In honor of NaNoWriMo, I offer up this discussion topic for fans of HPMOR and rationalist fiction in general:
How many ways can we find that stock superpowers (magical abilities, sci-fi tech, whatever), if used intelligently, completely break a fictional setting? I’m particularly interested in subtly game-breaking abilities.
The game-breaking consequences of mind control, time travel, and the power to steal other powers are all particularly obvious, but I’m interested in things like e.g. Eliezer pointing out that he had to seriously nerf the Unbreakable Vow in HPMOR to keep the entire story from being about that.
I seem to be able to do this with almost any power to various degrees. Including ones I actually have, and ones that are common among humans. Any specifics you had in mind?
Really, ANY ability will reroll some chaotic stuff and be a valuable asset simply because it’s rare. Even a deliberating curse, if rare and interesting enough, can do things like be useful for research or provide unique perspectives to be studied. So really, the only limit to where a power stops being useful is where it’s only useful to someone else controlling you.
Hence, why anything properly rationalist that’s not going to be largely about breaking the setting must do something like give MANY the ability so the low hanging fruit is already gone, or make it inherently mysterious and unreplicable, or have some deliberate intelligence preventing it from getting well known, or something like that.
We may be operating on different definitions of what it means to “break” a setting. For example, how useful is flight by itself, really?
Many abilities seem potentially very useful if other people don’t know you have them, but become much less useful once you get found out:
The “energy blast” type abilities common among wizards and superheroes are not terribly combat useful in a setting with modern weapons. Their big use would be assassination: slip past metal detectors and pat-downs, baffle detectives… but once you get found out, no one wants you around and the police know the otherwise inexplicable burning death was probably you.
Mind-reading, if it has standard limitations on range, similarly becomes a lot less useful once you get found out and banned from everywhere.
Super-senses on a level comparable to what’s already possible with technology: lets you spy on people from a distance without anyone wondering what you’re doing with those binoculars… otherwise not so useful.
Thats because those are among the worst possible ways to use those abilities.
The energy blasts as usually depicted break conservation of energy; with a bit of physics trickery you can get time travel out of that. Even if not, they make you an extremely portable and efficient energy source, perfect for a spaceship where mass is critical and a human needs to come along anyway but it doesn’t matter in particular who since it’s for PR reasons.
Mind reading is a means of communication that does not require cooperation or any abilities in the target, and cant be lied through. Communication with locked-in patients, interrogation, extraction of testimonials from animals. And if you an find a way to yourself precommit, you also have fully reliable precommitment checking for everyone, lie detection for political promises, and the ultimate forensics tool.
If you combine the strengths of 2 kinds of system, you get something greater than the sum of it’s parts. So it is with human senses and digital sensors. The key here is bandwidth, and analysis. Sure, you can get all the same data onto a computer, but it won’t do much good there. Someone with true super-senses as flexible and integrated as their normal biological ones, after a few years for the brain to adapt if they were not available from birth, would most likely be able to see patterns at a glance that’d take large teams days or months to discover in some database format. The exact applications of this depend on what sense we’re talking about.
Common factors: Focus on things done with to cooperation of large numbers of other people, finding an economic niche, fundamental physics exploits, and/or using large and expensive equipment. If not that, look for a niche within the military as a specialized technician, most likely not in the field and if in the field then in some large vehicle with a crew of many. Almost NEVER is an efficient use of a power found in brawling or acting alone like all your descriptions where.
The energy blasts as usually depicted break conservation of energy; with a bit of physics trickery you can get time travel out of that.
Wait, explain that? What is “a bit of physics trickery” here?
I know in HPMOR, Harry points out that violations of conservation of mass in magic imply FTL signaling, and I know from relativity FTL implies time travel, but Harry doesn’t even consider running off to get time travel from common spells. Assumed turning the theory into practice would be far from straightforward.
Heck, it’s not even obvious to me how you turn FTL travel into time travel in practice, if you don’t have control over what frame of reference you’re FTL in.
In the approximation of the True Laws Of Physics which is in use today—The Relativistic Standard Model—FTL (and subsidiarily time travel) is nonsense. Like, it’s gibberish. It is a description of a situation which not only does not happen, but which is a mathematical falsehood. It is impossible. It is like violation of conservation of energy, or violation of entropic developments.
The maths plainly states that assumptions like that leads to a contradiction, and we do in fact know that the Standard Model is complete and consistent (i.e. cannot encode formulas as objects).
Any hypothetical scenarios involving time travel will invariably be contrite, non-causal, and require classical mechanics. It is fiction, make of it what you will.
Bit over a decade ago, when I was still a naive wild-eyed idealist blissfully unaware of anything realistic about people at all, I set up the foundations for most of my sci fi/fantasy/etc fictions. The piece of supertech I immediately had to nerf was technology based around a form of space compression—somewhere between the MCron Crystal (Marvel) and Dynocaps (Dragonball). And today, I’m still coming up with more reasons to nerf it heavily, to the extent that the civilization based around this technology must certainly have had a shady counsil of vagueness who developed a limited-scope AI to control production and block any of the scarier uses. This after I tied it to FTL capabilities (I’m trying very hard to prevent this from turning into timetravel, not that I’m too afraid to abuse that option for a crisis crossover or something).
