I don’t think this is possible. A show with consistent interactions between the same people needs either an external enemy or internal strife to keep it interesting. Shows like Always Sunny rely on the main character’s biases, stupidities, and selifshness to generate strife within the group. A rationalist house would simply not be this way. Rationalists who hate each other would find some sort of system by which they can minimize interaction along dimensions they hate (maybe scheduling separate mealtimes if one is a vegan) or simply move away. As far as external enemies go, you’re creating a very different kind of show.
I imagine the rest of the world outside the house to be and bearing in mind that no one is perfectly rational; and most people you find will be still on their journey of “getting better”. I imagined my characters to only be “most of the way there”.
They may appear to be incongruently on their way to rationality (aka—better in some areas than others). But such is the nature of the journey. For we are not all naturally born saints.
There is a lot of rationality to try to have it all there at once. It would have to be an imaginary “inquiry” process where a particular notion or two will be focussed on at any given episode. This episode focusses on the errors caused by a lack of bayesian reasoning over simple tasks, and further the failures of having too much of it… And eventually the advantages of bayesian thinking win out over the disadvantages.
Take: trigger-action person. (they rely on verbal triggers to do a whole bunch of actions) i.e. pushups, smiles. And have them get into a fight over their trigger action (oh no—sometimes the world is just tricky to navigate). But also have them succeed at whatever trigger action they were trying to complete. Make the win-states outweigh the losses...
Journey to the win-states? With bad jokes along the way?
Do you have/know someone with experience in scriptwriting?
I don’t have experience beyond having watched a lot of tv and talked about it but I have watched a LOT of tv, read a LOT of books, and seen quite a few movies.
Insofar as you make average people and situations the enemy of your main cast, you are positioning yourself as critical of normality, in a way similar to Dilbert. I think that’s a decent stance to take, though I can’t think of a good example that has a wide cast of competent people. But making fun of normality is a LOT easier than presenting a coherent upgrade. This is similar to the problem of writing very intelligent characters: It’s not easy to write someone smarter than yourself.
Since your show is explicitly didactic, it’s very vulnerable to mistakes on the part of the writing, as well as your own biases. The fact that you’re drawing your bottom line before you start also has a sort of gravitational pull on the quality of your story. There will always be a temptation to present normal people as extra irrational and the solutions of your “rational” main cast will work much better than they might in reality. Even if every situation is drawn from real life examples of rationalists and their households, they can still come off as preachy and unrealistic. I don’t think you can make this show with this intent and have it be good entertainment, as opposed to a blatant after-school special style program.
I am going to try to work out how to put the first few steps into creating a plot/script for an episode and see how it goes. (when I get around to it—it will be posted somewhere online)
Doesn’t Big Bang Theory already exist?
I want to create a variant on that for rationality topics; not “giant sci-fi nerds living together”; but “giant rationality geniuses” living together.
and I want it to show rationality being a win-state not a laugh-at-me-state.
I don’t think this is possible. A show with consistent interactions between the same people needs either an external enemy or internal strife to keep it interesting. Shows like Always Sunny rely on the main character’s biases, stupidities, and selifshness to generate strife within the group. A rationalist house would simply not be this way. Rationalists who hate each other would find some sort of system by which they can minimize interaction along dimensions they hate (maybe scheduling separate mealtimes if one is a vegan) or simply move away. As far as external enemies go, you’re creating a very different kind of show.
I imagine the rest of the world outside the house to be and bearing in mind that no one is perfectly rational; and most people you find will be still on their journey of “getting better”. I imagined my characters to only be “most of the way there”.
They may appear to be incongruently on their way to rationality (aka—better in some areas than others). But such is the nature of the journey. For we are not all naturally born saints.
There is a lot of rationality to try to have it all there at once. It would have to be an imaginary “inquiry” process where a particular notion or two will be focussed on at any given episode. This episode focusses on the errors caused by a lack of bayesian reasoning over simple tasks, and further the failures of having too much of it… And eventually the advantages of bayesian thinking win out over the disadvantages.
Take: trigger-action person. (they rely on verbal triggers to do a whole bunch of actions) i.e. pushups, smiles. And have them get into a fight over their trigger action (oh no—sometimes the world is just tricky to navigate). But also have them succeed at whatever trigger action they were trying to complete. Make the win-states outweigh the losses...
Journey to the win-states? With bad jokes along the way?
Do you have/know someone with experience in scriptwriting?
I don’t have experience beyond having watched a lot of tv and talked about it but I have watched a LOT of tv, read a LOT of books, and seen quite a few movies.
Insofar as you make average people and situations the enemy of your main cast, you are positioning yourself as critical of normality, in a way similar to Dilbert. I think that’s a decent stance to take, though I can’t think of a good example that has a wide cast of competent people. But making fun of normality is a LOT easier than presenting a coherent upgrade. This is similar to the problem of writing very intelligent characters: It’s not easy to write someone smarter than yourself.
Since your show is explicitly didactic, it’s very vulnerable to mistakes on the part of the writing, as well as your own biases. The fact that you’re drawing your bottom line before you start also has a sort of gravitational pull on the quality of your story. There will always be a temptation to present normal people as extra irrational and the solutions of your “rational” main cast will work much better than they might in reality. Even if every situation is drawn from real life examples of rationalists and their households, they can still come off as preachy and unrealistic. I don’t think you can make this show with this intent and have it be good entertainment, as opposed to a blatant after-school special style program.
“Upgraded normality” is a neat name.
I am going to try to work out how to put the first few steps into creating a plot/script for an episode and see how it goes. (when I get around to it—it will be posted somewhere online)
Yes, and the characters are terrible rationalists.
Big bang had an alternative purpose. They did well. And maybe its time we stepped up to the plate...