explanations. From him being manipulative and performative, using his displays of emotion like tools to control people. To him not being rational at all actually, him lying to himself and others, not even knowing who he is, pretending and failing.

Every time I get over it and completely forget and then another one of these hits me in the face. What I forget is that in common understanding rationality is opposed to being emotional. While in the community it is a basic level understanding that there are rational emotions and irrational ones. The same way there are rational beliefs and irrational beliefs (which is to say true and false basically).

From here:

A popular belief about “rationality” is that rationality opposes all emotion—that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings. …

For my part, I label an emotion as “not rational” if it rests on mistaken beliefs, or rather, on mistake-producing epistemic conduct. “If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.” Conversely, an emotion that is evoked by correct beliefs or truth-conducive thinking is a “rational emotion”; and this has the advantage of letting us regard calm as an emotional state, rather than a privileged default. …

Becoming more rational—arriving at better estimates of how-the-world-is—can diminish feelings or intensify them. Sometimes we run away from strong feelings by denying the facts, by flinching away from the view of the world that gave rise to the powerful emotion. If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger. …

I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light—I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven’t the words to say. Despite all my philosophy I am still embarrassed to confess strong emotions, and you’re probably uncomfortable hearing them. But I know, now, that it is rational to feel.

Daniil probably suppresses some of his emotions to be taken seriously. But this is masking. And he is bad at it. He has strong emotions and strong convictions and they spill out of him regardless. He also values truth and honesty and that’s another reason why he can’t fully suppress his authenticity.

But all of it is about how to behave in polite society. How not to freak out neurotypicals. It has nothing to do with his thinking process, his beliefs and his goals. His rationality.

Now you can argue that his sincerity and his openness are irrational instrumentally, which is to say they lead to his downfall. He should have masked better and become more cynical if he wanted to succeed. Maybe? But that would also have its downsides, I’m pretty sure. (we’ll see what apathy meter does to his decision making soon enough)

Anyway, that is not the point I see people make. And I just really want people to stop making it. Strong emotions, strong ideals, passionate belief in a better future for humanity – those are all perfectly rational if they align with truth. And he does fail as a rationalist quite a lot as well, but this is purely an epistemological issue that has nothing to do with him being emotional.

[azdoine]

from my engagement with, uh - the HPMOR extended universe? vaguely embarrassing that I’m even aware of such a place - I don’t know if it’s fair to say that EY explicitly set out to write a fanfic specifically to attract a cult. not because he didn’t want to spread some of his beliefs, or because he didn’t ultimately accrete a sizeable devoted circle, but because it kind of attributes more intelligence and agency to him than he really has, right? especially when ‘hey, no one can actually be that competent in real life’ is really the harshest rejoinder to rationalism as a mindset anyways.

my honest impression is that he just wanted to write a parable, rather than making some calculated decision in advance in his head all like “this is the one optimal way to reach the single largest audience, and that’s the one thing I’m aiming for here”. and so the weird didacticism of the work was just a combination of him setting out to write a parable + him semiconsciously writing what he likes and knows as an author. (at least until later, when the outsized influence of the fic became obvious, and capitalizing on that would be trivial.) I especially believe EY had read and enjoyed a fair amount of HP FF previously, rather than leaping on it as an outsider to a trend; HPMOR makes too many shout-outs and wholesale plot references to other HP fanfics, in much the same way as it references countless other pop culture touchstones, for me to think he wasn’t bringing any fannish passion to the whole massive project at all.

as for the actual thrust of your posts, OP, the idea of confronting your audience’s unspoken assumptions is something EY explicitly tried before, more clumsily, in his The Sword of Good (another reason I see the whole thing as just a part of a wider background trend in his work, I suppose). but that was very specifically a drive he experienced as an author, and not something he could communicate to his audience. and even if his audience experienced the same urge, they wouldn’t feel as much of a driving need to relitigate the exact same ideas and arguments expressed in HPMOR, which expressed those ideas decently enough (decently enough in your eyes, at least, if you’re the kind of person swayed by HPMOR. tautologies are tautologies, etc.)

so it’s not surprising to me that EY’s literary successors, and “ratfic” as a book club genre, have coalesced more around a the structural hallmarks of HPMOR (self aware “genre savvy” narratives; “munchkin” power gaming stories; “competence porn” heroes and villains; nerd-verisimilitude worldbuilding; etc) rather than around HPMOR’s putative evangelical impetus.

I do think there are at least some HPMOR descendants that set out on a similar project of challenging their audience on some point; but broadly, they respond to HPMOR and the rationalist community in somewhat the same way that HPMOR responded to Harry Potter and to pop culture. so such “authentic” sequels have an exponentially smaller reach and audience. and few to none of them have been exhaustively comprehensive doorstoppers in the way that HPMOR was.

like nobody ever talks about how one specific hp fanfic started a cult 😔 surely there's some potent analysis that can be done there