This was partly a deliberate choice, since the artist I selected has done a number of other “rant” comics in similar style, but you’re quite right. Increasing the art-to-text ratio is one of my priorities for any future comics.
DataPacRat
Karma: 2,004
Re “Show people changing their mind”, that’s at the top of my list for ideas for a third comic. (In association with “Learn how to lose” as applied to ideas—that before you can have a meaningful victory, defeat has to be at least conceivable. Probably throwing in a Litany of Tarski while I’m at it.)
Content-wise: I have two justifications for what you disagree with, one involving taking broad principles and narrowing them down into “do it today” tactics, the other involving writing about a topic the intended audience wants to read about. The latter is more important—if I’m not going to talk to a target audience about that which makes them a target audience, that doesn’t leave me much to hang a comic on that they’ll want to read.
I don’t think Rationality Matters could be generalized to be appealing to all audiences while still being appealing—to interest different groups, I’d have to comic up with comics that focus on their particular areas of interest… and I know more about the current targets than I do most other groups, so a re-aimed comic would likely do more poorly. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that I don’t think I’ve got the chops to do it.
The first comic is nsfw
Really? Hunh. I’d tried very hard to avoid crossing that line. What in particular do you feel makes it so?
and assumes its audience is attracted to women.
I have survey data backing up my anecdotal experience suggesting that the audience generally is attracted to women. :)
The message is mostly ok though, I think.
Good to hear.
The second comic makes a lot of assumptions that I’m not sure are necessarily true, while the final compact is not terribly original, and, as with all brief compacts, is needlessly ambigous (how much freedom of property do I have. What does ownership mean precisely (can I inherit it? Is the only way to obtain it via the exchange of goods? How far does self defence stretch?)
I could argue about various aspects of this, but that’s not what I’m here to do. (At least, it’s not what I’m trying to be here to do.) I will say that a lot of the ambiguity you refer to can be cleared up by assuming that the terms in question are subculture-specific jargon, with relatively well-defined meanings understood within the target audience, and that once those jargon terms are considered defined, at least some of the areas of ambiguity are deliberate in order to allow different subgroups of the audience to agree with the non-ambiguous parts, to allow ‘fellow travellers’ to cooperate towards their shared goals.
I’m not really sure how I could improve this aspect. Taking the time to define terms the target audience already knows would give me fewer panels in which to describe the new ideas I want to introduce to them. Any advice on broadening the appeal without losing core target interest would be cheerfully accepted.
(Does that count as changing my mind about how often I have occasion to reply with arguments for more agreement rather that arguments for disagreement? Pretty please?)
I’m afraid that I’m going to appeal that one to the harshest judge I can imagine—your own honest self-assessment. :)
Putting
s in between would fix that.Fixed! Thank you kindly.
The final image is nsfw.
Hrm. I’d been using the rule of thumb “swimwear okay, lingerie not okay”. I can see that some workplaces wouldn’t allow even bikinis, but I’m not familiar with the specifics of such codes, or how widespread they might be. Do you have any references to help me determine a better rule of thumb?
Are the things in that compact new to your audience?
I’ve recently exchanged some email with a prominent libertarian authour, and while there are similar sorts of ideas, such as the Covenant of Unanimous Consent , none seem to fill the particular niche this Compact does.
I’m hoping to have a third part written, in which the narrator asks “What would the world look like if libertarianism was a poor social tool to accomplish your goals? What would it look like if it was a good tool?”, drawing heavily from Methods of Rationality’s chapters of Draco questioning blood purism.
I wanted to start out by ruling out as many of the unverified/unverifiable ‘escape hatch’ versions of physics of possible, such as being able to open a door to alternate timelines. Since, as far as I understand it, Many Worlds ‘adds up to normality’, that is the single apparent universe we see around us, and I don’t understand Many Worlds well enough to argue about it, I felt safe enough in sweeping it under the rug for this presentation.
The real enemies of rationality are not evil, or selfish, but merely confused people, doing what they think is right in spite of the fact that it isn’t.
I notice that I am confused.
I have a reasonably firm belief that there are at least some people who /are/ evil and selfish, acting to benefit themselves in ways that cause harm to large numbers of other people; people who act as if the universe were either a zero-sum or negative-sum game rather than a positive-sum game; and that such people tend to seek power over others, including political and economic power. But I can’t think of any evidence that would be reasonably persuasive to someone who believed such people don’t exist. And I’m not sure what it would take to convince me that such people don’t exist.
I sense that I’m failing at being a rationalist somehow, but I can’t quite figure out the nature of that failure or how to fix it.
Aha—I now understand where we are seeing different things from the same image. I asked the artist to draw a modified version of a bikini, with a “furry” visual gag that in addition to the usual two human-style mammaries, she also has two pairs of nipples further down.
Ask yourself if libertarians are likely to learn anything new from it
I’ve paid reasonably close attention to libertarian discussions for a few years now; and it was only this year that I had certain insights into the nature of politics, ideas which I hadn’t seen discussed amongst libertarians before. It was one of these insights that I used as the basis of the comic’s discussion on oligarchs and democracy—as far as I can tell, it is a new idea for its target audience.
