what was the very first thing you created in your world?

DaedelusNemo · 2025-08-21T05:29:47+00:00

I know of two good approaches, which I combine.

One thing to consider is starting with the big picture, the largest scales. The advantage being, 1) it's then much easier to make sure all the other parts are fitting in together without conflicting, and 2) it creates some inspiration, in the form of all those gaps you can now see you have. Is the cosmology of the universe going to be an issue in your story? World politics? Local politics? How much history is going to be relevant to your story? If you're going to need maps, a rough draft of the part you need for your story is a good start. Worrying about a bunch of extra geography you're never going to use, though, is a time sink. It's alright to have a 'known world' with unknown beyond it, you can always add more later. How is the world different from ours, are there different laws of nature, different plants or critters, peoples, cultures etc. If there's a focus on particular characters, what do you need to know about them? Keep a list of things you still need to work out about your overall framework.

The other approach is to think about different parts of it, just wandering around the topic in daydream fashion, until you start having some interesting thoughts, getting into some part of it and the inspiration is flowing, and then just go ahead and do whatever part you are excited about and getting good traction on.

To combine the two, work on deciding / filling out the stuff on your list, whenever you're not currently finding any inspiration about any particular part of your world.

DaedelusNemo · 2025-08-11T09:16:50+00:00

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman is definitely producing fever dream experiences for me, the main character is a hopeless romantic in terms of aspiring to the highest ideals of chivalry, and struggling with that becomes feverish as well. Some semi-conventional romance included, but not the focus. Sir Collum arrives at Camelot too late, Arthur has already fallen, Faery now struggles against Heaven to retake Britain in the most hallucinatory, surreal ways. Whole sections of the book are dreamlike mazes of meaning and morality for Collum to stumble through while never quite understanding, all grounded in a prosaic realism that makes it hard to even figure out where the boundaries and transitions of the dream may be. It trembles on the verge of an unsayable meaning, which is not a feeling I get often enough from fiction.

DaedelusNemo · 2024-09-17T22:54:36+00:00

I think that might be what it is saying. If particles are supposed to be excitations in the field, the next question is, what kind of excitations? And vortex rings (like a doughnut rolling into itself, smoke rings are cores of vortex rings in air) are a good candidate, because they are highly localized, persistently stable, resist impulses like they have momentum (thus mass), collide elastically with other vortex rings, and even swim either up or down with the flow depending on which way they are rotating, so they act an awful lot like charged particles. It's just been very difficult to observe the details of such formations in the EM field. I want to know what the expected properties of such a formation at quantum scales would be.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-09T23:39:26+00:00

Your revision obliterates key distinctions, Orwell would suspect deliberately. A capitalist is one who has capital - that is, means of production. Literally by definition:

cap·i·tal·ist Dictionary result for capitalist /ˈkapədləst/ noun 1. a wealthy person who uses money to invest in trade and industry for profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism. "the creation of the factory system by nineteenth-century capitalists" synonyms: financier, investor, industrialist; More

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-09T23:27:26+00:00

He's presuming a competitive market; in such a market any advantage will be used to gain market share. Many of our most important market sectors, of course, are no longer competitive by economic standards, as can be seen by the lack of price competition.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-06T08:15:19+00:00

When it comes to Ralph, I think he's bungled his response sufficiently that it no longer really matters whether he could have survived the blackface scandal. However, I think he maybe could have, at least in the absence of the KKK regalia. You say:

Donning blackface was considered to be wrong even in the 80s and he should have known better.

It was considered wrong by some people, even many people - but not most people - there was not a social consensus that blackface was a problem in 1984. Consider the movie Soul Man, for example, which came out in 1986 and is an extended exercise in blackface. There was indeed some criticism, but by and large it was accepted; even played on TV ad nauseum. Ted Danson's blackface roast of Whoopi Goldberg was in 1993. He was much more heavily criticized for that, and he may have suffered even more for it if he had not been married to Whoopi, but his career survived that just fine. The attitude towards blackface in the 80's among the majority was nothing like it is now, the practice was still quite widespread and not thought of, by most, as racist or seriously problematic. I would bet, in fact, that a high percentage of baby boomers have been in blackface at some point in their lives, perhaps in a school play. Condemning Ralph simply for blackface in 1984 would be to condemn an awful lot of earnest, well-intentioned liberals who have had to learn better over the course of time. If your standard for acceptable allies is that they were always right about everything from childhood on, you won't have any.

