Tags: worldbuilding
Status: draft
-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, as contrasted to our real world, where the sort of person contemplating this exercise is probably a weird nerd of one sort or another.
+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.
-What makes the exercise challenging is the craft of portraying the medianworld as a consilient world with a realistic, self-consistent history. It's _not_ a Society of duplicates of you, because actual-you and all your memories come from _our_ world; 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/).
+(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.)
-Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the center, rather than at the margins: 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 Society to supervene on that population?
+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.
-[the details of who you are is formed against the context of our world; if someone had the same underlying traits in a world full of others like them, the outcome would be different]
+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?
+
+The trope may have been intended as a [comforting escape fantasy for weird people tired of grating against the insanities of our world](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession)—you can pretend to be "from" someplace else, perhaps [deposited here by some fantastical portal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai), and missing your home.
+
+But when I contemplate this exercise for myself, I'm instead struck by the extent to which such a fictive "home" is _necessarily_ a chimera—a scintillating but ultimately untrue thought. All of my memories, all of my life projects, actually took place _here_, in this United States of this Earth in this early twenty-first century, where I _am_ kind of weird along several dimensions, and my existence doesn't make sense outside of that context. To posit a self-consistent world in which my underlying traits are normal, a _lot_ of things would have to change; although many of the changes would be appealing, the overall outcome would have to be a strange and somewhat alien Society—somewhere I could happily assimilate with time, probably; somewhere I wish my world would imitate in some aspects, assuredly; but not a _home_ for current-me.
+
+And if I'm not at home _here_, either, well—who said all problems were solvable?
+
+----
+
+My medianworld has various names for complicated political reasons (compare [Myanmar/Burma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Myanmar), or [Kyiv/Kiev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KyivNotKiev)): most often known by the [exonym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym) Zackistan, it is also sometimes called Westlake (the convention used in this post), or less commonly, Carrietopia.
[underlying traits: ideologically-drivenness, need for transparency, general craziness, autogynephilia]
[mental health]
-[money isn't real: credit-assignment rituals (not impact certificates)]
+[money isn't real: credit-assignment rituals (not impact certificates as proposed by Chrisiano, where the funder is assumed to be purchasing the good)]
[caring about children as an abstract committment to the Future, rather than actually liking kids]
[autogenderphilia]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff