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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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Zach Wiener's elegant disproof:
(Although to be fair, it's possible that the disproof fails because "think of the strangest thing that's true" is impossible for a human brain.)
It also fails in the case where the strangest thing that's true is an infinite number of monkeys dressed as Hitler. Then adding one doesn't change it.
More to the point, the comparison is more about typical fiction, rather than ad hoc fictional scenarios. There are very few fictional works with monkeys dressed as Hitler.
Indeed, I posted this quote partially out of annoyance at a certain type of analysis I kept seeing in the MoR threads. Namely, person X benefited from the way event Y turned out; therefore, person X was behind event Y. After all, thinking like this about real life will quickly turn one into a tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.
Yes but in real life the major players don't have the ability to time travel, read minds, become invisible, manipulate probability etcetera, these make complex plans far more plausible than they would be in the real world. (That and conservation of detail.)
In real life the major players are immune to mindreading, can communicate securely and instantaneously worldwide, and have tens of thousands of people working under them. You are, ironically, overlooking the strangeness of reality.
Conservation of detail may be a valid argument though.
Conservation of detail is one of the memetic hazards of reading too much fiction.
Which is exactly what MoR tells us to do to analyze it, is it not?
That's still not a reason for assuming everyone is running perfect gambit roulettes.
You can say that with a straight face after the last few chapters of plotting?
Yes, I was referring to the theories that Dumbledore sabotaged Snape's relationship with Lilly so that the boy-who-lived (who hadn't even been born then) would have the experience of being bullied by his potions master.