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Alicorn comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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Did you confuse Alicia with Fate?
No.
I'm just opinionated on the subject.
MAHOU SHOUJO TRANSHUMANIST NANOHA
"Girl," whispered Precia. The little golden-haired girl's eyes were fluttering open, amid the crystal cables connecting the girl's head to the corpse within its stasis field. "Girl, do you remember me?"
It took the girl some time to speak, and when she did, her voice was weak. "Momma...?"
The memories were there.
The brain pattern was there.
Her daughter was there.
"Momma...?" repeated Alicia, her voice a little stronger. "Why are you crying, Momma? Did something happen? Where are we?"
Precia collapsed across her daughter, weeping, as some part of her began to believe that the long, long task was finally over.
So, in case anyone is still confused about the point of the Quantum Physics Sequence, it was to help future mad scientists love their reconstructed daughters properly :)
An Idiot Plot is any plot that goes away if the characters stop being idiots. A Muggle Plot is any plot which dissolves in the presence of transhumanism and polyamory. That exact form is surprisingly common; e.g. from what I've heard, canon!Twilight has two major sources of conflict, Edward's belief that turning Bella into a vampire will remove her soul, and Bella waffling between Edward and Jacob. I didn't realize it until Baughn pointed it out, but S1 Nanoha - not that I've watched it, but I've read fanfictions - counts as a Muggle Plot because the entire story goes away if Precia accepts the pattern theory of identity.
I would find it unhelpful to describe as a "Muggle Plot" any plot that depends on believing one side of an issue where there is serious, legitimate, disagreement.
(Of course, you may argue that there is no serious, legitimate disagreement on theories of identity, if you wish.)
I also find it odd that polyamory counts but not, for instance, plots that fail when you assume other rare preferences of people. Why isn't a plot that assumes that the main characters are heterosexual considered a Muggle Plot just as much as one which assumes they are monogamous? What about a plot that fails if incest is permitted (Star Wars could certainly have gone very differently.) If a plot assumes that the protagonist likes strawberry ice cream, and it turned out that the same percentage of the population hates strawberry ice cream as is polygamous, would that now be a Muggle Plot too?
I think the idea is not so much "rare preference" as "constrained preference," where that constraint is not relevant / interesting to the reader. Looking at gay fiction, there's lots of works in settings where homosexuality is forbidden, and lots of works in settings where homosexuality is accepted. A plot that disappears if you tried to move it to a setting where homosexuality is accepted seems too local; I've actually mostly grown tired of reading those because I want them to move on and get to something interesting. I imagine that's how it feels for a polyamorist to read Bella's indecision.
To use the ice cream example, imagine trying to read twenty pages on someone in an ice cream shop, agonizing over whether to get chocolate or strawberry. "Just get two scoops already!"
Excellent reply. I'm pretty sure I'd feel the same way if I was reading a story where A wants to be with only B, B wants to be with only A, neither of them want to be with C, but it's just never occurred to them that monogamy is an option.
Better to say "B wishes A would not sleep with others, A wishes B would not sleep with others, but..". Monogamy is the state of disallowing other partners, not just not having them.
I'll accept this definition, but would like a word to describe my marriage in that case.
I'm quite confident that if we ever wanted to open the relationship up to romantic/sexual relationships with third parties, we would have that conversation and negotiate the terms of it, so I'm reluctant to describe us as disallowing other partners. But I currently describe us as monogamous, because, well, we are.
Describing us as polyamorous when neither of us is interested in romantic/sexual relationships with third parties seems as ridiculous as describing a gay man as bisexual because he's not forbidden to have sex with women.
So how ought I refer to relationships like ours, on your view?
Explaining it as a complaint about a constrained preference does negate the heterosexual example, but I could easily tweak the example a bit: I could still ask why "Muggle Plots" doesn't include plots that assume a character isn't bisexual. And my incest example applies without even any tweaks--I'm not pointing out that Star Wars would be different if characters accepted incestuous relationships and no other kind, I'm pointing out that Star Wars would be different if characters accepted incestuous relationships in addition to the ones they do now--that is, if their preference was less constrained. So why is it that a plot that depends on the unacceptability of incest doesn't count as a Muggle Plot?