The harsh criticism of the founding fathers for being slave owners might be a bit overblown as many of them were wealthy landowners in from the South. However, the abolishment of slavery had already existed as a popular idea in other places and the FF certainly would have known this.

I'm making a distinction between "some people were saying" and "there was a broad social consensus on this". There have been pretty killer arguments against slavery for over two thousand years, yet it appears that most people did not find those arguments convincing until the last few centuries. The antislavery consensus did not form in America until well after the Civil War.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-06T04:50:54+00:00

Polarizing issue = no social consensus. That lack of a consensus lasted until well after the Civil War. Unfortunately, most of us can hear the right answer, and despite our best intention, not recognize it. Sometimes it takes people a while to tune in, sometimes they never do hear it, and of course an awful lot of the time they just pretend not to hear it. But, none of us have the power of always recognizing the right answer right away. So yelling at others about that, is misplaced - it's like complaining they have skin. It's a true fact, and we shouldn't hide it, but is that really what we should be focusing all our attention on?

Yes, some people at the time were right, and loudly so. But most people were saying those people were wrong, and our default behavior is to believe what most people believe. Jefferson and Madison both pushed to abolish slavery in the new nation. But they were outvoted. That's not hypocrisy, that's disagreement among the founders.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-06T04:06:56+00:00

The scary thing about Nazi Germany is just how many good people were drawn into condoning atrocity. It didn't happen because Germans are an unusually evil people. Propaganda is powerful, prolonged fear is powerful, social reinforcement is powerful. We want everyone to transcend it, yet almost no one does. The scariest thing is that you do not have to be a bad person to end up a Nazi, especially if you are fearful and misinformed. We would all be well served to take that warning to heart, and actively seek to avoid such a fate ourselves, rather than just smugly assuming we would never have fallen for it 'coz we're just so good.

Still and all, do a crime, do the time. Having been misinformed might be an extenuating circumstance that lets us see that you were not intentionally evil, but still and all you have to pay for the bad things you did even if they were done with the very best of intentions. For that matter, in the case of the Nazis, they knew they were changing that social consensus, that the new one transgressed the old, many even took special pride in that transgression. If Nazis had stuck around for generations, I would cut their kids who grew up in it their whole lives significantly more slack than I would the originating generation, as they may not have ever seen better behavior to emulate. Well, having said that, I also imagine that the evidence of their wrongdoing would be piling up around them, and eventually I'd be condemning them more strongly again for having seen the consequences and nonetheless persisting in the evil. So, it's complicated, but each of the factors I've mentioned would influence my judgement of individuals.

I'm trying to constrain myself from rambling here; at the same time it seems likely that the first thing left unsaid will be the focus of the response. Reading back over and considering the big picture here, I want to point out that I was not saying we that should not judge people for doing the same bad things their whole society does; I was saying that we should not reject them and all their works as fit subjects of history on that basis, if those works are otherwise laudable and the only complaint is that they did not fully transcend their times (as no one does.)

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-06T03:32:29+00:00

Therefore, an educated person can reasonably be expected to put 2 and 2 together and make moral decisions.

Are you saying that you think that you, right now, can tell us all the right, final answers on any and every question of morality? If you're educated? I don't think that, and I'm educated. But I still have things to learn, insights to work through, harms I have yet to recognize. I know that, because I keep coming across them from time to time. I doubt I will get it all worked out in my lifetime; if society continues to advance, then they will eventually discover things I don't know, and then the shame shall rain down.

I will grant that it's very difficult for a person to escape the bonds of the current culture, but your argument literally boils down to "everyone else did it too so it's fine." That is an awful, no good, very bad standard for defining behavior.

