There’s a story that the reason why you have a lot of anime that goes in very weird sexual directions is that Japan is an incredibly sexually repressive society, so the Japanese channel their compressed libido towards art.
I don’t really believe this story, but I think the pattern it exemplifies is at play here.
Rats have very ambitious goals of fixing the world. They see that the world is in a pretty bad shape and demands fixing. But they can’t fix it. No one else can fix it either (nihil supernum, deep atheism), and even if they could, it would likely be bad, because their values are not yours (even deeper atheism). So you yearn for a world in which you smash those limitations. “Power” (or a specific kind of it) is the thing you need, and its value is not bounded, so the threshold of a superstimulus is largely your imagination, perhaps constrained by some ontological assumptions. That’s why this theme recurs through ratfic so much.
This seems somewhat obvious to me[1] and so I am somewhat surprised that people in the comments mostly seem to explain it in terms of game-theoretic (or other) realism or people having consequentialist-ish views, etc.
It recently occurred to me that powerful gods caring about humans is the baby version of the phenomenon being described in the OP.
“Sure, I cannot hope to ascend to power, but there is a deity that knows about me and cares about me and can do a lot of stuff and will move the heavens to rig the matters in my favor if I pray enough, sacrifice enough, and exercise virtue enough.”
E.g., the whole idea of the Last Judgment is quite reminiscent of many quotes in the OP.
First of all, there might exist cases when a god with different values is preferable to the current world state (e.g. if the world is clearly heading towards self-destruction which would terrify even the god). Additionally, I doubt that the theme of gaining power and fixing the world recurs just through ratfic and not through fiction whose authors display some bias which I cannot describe more precisely than “finding it hard to restrain themselves.” Finally, Max Harms has been trying to construct an agent whose sole goal is being corrigible and even defined power for the agent to optimize in a way which I suspect to be transformable into the Natural Abstract Goodness.
First of all, there might exist cases when a god with different values is preferable to the current world state (e.g. if the world is clearly heading towards self-destruction which would terrify even the god).
Sure. Maybe you misunderstood me. I didn’t write this as an endorsement of the “even deeper atheism” view.
First of all, there might exist cases when a god with different values is preferable to the current world state (e.g. if the world is clearly heading towards self-destruction which would terrify even the god).
It still seems like this is much more prevalent in ratfic. E.g., compare how much of it you see in the top 10 ratfic works vs IDK top 10 generic high fantasy or top 10 post-human scifi works.
There’s a story that the reason why you have a lot of anime that goes in very weird sexual directions is that Japan is an incredibly sexually repressive society, so the Japanese channel their compressed libido towards art.
I don’t really believe this story, but I think the pattern it exemplifies is at play here.
Rats have very ambitious goals of fixing the world. They see that the world is in a pretty bad shape and demands fixing. But they can’t fix it. No one else can fix it either (nihil supernum, deep atheism), and even if they could, it would likely be bad, because their values are not yours (even deeper atheism). So you yearn for a world in which you smash those limitations. “Power” (or a specific kind of it) is the thing you need, and its value is not bounded, so the threshold of a superstimulus is largely your imagination, perhaps constrained by some ontological assumptions. That’s why this theme recurs through ratfic so much.
This seems somewhat obvious to me[1] and so I am somewhat surprised that people in the comments mostly seem to explain it in terms of game-theoretic (or other) realism or people having consequentialist-ish views, etc.
partly through introspection + the Copernican principle, FWIW
It recently occurred to me that powerful gods caring about humans is the baby version of the phenomenon being described in the OP.
“Sure, I cannot hope to ascend to power, but there is a deity that knows about me and cares about me and can do a lot of stuff and will move the heavens to rig the matters in my favor if I pray enough, sacrifice enough, and exercise virtue enough.”
E.g., the whole idea of the Last Judgment is quite reminiscent of many quotes in the OP.
First of all, there might exist cases when a god with different values is preferable to the current world state (e.g. if the world is clearly heading towards self-destruction which would terrify even the god). Additionally, I doubt that the theme of gaining power and fixing the world recurs just through ratfic and not through fiction whose authors display some bias which I cannot describe more precisely than “finding it hard to restrain themselves.” Finally, Max Harms has been trying to construct an agent whose sole goal is being corrigible and even defined power for the agent to optimize in a way which I suspect to be transformable into the Natural Abstract Goodness.
Sure. Maybe you misunderstood me. I didn’t write this as an endorsement of the “even deeper atheism” view.
Sure, it’s not an exclusively ratfic issue. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodhoodSeeker
It still seems like this is much more prevalent in ratfic. E.g., compare how much of it you see in the top 10 ratfic works vs IDK top 10 generic high fantasy or top 10 post-human scifi works.