Report comment

The attraction of such a story, to me, would be in learning more about the concept of Least Convenient Possible World by seeing it from another angle, and also in admiring the author’s skill at crafting a series of events that both conforms to a Least Convenient Possible World and makes a good story. If a story with this premise doesn’t have these attributes, then it may be a good story in other ways, but it will not live up to its premise.

However, when I thought about the concept of a literal LCPW, it seems like the author can make the world anything they want. The LCPW concept only applies when you want to remove practical considerations from a philosophical discussion. Yet there is no standard way to choose a philosophical discussion, and thus the LCPW in the story could remove the practicalities from any set of philosophical discussions the author chooses. For example, if the author decides that the protagonist struggles with Pascal’s Wager, then Omega might tell them that either God does note exist or Catholicism is absolutely right, but if the author decides that the protagonist doesn’t care about Pascal’s Wager, then such a thing would not happen.

The author would be given too much freedom to craft the story world into anything they want. The task of fitting a story into the LCPW mold is too easy for me to be impressed with it. And similarly, because a LCPW could be almost anything, I wouldn’t be able to learn much about them by just seeing one example.

Report comment

The idea was to make sure that the people who took the actual decisions didn’t _feel_ high-status, which might then mean the loss-of-intelligence doesn’t get them. Of course the precise trigger for loss-of-intelligence on Zyzzx might not be that. Also, I suppose I’m identifying with the ordinary people who don’t want catastrophically incompetent government or a string of revoltions, and not identifying with the unlucky people who’d be the class of people who actually ran the things the jerkocrats were nominally in charge of.

Except the whole idea makes me shudder so much that maybe I’d take my chances with the inept governments and the periodic revolutions…

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment