Rationality Quotes August 2012

Alejandro1

Rationality Quotes August 2012 — LessWrong

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"Given the nature of the multiverse, everything that can possibly happen will happen. This includes works of fiction: anything that can be imagined and written about, will be imagined and written about. If every story is being written, then someone, somewhere in the multiverse is writing your story. To them, you are a fictional character. What that means is that the barrier which separates the dimensions from each other is in fact the Fourth Wall."

-- In Flight Gaiden: Playing with Tropes

(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagons and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)

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JenniferRM14y00

Or at least... the story could not be real in a universe unless at least portions of the universe could serve as a model for hyperbolic geometry and... hmm, I don't think non-standard arithmetic will get you "Exists.N (N != N)", but reading literally here, you didn't say they were the same as such, merely that the operations of "addition" or "subtraction" were not used on them.

Now I'm curious about mentions of arithmetic operations and motion through space in the rest of the story. Harry implicitly references orbital mechanic... (read more)

5VKS14y

Huh. And here I thought that space was just negatively curved in there, with the corridor shaped in such a way that it looks normal (not that hard to imagine), and just used this to tile the floor. Such disappointment... This was part of a thing, too, in my head, where Harry (or, I guess, the reader) slowly realizes that Hogwarts, rather than having no geometry, has a highly local geometry. I was even starting to look for that as a thematic thing, perhaps an echo of some moral lesson, somehow. And this isn't even the sort of thing you can write fanfics about. :¬(

3Bill_McGrath14y

Could you explain why you did that? As regards the pentagons, I kinda assumed the pentagons weren't regular, equiangular pentagons - you could tile a floor in tiles that were shaped like a square with a triangle on top! Or the pentagons could be different sizes and shapes.

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