No, science is not a set of answers; it is a procedure.

Nassim Taleb

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Richard Feynman, What is Science?

"Write what you know" is pretty good writing advice. What's really curious is whether anyone will be able to conclude from the True Ending how EY broke out of the box the first time.

Interesting, so it all comes down to a version of the AI box experiment.

And then there's all the callbacks to those. Here's a few lines of Keats I read recently:

...but to that second circle of sad Hell

Where in the gust, the whirl-wind, and the flaw

Of hail-stones, lovers need not tell

Their sorrows; pale were the lips I saw

Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form

I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

For those keeping score at home, that's Keats alluding to Dante alluding to a famous and semi-legendary Italian love affair. And the Bible, of course. Earlier in the same poem, Keats throws in a lot of references to Greek myth too.

Your last statement is not correct. Many of the works of literature regarded as the best do that very heavily. Dante does that like crazy in the inferno. Joyce does it non stop in Ulyesses. Most of the works of Vladimir Nabokov do it very heavily. As does Pynchon. It may be that you just don't notice it in literature and do notice it here because you are more familiar the the animie canon than the literary canon.

If the laws of reality are simulated, then they must be computable. A giant switch statement isn't going to let you figure out how to make time travel consistent. They couldn't easily check every possibility and see if it's consistent. Even if they did, that would mean they're simulating all of them, including the inconsistent ones, and there'd be no reason for Harry to find himself in a consistent one.

You've got a point there. Offhand, I can't think of a book which mentioned the phrase. My memory for such things is good but not excellent, though, and my reading is hardly complete.

As for your school, some Protestants are fond of Judaism (my impression is that's based on an effort to find something more pure/older than Catholicism).

I read a lot growing up and my elementary school spent an inexplicable amount of time teaching Jewish history and so on, but I wouldn't have recognized that line until a year or so ago. (I have no idea why my elementary school was like that. There were fewer than 100 students, most of them were black, and when I looked the school up a few years ago, it looked to be nominally affiliated with some mainline Protestant church.)

I only know of it through LW, so it could be that Harry had a few Jewish tutors and overheard them talking amongst themselves. I would expect someone who wants to conquer^Woptimize the world to read up on the successful cultures of the world and their social technology, but I can't see Harry doing that. Maybe he's wiser than I give him credit for. Then again, I still haven't done that specific bit of reading. Are there any good books on it?

The main danger, I would imagine, is that somebody searching for signs of extraterrestrial life [that is, extra-their-terra, not extra-our-terra] might actually seek it out. (Hopefully anyone with the technology to make such a search successful already knows about magic and can safeguard against it.)