The [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) collaborative-fiction community has [this worldbuilding trope of an author's "medianworld"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639)—a setting where the average person is _like you_ along important dimensions.
-(You might think that this is only an interesting thought experiment for people who are weird in our own world, but [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's _much_ more hypervolume in the _n_-space around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.)
+(You might think that this is only an interesting thought experiment for people who are weird in our own world, but [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly _more_ hypervolume in the space around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.)
What makes the exercise challenging is the craft of portraying the medianworld as a realistic world with a consilient history. It's _not_ a Society of duplicates of you, because the only simple, consistent history producing that outcome would be giving actual-you some sort of [science-fictional](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter_duplicate) [duplicator technology](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator/); actual-you and all your memories come from _our_ world.
-Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the center of the distribution: for everything that makes you weird _here_, half the population of your medianworld is even more so. The worldbuilding problem is: how would that _actually_ happen, given different initial conditions, but the same underlying laws of economics, sociology, psychology, _&c._? How would the macro-level features of Society shake out, were a Society to supervene on that population?
+Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the center of the distribution: for everything that makes you weird _here_, half the population of your medianworld is even more so. The worldbuilding problem is: how would that _actually_ happen, given different initial conditions, but the same underlying laws of economics, sociology, psychology, _&c._? (_Our_ world produced someone like you at least once, so it's reasonable to suppose that a world with the same laws but different parameters could do it much more often.) How would the macro-level features of Society shake out, were a Society to supervene on that population?
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff