I Will Ask You Questions - Now with MORE fantasy ecology!

ask me a question

Imagine that your skill development worked in the inverse of the norm - that is, you were very good at everything you did the first time that you did, but gradually got worse as you 'practiced.' This would cover just about everything you did, from reading, to conversation, to riding a bike. What career would you pursue, and how would you entertain yourself?

Can I have another?

Sure.
Imagine that we were horribly wrong about the position of the mantle, and there is actually an 'undersea' below the ocean floor, with various cavernous openings into the seas. This undersea is occupied by a race of sentient cephalopods who are just as ignorant of us as we are of them, but have progressed to a technological level that is, on average, around fifty years behind ours. What would their first impressions of us be, and what barriers would exist between our interactions with them, aside from distance, pressure, and other environmental constraints?

I've been instructed to get in on this. Pretty please?

aks me question nerdo

Imagine that the United States federal government funds a new educational channel similar to PBS aimed at all age groups, and you are one of the people responsible for determining its programming. How would would you use the broadcasting time that you are given to better educate America about mental health?

I hope you have nefarious plans for using the answers you get here.

I've been instructed to get in on this. Pretty please?

If there were an elemental magic system which, instead of the classical elements (air, wind, fire, earth), relied upon manipulation of periodic elements, what would these wizards' powers look like?

Imagine that most of the world were to suddenly have all of their energy needs met with renewable energy which requires minimal maintenance and is consistently functional, instantly obviating any reliance on fossil fuels. This would include cars (which are now all electric), house heating (all natural gas replaced with electric), etc. What would be the new primary source of international conflict, and how would America and China respond to it?

I honestly don't see a whole lot of major changes happening in the war department with the advent of unlimited renewable energy. The American military-industrial complex is going to continue to find excuses to justify its own existence, whether that means protecting us from terrorists, or getting rid of that dictator that we put in power 20 years ago, or whatever else works. As for the other dozens of wars going on in the world right now, I would say that almost all of them have more to do with ideological differences and internal power struggles than they do with resources of any kind. I'm looking at this list of ongoing conflicts right now, and I'm finding it difficult to pick out even a single one that might likely have been avoided/prevented if both sides had access to unlimited free energy. Certainly not any of the top five at least.

Personally, I think the big changes to wars aren't likely to come until we get to the inevitable near-future scenario where upwards of 90% of the human workforce gets replaced with friendly automatons. As more and more of the population becomes unemployable through no fault of their own, it in turn becomes harder and harder for the world to justify letting all of the lazy poors starve on the street, and one by one, the nations of the world begin to fall prey to the global scourge of Socialism.

The more optimistic part of me would like to believe that national militaries wouldn't have much need to still exist in a near post-scarcity society, but more realistically, I'd say that humanity probably still has at least one or two more huge wars left in it before they finally have to give up their murder toys for good. I don't really see there being any kind of lasting world peace though until all the armies of the world are officially united under one banner. (Or possibly a small handful of banners?) Ideally, this would be some sort of global United Nations-like peacekeeping force, and not a massive, dystopian world empire. I'm going to go with the former since it's much less depressing.

Anyway, at this point, humanity and its robo-friends can finally settle down and put all of that war nonsense behind them, focusing on more productive things, like medical science, space exploration, and cleaning up after all of those past wars we made. Things continue peacefully like this for a good while, that is at least until we finally pick up our first signs of intelligent life from other planets. At that point, humanity will proudly dust off all of the old Kill-droids, and will happily go right back to doing exactly what humanity does best. Shooting aliens in the eyestalks.

(Wait, sorry, I got distracted for a bit there. The actual answer to your question is that humanity's last great war will be fought over who gets the nicest vacation spots. The world's trillionaires sending thousands upon thousands of warbots to secure their claims to the world's nicest beaches and mountain vistas. These vacation spots will obviously all be completely destroyed within the first few weeks of fighting, in a grand display of cosmic irony. RIP in peace, all of Hawaii.)

I hope you have nefarious plans for using the answers you get here.

Imagine that humanity adopted a new language as the international tongue of trade and science. This language has no homonyms, no words with more than one meaning, and all words are spelled phonetically in order to promote clarity. How would our sense of humor and poetry be different in this new language?

Imagine that humanity adopted a new language as the international tongue of trade and science. This language has no homonyms, no words with more than one meaning, and all words are spelled phonetically in order to promote clarity. How would our sense of humor and poetry be different in this new language?

I have two immediate observations.

First, you did not specify that this new language would replace all language, merely that it would be the international language for trade and science. If existing languages remain in use, then it's highly likely that words in the new one will be similar to words in other languages, and so a good amount of humor would be based in multilingual puns.

Second, the condition that there are no words with more than one meaning will not last. This is inevitable. It's just easier to repurpose an existing word as a metaphor or to cover a similar-but-not-identical concept than it is to come up with a new one and explain it. This isn't even considering loan words - if the common language isn't sufficient to explain a concept but your native language has a word for it, you're going to find it easier to use the latter. For that matter, the phonetic spelling probably won't last either, because pronunciation habits will change over time. Over the long term, this language will be just as unwieldy as English is today.

Let's take the hypothetical a step further and assume this language becomes universal somehow. Other languages only exist as curiosities, they're studied by academics and a few hobbyists and that's it. We're still likely to find artists who feel that the language isn't sufficient to tell their stories, and so we more than likely end up with a Shakespeare equivalent who coins thousands upon thousands of words, many of which are simply adaptations of more familiar words, or perhaps taken from the now-dead languages.

So I feel in the long term, the constraints on this language will be eliminated, because language evolves through use and most people who actually speak it regularly won't be too concerned with preserving its unambiguousness. But that still doesn't mean poetry and humor would work the same way as they do now, of course; more likely they'd develop in a certain direction as the language got started and that would inform their eventual shape.

So what would the short-term effects be? Well, let's look at the language as it starts being adopted. Before we start metaphoring it up and adding all sorts of new words and ruining its basic structure, this language would primarily be used in contexts where we want as little ambiguity as possible. Laws, contracts, scientific explanations. So the first wave of art and humor in the language would probably be based on that model. Humor would be largely satirical, consisting of legal definitions or scientific analyses of things that don't really need them. For other forms of humor, it would generally be easier to use your native language, and you'd make the choice to use this one only if you felt the joke worked best in it.

I haven't talked much about poetry, probably because that's not really my strong point. On a structural level, I think poetry would be concerned with the rhythm of the words; even if the language initially has no rhymes, we already have plenty of examples in existing languages of writing based around flow, such as iambic pentameter. So I think this aspect would be emphasized.

So how would these things affect the long-term development of the language, if it eventually becomes "the primary language of everyone on Earth"? I feel like poetry would still be heavily flow-based even as the language adapts to have more rhymes. It would be far more important for two lines to have the same rhythm than it would be to have their endings sound similar, especially if rhyming ended up being rather uncommon. Most poets would find it boring to keep using the same rhymes over and over.

More generally, though, I think poetry and humor would borrow heavily from the languages that died out. During the period where the common language was greatly increasing in use but other languages were still actively being spoken, people would probably find themselves bringing over habits from their native language into the new one. So more than likely, over the long term such a language would end up being an amalgam of dozens of others. In fact, it's quite likely that our modern languages would end up heavily informing different dialects; perhaps even to extremes where it doesn't feel like the universal language really is that universal.

So overall: I feel that the defining characteristics you've noted would become less and less true over time, and that the early development of the language would be heavily influenced by the fact that most of its speakers will have their own native languages.

Excuse me.

Let's say you had access to the stored data of a ratings site, like yelp or consumerreports, and they asked you to come up with new classifications for their entries (that is, something other than location, type of automobile, genre of food, average rating, price range, etc). What new categories would you come up with, and how would things be sorted within them?

Bathroom Cleanliness, where applicable. I don't like dirty bathrooms. Also if it costs money to use the bathroom.

I don't know how to be in depth about this like everyone else is. Maybe this is already a category. I wouldn't know.

ask me a question

Imagine that your skill development worked in the inverse of the norm - that is, you were very good at everything you did the first time that you did, but gradually got worse as you 'practiced.' This would cover just about everything you did, from reading, to conversation, to riding a bike. What career would you pursue, and how would you entertain yourself?

I'd be a singer/musician with natural talent. You can't really lose stuff like that through lack of practice I imagine. Or an office worker or something where skill doesn't really matter, over simple labor. And I guess I'd entertain myself by doing something new every day. Starting with the crazy hard stuff. Be a daredevil early on and have confidence that I won't fail right as I'm getting started. Then, as I get older, I do the more slow-paced stuff until I eventually die.

ask me a question

Imagine that your skill development worked in the inverse of the norm - that is, you were very good at everything you did the first time that you did, but gradually got worse as you 'practiced.' This would cover just about everything you did, from reading, to conversation, to riding a bike. What career would you pursue, and how would you entertain yourself?

I'm going to commit the cardinal sin

of answering someone else's question *GASP*

I would first die, as my breathing exercises wouldn't work as well as time went on. But if breathing doesn't count, I could still try the stock market, and get rich, thus deprive myself of any reason or means to do work as I sat on the couch all day.

