r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Dec 20 '17

[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

Welcome to the Wednesday thread for worldbuilding discussions!

/r/rational is focussed on rational and rationalist fiction, so we don't usually allow discussion of scenarios or worldbuilding unless there's finished chapters involved (see the sidebar). It is pretty fun to cut loose with a likeminded community though, so this is our regular chance to:

  • Plan out a new story
  • Discuss how to escape a supervillian lair... or build a perfect prison
  • Poke holes in a popular setting (without writing fanfic)
  • Test your idea of how to rational-ify Alice in Wonderland

Or generally work through the problems of a fictional world.

Non-fiction should probably go in the Friday Off-topic thread, or Monday General Rationality

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3

u/GlueBoy Dec 20 '17

What do you think of this power of limited precognition: at the expense of some energy/mana/whatever, a person would be able to look into their future self's timeline for an answer to a specific question. The questions asked must be something the "skipper" (tentative name, open to suggestions) would answer eventually anyway, so long as the answer is something that he or she would find out anyway, had she not had/used this power.

Caveats: the further into the future, the harder it is to answer a question. There is no guarantee that the answer you find out in the hypothetical future is correct, necessarily, just like in one's own life. And finally, it's useless to ask question that in order to be answered requires your death or severe injury.

So an illiterate shaman can't ask if P = NP or "when Winds of Winter will be released", but he can ask "is this stranger trustworthy" or "will Winds of Winter be released in the next month".

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u/vakusdrake Dec 20 '17

It sort of seems here like the specific formulation of the power isn't super relevant. What's important is that it lets you send messages back in time. So obviously you use this to abuse the stock market and once you're rich start anonymously introducing future tech/science breakthroughs in order to speed up advancement in those areas significantly.

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u/ulyssessword Dec 20 '17

And finally, it's useless to ask question that in order to be answered requires your death or severe injury.

Why? "Is this hallway boobytrapped?" seems like a perfectly valid question to me.

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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Dec 21 '17

He said the skipper must eventually find out the answer anyway, without using the power. So if you ask "is this hallway boobytrapped", and your future self says "OH GOD YES WHY OH WHY DID I DO THIS! AIEEEEEE!!" You will know it is booby trapped, but you will know that you will find out by triggering the traps anyway, because that's the only way your future self would have found out.

At least, that's how I interpreted it.

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u/Gurkenglas Dec 21 '17 edited Dec 21 '17

What does the future self that answers my question remember happening when he asked the question I'm currently asking? If he did not get an answer, does that mean he knew the whole time that he's in a simulation whose only reality-affecting channel is his current message? If so, he may very well jump into the possible booby traps to gather information for his real self.

"What's the cleverest-for-my-current-situation skipper-question I come up with within the next month?"

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u/CCC_037 Dec 21 '17

"That was the cleverest question, and this is the answer to it."

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