Personally I’ve found a lot of the show’s lessons to be overly one-sided and applause-lightish.
Of course. The issues with rewriting them to be rationalist are twofold: first, they’re primarily about friendship, where rationality is mostly silent on direct advice, and second, they’re on features where one-sided advice is generally better than two-sided advice.
Consider, for example, Twilight’s nerdy scholarship. It’s shown to be useful (it’s a major source of her magical power and she’ll often know things because of it) but have its limits (let’s learn how to do a slumber party from a book!). Which, of course, is the sort of thing you’ll find in any of lukeprog’s articles on relationships here. Rationality’s primary lesson is “learn from successful examples and build up experience” rather than “book smarts are sufficient to interact with other people in real-time.”
As an example of one-sided advice, take the lesson of Bridle Gossip:
Never judge a book by its cover. Someone may look unusual, or funny, or scary. But you have to look past that and learn who they are inside. Real friends don’t care what your “cover” is; It’s the contents of a pony that count. And a good friend, like a good book, is something that will last forever.
Obviously, appearances can provide useful information. The standard human bias, though, is to overweight appearance- and so advice to humans should generally be along the lines of “discount appearance” rather than “use appearance optimally,” because the first is harder for humans to twist than the second.
The fact that the Potter books have concluded is one of the advantages to setting a rationalist/munchkin fic there.
I personally dislike the “rationalist fic = munchkin fic” association, but suspect that is atypical of LW users.
Of course. The issues with rewriting them to be rationalist are twofold: first, they’re primarily about friendship, where rationality is mostly silent on direct advice, and second, they’re on features where one-sided advice is generally better than two-sided advice.
Consider, for example, Twilight’s nerdy scholarship. It’s shown to be useful (it’s a major source of her magical power and she’ll often know things because of it) but have its limits (let’s learn how to do a slumber party from a book!). Which, of course, is the sort of thing you’ll find in any of lukeprog’s articles on relationships here. Rationality’s primary lesson is “learn from successful examples and build up experience” rather than “book smarts are sufficient to interact with other people in real-time.”
As an example of one-sided advice, take the lesson of Bridle Gossip:
Obviously, appearances can provide useful information. The standard human bias, though, is to overweight appearance- and so advice to humans should generally be along the lines of “discount appearance” rather than “use appearance optimally,” because the first is harder for humans to twist than the second.
I personally dislike the “rationalist fic = munchkin fic” association, but suspect that is atypical of LW users.