But wait, what if I wasn't good at being a couch potato anymore? How could I live with the consequences? Sleep would no longer come easily. Whatever choice I have would only end in ruin. I'm starting to think these questions were a bad idea, Sai. :/

do normal people start out with poor couch potato skills

ask me a question

Imagine that your skill development worked in the inverse of the norm - that is, you were very good at everything you did the first time that you did, but gradually got worse as you 'practiced.' This would cover just about everything you did, from reading, to conversation, to riding a bike. What career would you pursue, and how would you entertain yourself?

I'm going to commit the cardinal sin

of answering someone else's question *GASP*

I would first die, as my breathing exercises wouldn't work as well as time went on. But if breathing doesn't count, I could still try the stock market, and get rich, thus deprive myself of any reason or means to do work as I sat on the couch all day.

But wait, what if I wasn't good at being a couch potato anymore? How could I live with the consequences? Sleep would no longer come easily. Whatever choice I have would only end in ruin. I'm starting to think these questions were a bad idea, Sai. :/

I'd give you another question, but you haven't answered your first one yet.

do normal people start out with poor couch potato skills

What aspect of your life would provide the most insight into a better understanding of humanity if you were to be passively watched by an intelligent observer (human or alien)?

yerp.

What fictional series that you have read or watched had the most interesting political developments that happened offstage (ie were referenced, but not explicitly shown), and what are your favorite theories surrounding this development?

I have read PSYREN, and for some reason, (SPOILERS)

SpoilerShow

The granny somehow pulls the strings to make Japanese government create a huge multi-billion-dollar ROOT NETWORK complete with the living essentials to survive the Global Rebirthday and house many people.

I'm not convinced she's that powerful. I'm convinced the Japanese government is just that stupid :/

I've been instructed to get in on this. Pretty please?

If there were an elemental magic system which, instead of the classical elements (air, wind, fire, earth), relied upon manipulation of periodic elements, what would these wizards' powers look like?

I really like the idea that most people in this system have these powers as apply to extremely rare or synthetic-only elements. The more common the element, the rarer the power, so there are actually only a few Mg-mancers or O-mancers (and not too many more of the obvious badasses like Fe-mancers or Hg-mancers).

I'm also assuming that all these wizards only have powers over one element in its elemental form, which means for anything more molecularly complex than that, you need a couple people to cooperate. So, to bend steel, you'd need a Fe-mancer and a C-mancer. Finding a suitable partnership to move water is pretty much a pain in the ass. I'm a Ta-mancer.

Sorry I just remembered this thing was here

another one

ask me a question or the rabbit gets it.

another one

Agree or disagree with the following statement, and explain your reasoning - "The value of sentience lies in its ability to predict the future, and therefore a species that was capable of observing time differently from us such that they can see the future perfectly would have no reason to evolve sentience if they did not have it already."

"Hit me", Credit says as he downs another suspicious glass. The bartender complies and puts it on his tab, which doesn't exist.

ask me a question or the rabbit gets it.

Imagine that you live in an era before banking became widespread and you need physical silver in order to pay your troops and purchase local supplies. You are faced with an enemy that is notorious for raiding supply lines, and the lines from your territory to the conflict zone are very long. How do you arrange for your silver to arrive where it is needed?

"Hit me", Credit says as he downs another suspicious glass. The bartender complies and puts it on his tab, which doesn't exist.

How would modern human civilization be different if, rather than developing into sedentary societies around river valleys to harvest grain, we instead discovered a reliable source of food that was naturally best suited to growing in mountainous regions?

"Hit me", Credit says as he downs another suspicious glass. The bartender complies and puts it on his tab, which doesn't exist.

How would modern human civilization be different if, rather than developing into sedentary societies around river valleys to harvest grain, we instead discovered a reliable source of food that was naturally best suited to growing in mountainous regions?

the incan empire (and to lesser extent other andean cultures), based on mountainous cultivation of many types of potatoes and llama herding, formed what are called vertical archipelagos at various heights including the high-up altiplano (and supporting it with maize at lower altitudes). I thought it was really neat when I read about it in this book which also has lots of other neat stuff You Never Heard About In School about the 'new world' before it got wiped clean with smallpox

_{(it is estimated by new scholarship that the pre-contact americas had ~75-100 million people in it; lack of immunity to smallpox and other european diseases, when mixed with lower genotype diversity of amerindians, resulted in possibly a 90% to 95% rate of population loss over the years from disease and the societal collapse that comes with most people around you dying). Also a lot about potatoes comes from the sequel.}

Imagine that you are a wealthy, self-interested politician, whose primary value is preserving his comfort. You place value on political theories based only upon their ability to accurately predict the future so that you can take the actions that will better your long term self interest. What theories do you rely upon to determine the course of your actions?

hey was I given a new question?

Now I'm questioning you. This is not ideal.

Not yet, but now that you've posted again you get another one.

What attributes about the people that you meet most heavily influence your first impression of them, and how do you recognize the ones that influence you unconsciously?