Having read the rest of the conversation... I'd say that yes, I have a mild "dammit, aren't condoms invented in this universe long ago enough to these issues to have gone away?!" to Starwars, but only after reconsidering it in the light of Homestuck. Which by the way, provides an excellent example in the alien Trolls considering both heterosexuality and incest-taboos in the kids to be trite annoyances.
I'm going out on a limb here, and saying that Muggle Plot is not a property of a plot, or even a plot-reader pair, but rather an emotion that can be felt in response to a plot, and which is scalar, with a rough heuristic being that it's stronger the more salient the option that'd make the plot go away is in whatever communities you participate in.
Why? Remember adaptation executors not fitness maximizers. And if condoms have been around for long enough for people to adapt to them, the first adaptation would be to no longer find condomed sex pleasurable or fulfilling.
I suspect the constraint against incest seems relevant to Eliezer. (The concept as I outlined it is subjective, and I suspect the association with "transhumanism + polyamory" is difficult to pin down without a reference to Eliezer or clusters he's strongly associated with.)
Because poly evangelism? It certainly seems like something people decide is a good idea rather than some sort of innate preference difference.
But if that were true, I would have to admit that monogomy is probably a bad idea, and that would be sad :(
(shrug) My husband and I live in a largely poly-normative social environment, and are monogamous. We don't object, we simply aren't interested. It still makes "oh noes! which lover do I choose! I want them both!" plots seem stupid, though. ("if you want them both, date them both... what's the difficulty here?")
So, no, acknowledging that polyamory is something some people decide is a good idea doesn't force me to "admit" that monogamy is a bad idea.
Admittedly, I'm also not sure why it would be sad if it did.
Because social norms, of course.
Actually, I was pretty tired when I wrote that, but thats what I think I meant.
(I'll note that most monogomous people whose opinions I hear on this think polyamory is almost always a bad idea, although possibly OK for a rare minority. But if relationships are usually a good idea, and polyamory isn't usually actively bad, then polyamory=more relationships=good, goes the 1:00 AM logic.)
Re pattern identity theory:
Scott Aaronson in The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine.
The first paragraph of the quote is about pattern identity theory. Unfortunately the second paragraph is actually something of a muddling of pattern identity with the separate issue of basing moral/ethical/legal considerations only on the externalities experienced by the survivors. Specifically, making it about 'depriving the rest of society' distracts from the (hopefully) primary point that it is the pattern that matters more so than spooky stuff about an instance.
Nice one. Though one could perhaps recover most of the Nanoha storyline by giving Precia Capgras delusion, unless by "transhumanism" you include the assumption that organic disorders would be trivially fixed (albeit I don't think Precia had anyone around to diagnose her?)
I'm not sure if that would make it more or less tragic.
Right, that's my standard head-canon on the subject.
Precia was very badly hurt by the accident, and had to leave society because - for some reason - resurrecting Alicia the way she did was severely illegal. As a result, there was no-one around to double-check her conclusions, or spot the brain damage.
Does worrying about that sort of thing suggest that Edward actually has a soul?
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER SPOILERS (up to season 4)
Rira gubhtu Fcvxr jnf fbhyyrff ng gur gvzr ur sryy va ybir jvgu Ohssl, V qba'g guvax ur jbhyq jnag gb erzbir ure fbhy, fvapr gung jbhyq shaqnzragnyyl punatr ure.
Bs pbhefr Va gur Ohssl-irefr, univat be abg univat n fbhy unf dhvgr pyrne rssrpgf (ynpxvat n fbhy zrnag lbh prnfr gb unir nal zbenyf, gubhtu lbh pna fgvyy srry ybir gbjneqf crbcyr lbh xabj), naq jr frr n pyrne qvssrerapr orgjrra crefba-jvgu-fbhy if gur fnzr crefba-jvgubhg-fbhy. V qbhog gung'f gur pnfr va gur Gjvyvtug-irefr...
My personal head-canon says that Precia, who ought to know better, was afflicted with a particular type of brain damage that prevented her from recognizing her own daughter. She was, effectively, insane.
Given that the cause of both Alicia's first death and Precia's insanity were an inadvisable engineering experiment that she is explicitly stated to have been against, this makes Precia a tragic figure in her own right.