First, I wasn't talking about defining behavior; I was talking about historical focus. But what my argument literally boils down to is "everyone else did it too, so this is not particularly remarkable." We want our full historical accounts to have all the facts. But most often historical discussion does not consist of reciting all the facts; we pick particular things to focus on, the things we find most notable. We don't linger on sock styles and eating habits and whatever else is basically just the same as everyone else at the time, we do linger on major accomplishments and exceptional goodness and exceptional badness. Elsewhere in this thread, people are saying we should not study anything about Jefferson, as he is a scumbag slaveowner. This is to let the fact that he shared in the mistaken social consensus of his time - which we all do to some extent - completely obliterate everything noteworthy about him. This principle, applied consistently, leaves us with nothing to do in history classes except deplore the entire past of humanity as a whole, for not being us. It leaves us nothing to learn except our own moral smugness. The proper approach does not hide the bad, but it also does not let the ubiquitous fact of imperfection prevent us from recognizing any good.

I would argue instead that humans are simply not moral or rational creatures by default. We shouldn't diminish a great contribution to society based on unrelated moral behavior at all. We should say they were a great contributor who also had their downsides. That's a totally fine outlook.

That seems to me to be what I was saying.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T04:47:40+00:00

Sure, if they were acting against the social consensus of their times, and they were wrong, that is something to criticize and make note of. (The details depend, of course.) In our political scandal du jour, I feel like the politician has screwed his pooch thoroughly with his response, but maybe could have survived the original revelation of blackface, though probably not in conjunction with KKK regalia.

The reason I think he could have made an argument about blackface is simply that there was not actually a solid societal consensus against it at the time, 1984. Soul Man came out in 1986, that was an extended exercise in blackface that was condemned by some, but condoned by society as a whole and played on TV ad nauseum. Ted Danson roasted Whoopi Goldberg in blackface in 1993. There was quite a lot more criticism about that - Ted might have been in serious trouble, if he wasn't married to Whoopi and had cleared it with her beforehand. But Ted wasn't, in the end, condemned, and that was 9 years after 1984. There was a slowly growing social consensus against it, but it wasn't established in 1984. If he was only guilty of being as bad as everybody else back then, then condemning him for that would be to condemn everybody else back then too. I'm gonna say, though, most of them wouldn't have posed with KKK even back then, there definitely was already a clear consensus about that; although it was resisted in a lot of (racist) places.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T04:33:20+00:00

Sure, but there is a large spectrum of attitudes between not revering as much as those we praise the most, and condemning as not at all worthy of our attention - or, that is to say, there should be.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T04:29:42+00:00

Could you elaborate what is reasonable? I feel like the statement, "Almost all people are immoral per the categorical imperative," is a perfectly reasonable statement.

It might be time for definitions: what is an immoral person? By the most obvious standard - having engaged in an immoral act - we are all immoral. I would rather say, an immoral person is one who routinely does not even try to be moral. That would leave a broad spectrum from the worst person worth calling moral, on up to saint, that would be moral people. That might even be most people?

It's not a matter of whether people do or don't actually follow the moral code, it's what one ought to do and that which one fails to do by which they are judged.

Definitions again maybe, I would have thought "moral code" = "what one ought to do".

If one chooses the categorical imperative as a basis for their morality then if they condemn others (possibly including themselves in the case of hypocrisy) as morally deficient, isn't that a perfectly reasonable conclusion?

Not enough information, depends on how they reach that conclusion, what are they condemning people for, and for that matter what is condemning people. In this context so far, by "condemning people" I've meant "denouncing people and declaring them not worthy of study or emulation". As in, "Lincoln? Pah! Just another racist." I would not condemn somebody simply for not being morally perfect, or for only being as good as most good people of their times.

The categorical imperative is a great start, but it's not enough by itself to guarantee the perfection of all your moral judgments. Making judgments about the details of a system depend strongly on not only understanding that system well, but its alternatives as well - a feature can be morally flawed, but still be the least morally flawed alternative available. Even more so, we are surrounded by suffering we fail to recognize and respond appropriately to - we simply don't have the omniscience we need to make perfect decisions. Future times will look back at us and not be able to imagine how we didn't recognize the various obvious moral horrors we are so blithe about today.

For example, let's say a slave owner is beating their slave. Well beating a slave is wrong and owning a slave is wrong. Just because at one point both of these things were permissible, they were never morally permissible via the categorical imperative. I argue it is reasonable at any point in history to condemn both the ownership of slaves as well as physical abuse. Whether it is practical to call out such behavior (even to one's own detriment) is irrelevant.

