(Part 2) Top products from r/rational

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We found 21 product mentions on r/rational. We ranked the 193 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.

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Top comments that mention products on r/rational:

u/DaystarEld · 8 pointsr/rational

I'm also going to start posting my book recommendations in these posts, since I write them out before recording anyway to stop them from being full of "um"s and "uh"s. If this seems too commercially and anyone finds it offputting, please let me know!

The Golden Compass is the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and it's hard to go into why I'm recommending it without massive spoilers. The series is amazing though, with great characters for every role, from heroes to antiheroes to villains to antivillains, and has one of the most unique multiverses I've ever read.

Just to mention what makes the first book great though, its main character is still my favorite female protagonist in a published novel, people in her world have sapient, shapeshifting familiars, and one of the nations is populated by TALKING ARMORED BEARS.

Seriously, it's awesome. If you like to listen to books as well as read them, then you can get a free audiobook when you sign up for a 30 day trial at audible.com. Just go to www.audibletrial.com/rational to get your book credit, and help support the podcast. Thanks for listening!

u/whywhisperwhy · 2 pointsr/rational

Definitely enjoyed meeting the Ones Who Came Before so far, good chapter, and the accompanying message about not using insulting terminology for other races. Felt very realistic.

Also, I'm sure it's been noted before, but I thoroughly appreciate the additional roles that this organization has, "Pragmatist," "Ethicist," etc. in hindsight they seem like a perfectly obvious thing to have aboard. When you look back at Star Trek or similar series, how much easier would their lives have been with those roles, or a dedicated linguist, etc.?

But I feel like this series is starting to drag with respect to the Reshapers' plot, which is unfortunate because that's possibly the most interesting part of the story, and also the speed and scope of their efforts were really giving the story weight to me.

On a side note, has anyone read Gateway by Frederik Pohl? [Spoilers](#s "The main adversary is literally trying to reshape the universe into something that is more amicable to their form of life; it's one of the biggest scopes I've ever encountered in a sci-fi story.")

u/owenshen24 · 4 pointsr/rational

Good and Real by Gary Drescher. Covers a similar philosophical stance to that of Yudkowsky in the Sequences, but with more academic rigor. A fun read that goes over computation, decision theory, morality, and Newcomb's Problem (among other things.)

Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman's lifetime of research in heuristics and cognitive biases condensed into one epic volume. Highly engaging and 100% recommended if you aren't well-versed in this area.

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. A scientific approach to studying, looking at good memory tricks, ways to learn better, and some interesting ideas on procrastination (including characterizing it as a malign reward loop).

u/narakhan · 9 pointsr/rational

Don't know specifics of what you're after, so I'll shotgun you with links:

u/optimizeprime · 1 pointr/rational

Book recommendation: The Fabric of Reality

Deals explicitly with how to think about a concept of time travel very similar to this. It’s framed in terms of Virtual Reality, but I think you could translate it for your own use easily. As a bonus, it’s a pretty fun tour of some really important ideas too.

u/xamueljones · 6 pointsr/rational

Changeling Space Program (My Little Pony) - the changelings are attempting to be the first on the moon. It has realistic depictions of rocket research and the author is basing the characters' progress on his ability to build a rocket on the Kerbal space game. It's a great read and hilarious. But the updates are on the order of months in between.

Replay (Original) - it involves a man repeating his life with the repeats getting closer to his death date each time. It's not what I consider rational in the character's investigation and use of the power, but his emotional struggles were very vivid and well written.

The Red Knight (Harry Potter) - A great story where Ron goes back in time to his birth, but the world he is reborn into is an AU so he has no idea of what to expect from the future.

Forged Destiny (RWBY) - It's a re-imagining of RWBY as an RPG-like world where everyone is a gamer character and the plot of RWBY is dramatically different as a result. I would recommend anything written by Couer Al'aran. He's a brilliant writer.

Auburn (RWBY) - RWBY with Jaune, Weiss, Blake, and Ruby on a team together. The author Super Saiyan Syndaquil has written some other good fanfics, but Auburn's my favorite.

u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/rational

Seems like a pretty good character study, where everyone can blame their irrationality on a comet. The claim that it "does for quantum physics what Looper did for time travel" throws me off, since there's nothing particularly quantum in the trailer. But hey, the reviews are good, and I'm a big fan of those Blair Witch Project style natural-script stories, so I'd certainly be interested in watching it. Needless to say, I'll be monitoring this thread.

ETA: Skimming the review. Tired of scrolling past pages of unoriginal Interstellar critiques. I liked that movie, dammit. If you're worried about the science so much, there's literally a book about that, and it's quite good at justifying the film. And no, love didn't actually matter, like, at all, that was just Nolan putting themes on top of it. As a story, it's great; as hard science fiction, it falls a bit short. But it wasn't meant to be judged as hard science fiction! So don't.

Also, that soundtrack was objectively amazing, no matter what he says.

I wonder how he's gonna 180° into applauding a story whose premise seems to be that a comet causes parallel universes to run into each other …

u/Predictablicious · 5 pointsr/rational

For communicating in difficult situations both Difficult Conversations and Crucial Conversations are good. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is the best book on how persuasion works, but How to Win Friends & Influence People is the definitive practical book on persuasion.
The Definitive Book of Body Language is a good book on the subject, which is fundamental to face to face communication.

u/Mbnewman19 · 2 pointsr/rational

I don't know of fanfics, but there is a line of published fiction by Karen Traviss (see here for the first one), which are absolutely amazing. She personalizes the clones so well, and adds a level of backstory to episode 3 that is wonderful.

u/ben_oni · -8 pointsr/rational

I've actually just started reading Worm for the first time. I tried reading it a while back and couldn't get into it. Doing better this time. Some basic thoughts:

  • Why is it called Worm instead of Parahumans?

  • It sure looks derivative. I've seen these tropes somewhere before. This is just another take on The Incredibles, isn't it?

  • I really hate Taylor. I'm taking Emma's side on this one. I mean, how can the girl make such consistently bad decisions all the time? She's just a waste of human flesh.

  • Tattletale, on the other hand, is awesome! We're getting married. As soon as I figure out how.

  • Why Arcs? Each Arc would be a Chapter in any other book! Why it have to be all hipster?
u/blazinghand · 2 pointsr/rational

This is a film adaption of the novel, which is excellent (amazon link) and worth a read. You'll learn more than you ever thought you'd know about the subprime mortgage crisis.

u/23143567 · 3 pointsr/rational

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Good and Real - each could be considered a canon of rationalist thought on evolution of humankind and ethics respectively.

u/alexanderwales · 8 pointsr/rational

Writing Excuses is a great podcast that covers a lot of important concepts.

I'm a big follower of Sanderson's First, Second, and Third laws of magic.

Stephen King's On Writing is one of the only books that I'd recommend on the subject. There are a ton of books about how to write well, but don't read too many of them, because at some point you're doing the equivalent of buying a bunch of running shoes and never actually putting them on to go jog around the block.

Dan Harmon's Story Circle Method is my preferred method of structuring stories; it's a prescriptivist version of Joseph Campbell's descriptivist The Hero with a Thousand Faces. (Glimwarden's plot is structured as story circles within story circles within story circles next to story circles.)

Also, /u/daystareld and I will be putting out a podcast in the next few weeks, "Rationally Writing", which is about writing rationally, so keep an eye on that.

My number one advice is to read a lot and write a lot, and do both of those with an analytical mindset. Break things down to see how they work and why they work, or in some cases why they fail. If you need help getting into an analytical mindset, try reading some in-depth criticism of something that you like or are at least familiar with. (Though they're not about writing, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and the Youtube channel Every Frame a Painting were both things that influenced how I think about telling stories.)

Edit: Oh, also TV Tropes, which is itself a form of multimedia criticism.

u/ianstlawrence · 4 pointsr/rational

Reading the books is maybe too obvious of a suggestion here, but, you know, they have even more world building in them. Although right now the books end at book 5 which is roughly season 4 or season 5 of the show I believe.

https://www.amazon.com/Thrones-Clash-Kings-Swords-Dragons/dp/0345535529/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=book+game+of+thrones&qid=1558396283&s=gateway&sr=8-1

u/SimoneNonvelodico · 3 pointsr/rational

I agree that you can't just accept the notion that things work as they are, and entire fields can lock themselves into a rut. I actually read recently a book by Sabine Hossenfelder on how this seems to be the case for modern particle physics, Lost in Math, and I tend to agree with her on that. But I'm also really wary of anything that suggests that I should take at face value the idea that this thing that looks simple to crack is actually that simple and everyone else is just too stuck in their own assumptions and can't think outside the box.

To make an example, I do have a feeling that medicine suffers from some of these problems. Seen from the outside, a lot of the field seems stuffy, locked into practices and habits (especially in terms of how things are taught and learned) that seem more the product of its historical tradition than of sensible didactic practice. The gap between the state-of-the-art researchers and your common GP seems immense. It seems hardly believable that there could be anything beyond simple gut-level decisions or optimism-biased assumptions going on when a doctor hears you describing a bunch of symptoms and rules out that it's just some trivial thing in three minutes without even touching you. I don't think there is, in fact. But the problem is also, while I do have these suspicions (and the right to express them, I think), every time I talked with people who actually are doctors about them I always got the answer that basically the whole shebang is just such a convoluted fucking mess that these sort of heuristics are still the only effective way we seem to have to navigate them. Of course, one could argue, maybe they just say that because they're doctors; they've been trained a certain way and can't see beyond the habits and prejudices that have been drilled into them together with the knowledge. That can be true. But either way, I can't imagine any serious reform coming from anyone but a doctor who still understands the knowledge sufficiently to realise what could be done to amend the way it's applied, because mine are just surface level feelings. There's too many things I ignore to actually make any kind of constructive proposal.

And when EY for example makes the Bank of Japan example in his book (just started reading), he does mention the opinion of professional economists. It's not something out of thin air. Rather, you get actual experts who don't have the sort of ties that will coax them into a socially-reinforced or biased position ("I don't want to criticise my senior colleagues, therefore I will not openly question their decisions even if I think they're wrong), and develop a contrarian opinion. It's not literally just one person.

u/rp20 · 3 pointsr/rational

You still have to connect that problem with technological displacement. I mean Rogoff and Reinhart wrote a book saying that financial recession are long lasting and that the long term effects of it are well understood. http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

Still you can clearly say that the Fed and the federal government did not do enough. Austerity was a problem and was counterproductive and the Fed should have pushed for a higher inflation target or go the market monetarist route and pushed for a NGDP level targeting.

The understanding is that unemployment is caused by friction in the market and when the economy shrinks due to a bubble bursting or what not, the wages are "sticky" so they do not adjust and instead people are laid off. That is a harm to the economy that we are experiencing right now. Governments doing nothing to boost the economy and the Fed not committing to a higher inflation target is keeping the economy underperforming.