(Of course, I could be wrong.)
We generally avoid calling things “irrational”.
I’ll try to remember that in the future.
Fair enough. I can’t expect to create Eisner-winning material on my first try, after all. :)
Assuming I do continue with any further instalments, do you have any suggestions for what I can do to fix the problems you’ve identified?
I’m going to have to re-absorb that sequence, and see if I can teach myself to understand on a deep gut level what practical differences there are between “how to deal with people who want to do things to you you don’t like because they want to help you” and “how to deal with people who want to do things to you you don’t like because they want to help themselves”.
Put on the ‘to-do’ list—after all, no reason I can’t have both presentations on different pages.
it’s vastly more likely than any other theory
I maintain that much as a cached thought, even if I can’t always remember how it’s derived.
So, you’re afraid people will think it would be easier to build a device to send you to a parallel, uninhabited version of Earth than to build a space shuttle and go to a different planet?
Not… exactly.
A certain segment of my target audience is very fond of conspiracy theories, and I’ve seen particular cases that make Time Cube look sane. I may not be able to reach the worst instances, but I can at least try to tug the remainder back in the right direction.
So, I’d recommend longer strips with less text overall (so much less text density), repeating a simpler point multiple ways (the old “tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them”).
I haven’t got any argument with any of that.
just don’t have an author avatar or a main character that is “close” to you
I think I’m going to avoid this one; the furry part of my target audience has a fairly well-developed tradition of “fursonas”, a blend between a separate fictional character, an avatar, and an alter-ego.
I think that I might go with one more installment in roughly the current format, and then, perhaps, branch into more story-like comics, focusing on different characters and so on. (I’d probably need to find a new artist for those, if I do so, as the one I’ve been working with has his own commitments.)
The first comic is distinctly better—though the ending is very disorienting, but that’s because I usually budget my furry-cheesecake time and my rationality-cheerleading time very separately, and you caused a memory protection fault in my brain.
I’ll take that as a compliment, I think.
The second comic… no, just no. The bottom line it writes is visible from space. I know you want to get already-libertarians to read it, but the only way you could get this aligned with rationality is to start from the beginning, chronicle your entire process of deciding what political position to take, and be genuinely unsure of which side you would end up taking.
This is what I’m thinking of trying to cover in the potential third instalment—that, in order to truly know/believe/understand that (political position X) is a useful social tool, you have to consider that it might not be, and do so seriously. At the moment, I’m trying to figure out which of LessWrong’s most quotable thoughts could be applied therein, with the top of the list being the Litany of Tarski and an adapted version of learning how to lose (eg, that “losing must be thinkable”).
I’ve gotten a bit of positive feedback from both non-furry libertarians and non-libertarian furries, so I think I’m doing reasonably well at targeting both audiences both together and separately.
(Of course, I could be wrong.)
A few thoughts …
Which I am very happy to read.
Rationality (both epistemic and instrumental) is about applying methods, not having beliefs about those methods. Illustrating the methods, rather than just talking about them and saying that they are good, would probably be more effective. Show characters engaging in rationality, not just praising it.
I agree—and this is what I’m currently trying to figure out how to script out. (I’d tried to do something like this in the second part, describing how to try ‘getting the job done’ of increasing liberty even when stuck in a political system full of ‘top of the dung heap oligarchs’, but it ended up being more about the specific tactics than the thinking processes used to figure those tactics out.)
At this point, any suggestions on how to do that would be cheerfully welcomed.
I really do not like the panel where the ostensibly rationalist rat character is beating the religious dog character over the head with a stick. In my experience, hitting people is not a useful way to get them to think.
Maybe I should start a discussion thread here on the ‘Stick Test’ I came up with some time ago, a rather more direct method to refute certain forms of philosophical navel-gazing such as solipsism, adapted from Dr. Johnson’s famous “I refute it thus!”.
Moreover, giving “rationalist” people arguments for hating “non-rationalist” people is probably a really, really bad idea.
… hate? Hrm. Do you really see that panel as involving hatred? I was hoping it would be closer to ‘frustration with people who disparage not just the truth, but the methods of determining it’ (and a bit of harmless cartoon-humorous release of said frustration).
What’s something your rat might have wrong beliefs about?
How might she discover they were wrong?
In what way would she behave differently after this discovery?
Good questions—and while my target audience’s interests tend to narrow the field down of which beliefs to deal with, there’s still a wide variety to choose from.
frustrated impatience
I find myself not wanting your points to be true, my mind trying to come up with counter-arguments rather than trying to come up with the truth, whatever the truth may be. So I’m not entirely sure I can trust myself here, but: what process can be used to help gather evidence about whether this panel helps me achieve my current goal (of getting at least some members of my target audience interested in LW-style rationalism, and the more the better)? Or, perhaps, should the question being investigated be what could be done with said panel to best achieve my current goal?
Coi