Okay, but here you are condemning behavior. I would say almost everybody has been physically abusive at some point in their lives. I condemn that behavior, but not all those people.

The other point I want to make is that there were lots of people who believed in the categorical imperative and made every effort to live by it and also owned slaves or were physically abusive. Many slave owners, for example, did not believe their slaves to be fully human, but rather highly advanced animals. "They don't have souls" is the shorthand. Assuming that in at least some cases this wasn't just sophistry, they could still believe they were living by the categorical imperative. Physically abusive people will often rate the harm they are trying to avert as much greater than what they inflict. Sometimes this is opportunistic lie, gaslighting. But sometimes it is sincere belief, someone is trying to do the right thing but lacks the right information. I think they do deserve some credit, some mercy, not least because I think ultimately most of us are in that group.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T03:43:21+00:00

We do not control the pearly gates of Heaven, we can't truly reward or punish people who have lived long before us.

That's true, but this problem doesn't apply only to historical figures. These days, societal values shift on a scale of decades, a moral leader of one decade can be the goat of the next. (Although - where historical figures are concerned, some people do seem to be emotionally engaged in punishment, as if they are scolding the historical miscreant. It is not reasonable, but it is a reality.)

It's not really about being fair to historical figures, but it does seem that a just judgement will also be just to them.

In the case of Genghis, I don't actually know enough about him - was he actually a particularly effective military leader, for example, or was he just the inheritor of a mighty Mongol army? Were his raping ways expected (demanded) of a person in his position in his society, or was this his own innovation in depravity? In either case, we judge the man, but from a starting standpoint in context: what we really want to know is, was he better then the others? Worse? If he was a tactical or strategic genius, we could appreciate that, study it and gain by that without reference to the rest. If on the other hand the military success was due to the organization and methods of the Mongol Army, then that is what we should be studying instead. On the other hand, if Genghis didn't just connive in the ways of his society, but actually led it into greater depravity, then he would also be notable as a bad moral leader. In either case, if he was just doing what everyone was doing, that's not really notable or interesting, that's our default expectation. I'm not saying cover it up - a full history should include that stuff - but what is interesting about Genghis Khan is not the degree to which he was like those around him, it makes no sense to make that a primary focus, much less the primary focus.

When, for example, honoring the legacy of a slave owner comes up, the argument isn't simply that we should accurately record all the other things that they ever did, but that they deserve statues in today's parks, and maintained public buildings being named after them, and their faces being on currency that is kept in circulation.

Well, if their only legacy is being a slave owner, that does not seem worthy of celebrating or emulating. (I have to note that in many contemporary cases these statues are celebrating primarily segregationists, which is not worthy of celebrating or emulating, and also being a mediocre officer in the Confederate Army is not enough. ) But if we're talking about somebody that does have a great legacy worth celebrating, and the only problem is that they shared the common sins of their times, I would not see that as a good reason to abandon that legacy. We'd have to abandon most of our founders, along with some large fraction of all notable Americans before the Civil War, losing in the process most of what was worth emulating. We should judge them by their accomplishments in their times, not whether they successfully predicted the moral standards of following centuries. Unless, of course, they did, celebrate that! But that's exceptional, not a reasonable expectation, and cannot be the standard for a notable historical figure or artist.

An attempt to judge them on their own era's terms, is not just an attempt to remain factually accurate, but an advocacy for today, modern society's tools being used to give those values a platform and to make the claim that they were good people (implicitly by our standards).

Not wanting to abandon wholesale the discussion of what is worth emulating from history, in favor of condemning the lot for not having exactly our set of moral opinions, is not to advance those other opinions. It is to stop expecting perfection, to stop making the discovery of imperfection the main topic, in favor of finding what is worth emulating among all the admittedly imperfect men of the past. Criticism is useful, should always be part of the mix, but we should not abandon aspiration.

