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): 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 consilient world with a realistic, self-consistent 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.
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+Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the mode: 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?
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+The trope may have been intended as a comforting escape fantasy for weird people tired of grating against the insanities of our world—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.
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+When I contemplate this exercise for myself, I
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+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 chosen in this post), or less commonly, Carrietopia.
[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]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff