Alicornutopia

I'm the counting-person on Reddit. I used Category:Sherlock on the wiki, which for some reason omits Mark.

I have fixed the thing! It no longer omits Mark :)

OK, now It's just too blatant. A desire for privacy in the flower and the first magical ingredient being a glowing red hexagon...

the indigo petals seemed luminous

I am with you on the 'blatant' xDDD

And a flecked feather with the next bellflower... Is he reading this and decided to really hammer it in?

On the other hand, Effulgence IS the biggest rationalfic in existance. This is his legacy and he's honoring it in his last arc.

Eliezer has read some of Effulgence but not, I think, all of it. I don't know exactly what parts he's seen (I know some of what he's looked at but can't confirm if he's read most particular sections); he consulted me on the potion ingredients. The overwhelming majority of the ingredients are in fact references, although some of them are very loose because he had other desiderata in the mix besides "make the ingredients in the potion exactly what Alicorn says they should be".

I was thinking it wouldn’t be worth analyzing the potion in terms of HPMoR rules of potions; we don’t know what went into making most of the things in that list.

I’m not certain I’d describe Effulgence as a rationalfic, although parts of it certainly qualify. On the rationalfic side, most of the characters are at least very Level 1 intelligent, and when I was rereading the Tangled sections yesterday I could not get the Litanies of Tarski and Gendlin out of my head. On the other hand, a large number of their problems are solved with superior magic or other “unfair” abilities, there are few intelligence-based mistakes (Bells often are right more often than should happen naturally given the available data, for example) and even the theoretically teachable ones are not being taught. I’d say it’s a story with rationalist characters, not a rationalist fic, in the same way that Strax is a story with musical characters, but I can understand it perfectly without knowing any music theory.

Tarski and Gendlin?

Both are in the Sequences, and also quoted in HPMoR. I don’t know if Tarski said anything similar to his litany and think Eliezer named it after him because of his definition of truth “The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white”; I can’t find if Gendlin said his litany but it is attributed as a quote in the LW wiki.

The Litany of Tarski is a template and can be filled in in various ways. The base form:

If <x>, I desire to believe <x>.
If <¬x>, I desire to believe <¬x>.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

An instance appropriate to why I brought it up:

If <Gothel lied to me all my life>, I desire to believe <Gothel lied to me all my life>.
If <Gothel did not lie to me all my life>, then I desire to believe <Gothel did not lie to me all my life>.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

The Litany of Gendlin is not a template. It is thematically similar, but more about why you should desire to believe the truth. I always pair the two in my mind, even though it never saw use here.

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

I kept thinking of them because for the first several chapters Rapunzel was going on an adventure and facing potential dangers specifically for the purpose of finding out about the truth, and because, practically every time she opened her notebook before they encountered the magic moss, she was reminding herself that she wanted to know the truth and that she should keep an open mind about it despite strongly preferring one option over the other.

OMG BABY SPHINX BELLA

SO CUTE

MUCH FUZZY