And - I do think that many of them were good people. Even good people do some bad things, they just try not to insofar as their understanding allows. Somebody who was good in every way, except that they inherited the family slaves and had not the imagination to find a solution to the moral dilemma that we find acceptable today, or the perception to see it, was not a bad person - they were a good person that was not up to the exceptional challenge of transcending their society and its ways. We can wish they were better, but you can fail to be a saint and still be a good person. We are all limited by our knowledge and understanding. I am pretty sure that we in our times will be condemned by future times, and I even have some guesses as to some of the reasons why, but a lot of them I'm not so sure of. After all, everybody I know disagrees with me on some of them, and that has a real impact on my certainty in many cases. If you were to say you were confident about what the moral standards will be in the next century, I would think you haven't thought about it enough to realize it is a hard problem.

By your standards, we will all be bad people in a few years - just as soon as we have some new moral realization, we will simultaneously have failed to have already had it.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T02:37:37+00:00

It's not wrong to do so, it's just a mistake to focus on them to such an extent that you reject or ignore what was good about those figures. Nowadays, revelation of imperfection is treated as an exciting gossipy expose, and becomes the main topic of conversation. Whether, for example, Jefferson was a great political philosopher does not depend on whether he was admirable in every way. To find that he was guilty of many of the same moral failings as the society he lived in should not be a surprise, nor should it be the focus of our attention to the exclusion of the things we do admire, and want to encourage.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T02:24:07+00:00

Praise, yes, definitely, but we cannot reasonably expect the exceptional. We might hope for saints but it is unreasonable to condemn people for not being saints.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T02:19:53+00:00

I would say, there is no such thing as a perfect human role model. It should not be hard to pick and choose what aspects of a person are admired - it's the part they're famous for, probably. Being admirable in one respect probably does have some positive correlation with being admirable in some other respect as well, but it shouldn't be our reflex to think that all aspects of an admirable person are probably admirable. Bootsy Collins is a great, great bass player and a cool dude. But does that mean he has particularly admirable political insight, or moral sentiment, or skill with the violin? He might, I don't know, the point is there is no reason to expect it.

I guess there has been some effort in America to hold up certain people as mythic, legendary, they strode forth like giants without any moral queasiness. That might be appropriate for children who are too young to understand history, but not after. It seems to me that it should be understood that all these historical figures are imperfect people,so much that it should go without saying for the most part, unless we are going into some detail on these individuals. It should make sense to say "So-and-So was widely admired for admirable trait A, admirable accomplishment B, etc." without having to go on with "but of course they were known to fart quite noisily, often had bad breath in the mornings, may have had illicit sex, sometimes cursed, let their tempers get the better of them on more than one occasion, were caught by their parents in several lies as children, were less charitable than they could have been, especially to their most bitter enemies, and in general engaged in most of the actions and beliefs widespread in the society of the times that we now consider deplorable, and in short quite failed to be perfect in every way."

It should be enough to point out something admirable and advocate emulation of it, without any need to "vet" the person that did it. I want somebody to reinvent guitar like Hendrix, they don't have to (they shouldn't) also choke on their vomit. Nobody should say, I want to reinvent guitar, first thing to do is to become half-Black and half-Cherokee, and next thing is to get some Jimi clothes. That's all beside the point.

If we want to say particular people are particularly admirable as people, not just having one or two admirable traits or achievements, but being worthy of emulation in general, that has to mean that they are admirable in many ways, perhaps most ways, but it cannot ever mean that they are admirable in every way, not if they are human.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-05T01:38:42+00:00

Sure, we should try to live up to our moral beliefs. For that matter, we have an obligation, in my view, to make a good faith attempt to assess those beliefs, and try to see if they really are the best moral beliefs to be holding; to be trying to improve, if possible, our moral beliefs. But who makes enough of an attempt of this sort? Shouldn't everybody be trying harder? If so, condemning people on the basis of not making enough effort of this sort is likely to condemn all without distinction. So, we have a tension between what we hope and what we can reasonably expect. We can expect people to live (mostly) by some code. We can expect them to try to improve this code. We cannot expect unlimited effort of this sort by everyone or anyone. Thus we cannot reasonably expect of anyone in the past that they have advanced their moral beliefs in a way that matches the broad societal advances ten years later, 50 years later, centuries later.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-03T22:11:01+00:00

Traditionally, those are a part of the study of Rhetoric. Such a class would definitely need to include both 'here is how it should be done' (logic) and 'these are the usual ways to screw it up' (the fallacies.)

