The character in question was plucked from Earth from early April, 2012. Another note for a future rewrite might be to more explicitly mention that she's drawing ideas from certain pieces of rationalist fiction.
Eh. You can make up in-universe reasons, but it still comes off as sloppy... a good idea should be independently inventable or findable.
I checked. They can indeed do so - it can cause a significant degradation of output, so dairies sometimes have to train cows to not do so.
Wow. I guess I have learned something from this fic.
This refers to the initial few lines of the first chapter, when the protagonist was punted by a mysterious stranger into Equestria; and is more thoroughly dealt with in a later chapter.
So we're supposed to infer that that was part of what she told the queens and they in turn immediately zeroed in on it as the best explanation? Still feels like a hole.
More notes:
ch34: use of Laplace's law painfully didactic. It's perfectly valid to use it in those circumstances, but it could have been explained so much better. For example: "Why should I go in? Half the times I've visited before, they've tried to kill me. Why should I expect that to be different now?"
And then you can have her ruminate something like "that was actually a valid bit of reasoning; it was called Laplace's Law on Earth, where Laplace asked if something had happened 1 out of, say, 10 times, and that was all you knew, how much should you expect it to happen again? 2 / 12; half the time you'll be too high and half too low, which is the best you can hope to do."
I bet you can come up with an even clearer explanation. You're the fic writer, after all.
a good idea should be independently inventable or findable.
I'm only aiming to write my protagonist as being an aspiring Bayesian rationalist, not a Yudkowsky-level or HJPEV-level one. In a later chapter, while her emotions are being artificially manipulated, her inner monologue reads:
...I'm so jealous of... of... the people who are actually smart. I'm well aware that I'm not nearly as smart as I like to think I am. All my seeming cleverness - it's all just tricks, things that anyone can do if they knew. I can't do anything that requires real intelligence
For the past two months, I've been writing, and posting, roughly two thousand words a day of "Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me", a story set in a "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fanfic universe, "Chess Game of the Gods". Outside of the sheer NaNoWriMo-like exercise of pushing out near-daily chapters, I've also been trying to keep in mind the various principles I've learned from Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and to try to present them in a way that people who like reading MLP fanfics might be able to appreciate.
I've just come to something of a minor climax with chapter 60, and while I'll definitely be continuing the story, this seems like a good time to mention it here, for whatever feedback and constructive criticism anyone cares to offer.