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drethelin comments on Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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this is the premise of Hominids.
I was ignorant of this novel until about five minutes ago. As a result, I'm still pretty ignorant about it.
That seems to be an implementation of something like this scenario using an alternate reality sci-fi trope. I really want to avoid Sliders-style alternate realities because they're (a) too open-ended, and (b) too heavily influenced by existing fiction on the subject.
In what way is an alternate separate earth population functionally different from an alternate universe? You say you're trying to avoid a scifi scenario but your two proposals are already pretty silly scifi.
If open-endedness is a problem, simply limit your universes to 2, like in Hominids.
Also, it would be easier to give recommendations if I knew what argument you were trying to win with this thought experiment.
I'm not trying to win any arguments. I'm trying to reason about artefacts of human culture that are parochial (accidents of history) or human-universal (practically inevitable products of human history). More to the point, I'm trying to equip other people with tools to reason in a similar fashion.
I'm also not trying to avoid sci-fi scenarios, but I am trying to avoid scenarios which have such a long history as a sci-fi trope that they will inevitably influence people's intuitions.
I'm not writing a story (although I do want to frame the thought experiment as a fictional narrative). I'm not writing specific details about what's on the other side of the wall / solar system / interdimensional gateway. The whole point of the thought experiment is that we don't know what's on the other side, apart from the fact that it contains a bunch of humans with as much chronological history as us. Based on that knowledge, what can we reason about them?