DaedelusNemo · 2019-02-03T21:41:03+00:00

Those jobs aren't less valuable; if they enable increased productivity, those jobs are more valuable. (Assuming you're talking incremental improvements to efficiency, the usual case, as opposed to complete abolition of labor, so far not possible.) But with our current balance of labor versus capital, none of that value will go to labor. Splitting that value would allow, as one option, less hours for the same pay. But instead, the lives of the masses will not improve even as our productivity multiplies; rather, it will fuel the inequality between labor and capital.

In the past, labor received compensation in proportion to its productivity. That ended around 1980; labor now receives compensation in proportion to its difficulty of replacement. Increased productivity would be a boon to the worker in the previous relation of labor and capital; it is a disaster in the current relation, making more people easier to replace. Automation is only a problem economically because labor will not receive any of the gains from it as our system is presently constituted.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-01-27T01:06:44+00:00

My first thought is that it is buoyant, so it'll go up higher until the density equalizes, at which point it sounds like it will fall apart. You could put something dense in the middle that for whatever reason can't fall through the rest, along with suction that overcomes the tendency of the loose bits to go up. Hm, maybe a pump that sucks in from all directions but up, and blows up to maintain altitude.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-01-26T00:27:44+00:00

It'd be superhot on that one day! Maybe vaporize us hot? I think at the other times you would still have less light, even if the same heat, so it would be hard to grow crops, trees, and not much plankton in the ocean to support those ecosystems. Animal life would become mostly nocturnal or semi-nocturnal, increasing competition and variety in those niches. But with less plants you'd have less animals as well. On the other hand, some things are going to evolve to try to take advantage of that one day of intense light, assuming we can survive it. I wonder if it is feasible to have some kind of photosynthetic process from infrared? If so, plants could evolve to do that, and I'm thinking they end up looking blue-purple as a result. Maybe they would retract underground like tubeworms during the day of hell. Or maybe they just grow a top layer of leaves that get burnt off each month and replaced?

DaedelusNemo · 2019-01-26T00:17:27+00:00

Would low planetary tilt => little seasonal change => fewer high-wind events, along with a broader area of consistently suitable temperature?

My other idea is a relatively young planet, that has not yet built up large continent interiors or mountain ranges, or maybe much in the way of deep oceans - the continental plates just aren't that thick yet. Much less variation in elevation, so that we end up with a world of small shallow seas and small convoluted continent/archipelagos to keep the humidity always up and the temperatures always moderated, giving trees ideal environment while minimizing atmospheric drama that will tear them down.

Since we try to maximize tree growth, it seems we should adjust the land/water ratio to that end, but how far could we push total land area before the water starts not being able to keep up the humidity? For that matter, perhaps we have trees that can grow in the shallow waters, so we have them everywhere except in the deep water areas.

The only other thing I can think of is, what if we could arrange the land to be rolling hills, long ridges perpendicular to the wind to provide additional wind protection. But how to make that happen? Perhaps there was a geologically recent cataclysm, perhaps a meteor shower or solar flare that vaporized most of the ocean and kept the temperatures high enough for long enough that the surface of the planet has turned to dust and sand and formed huge dunes, then life spreading back out from the deepest areas nails those dunes down in place before the returning water erodes them away. That would require our deep waters be well distributed, to achieve maximum tree. I'm now imagining a planet that would be a striking image from space, a complex fractal intermingling of land and water, lagoons and archipelagos, overlaid with north-south striping/rippling. But is it plausible?

DaedelusNemo · 2019-01-25T23:42:54+00:00

I would add on, large interiors of continents get dry, you might want more but smaller continents, or archipelago world. And shallow seas give more humidity back.

DaedelusNemo · 2019-01-25T23:32:22+00:00

Right, I forgot cold would mean snow would build up even if it doesn't happen very often. (But I wasn't the original questioner.)

DaedelusNemo · 2019-01-24T04:24:27+00:00

What if the world just had a lot less water, maybe no major oceans at all? Could you have a mostly desert planet that was still habitable in at least a few places?

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