X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fanother-me-i-havent-met.md;h=1d806e229c194ba3eb82c7495071670024dec73d;hp=23c0d16a7a1bfdcdc01aaa43f77b369abaf69c07;hb=f4e5dd68fe57c4c523be59e9522726d1b4e31756;hpb=b7d7c48289c29045f3416298f99a1375d242a731 diff --git a/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md b/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md index 23c0d16..1d806e2 100644 --- a/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md +++ b/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md @@ -6,11 +6,11 @@ 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. -(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? ----