It took me much longer to realize how much nerfing of powers unrelated to the above tech I needed to do, partially because I was trying to avoid breaking the laws of physics too horribly (this universe runs on a sort of mangling of GR and M-Theory that assumes fundamental forces each get something resembling a dimension, and that attempts to break the light-speed barrier have lots of wide-reaching consequences).
A few things I’ve had to seriously remodel (mostly for the sake of in-universe physics not breaking, though I’m sure there are obvious uses/flaws here I’ve missed):
Light manipulation. The version I started out with was written as superweight (tvtropes) type IV, when the applications I had in mind were more indicative of a potential V or VI. Since tried to tone down so that this character hovers between II and III (the distinction is a little vague), but I’m sure I’m still underutilizing this character even with all the restrictions I’ve added. (Invisibility, holograms, filtering specific wavelengths to minimize radiation risks, screwing with radio communication, sometimes can weaponize directly with lasers and x-rays and such).
Gravity manipulation. This one perplexes me most, even though it seems like it’s become relatively clear what limitations it should have—denser matter is more easily affected, sources of gravity can be boosted or reduced on specific objects, all within a finite range. Not precise enough to simulate telekinesis, yet I feel like I’m missing some crucial issues with this power.
Variations on “interversal connections”; that is, we have a multiverse that would take too long to explain, but spaces or objects in universes can remain connected, after a fashion. These are generally unstable, so those that we see are generally related to intelligence, just because intelligences can find ways to maintain them. The broadest versions tend to catch any high-energy particles entering the affected area and replace them with particles from the connected universe (so if you shot a stream of gamma rays at one of these, you’d get a small amount of hydrogen out of it). These can become more specialized until we have people that can summon and manipulate stellar matter (these tend to be the scariest mofos around, and get appropriate attention from any governments who learn of them), or in some unique cases, people that can “turn into water” (or rather, swap with a mass of water in the connected universe), generate ice/magma/metal, etc. It hasn’t really come up yet, but I expect that special relativity tries to be conserved after a fashion, with matter elsewhere being fed into the power-supplying universe, and if anyone measured the delay, it would turn out as one would expect given distances involved.
I had nebulous “ki power”, which I’ve since remodeled as being related to a unique sort of substance that I’m pretty sure would turn the first quantum physicist with appropriate equipment to study it into a god. However, I only realized that god part very recently. I don’t think I can explain it without a long trek through my mythos, but things we’ve seen related to this substance (and its even scarier source) include: walking talking skeletons (can produce the stuff as a byproduct of feeding on organic matter), people with the most intense exposure becoming effectively immune to aging but with continually degrading cognitive function (and as a bonus, they can pretty much ignore gravity and wind resistance exactly as much as they want), lesser exposure has been associated with abilities such as fireballs, limited flight/hovering, some degree of pyro/electrokinesis. And the ability of the substance to replicate, of course.
In a completely different direction, there is a more fantasy-esque universe with souls, gods, and magic as facts of nature, except this is part of the same multiverse as the above, so I realized that the laws of physics couldn’t be all that different. So I had the creator-god (effectively a backup of a pre-scientific human mind with way more resources to devote to naive conceptions of wisdom), reallocate the weak nuclear force to manage souls, and the sun god (or rather, the superintelligence the creator built to handle the finer details of physics) having a more reductionist/lifist stance. Shenanigans ensue, which resulted in me realizing that, if one of this world’s souls wound up in our world, it would turn into a transmutation bomb. Commence panic when I realized that I had a character that I really like getting stuck in one of the more Earth-like worlds in desperate need of a soul-shield, less all the neutrinos give him soul-cancer before all the surrounding gases get zapped with a pound of W and Z bosons and start the biggest Fluorine explosion ever. On the “bright” side, I can now have a supervillain summon the dead from that world and use them as transmutation bombs whenever I need something sufficiently horrifying.
Oh, and I keep glossing over wind manipulation. It’s treated as simple and boring in-universe, when it probably shouldn’t be. I’m sure if I did some number-crunching, there’d be a lot of scary possibilities here that I’ve overlooked. The character who specializes in this can use it to fly and may or may not be able to summon hurricane-force winds or stronger. Most other examples are much more mundane; the most impressive demonstrations are some directed gusts being used to push people a little. Combine this with the first two (light and gravity), and the space program might get considerably cheaper.
In all of this, I expect I’m missing something world-breaking that half of LW would notice within five minutes of having the powers explained (or maybe just introduced—do you need to know that someone generates his fireballs by burning in a weird chemical unwanted bodyhair (and subdermal fat when that runs out) to think of issues that arise from someone with the power to toss fireballs around?).
In honor of NaNoWriMo, I offer up this discussion topic for fans of HPMOR and rationalist fiction in general:
How many ways can we find that stock superpowers (magical abilities, sci-fi tech, whatever), if used intelligently, completely break a fictional setting? I’m particularly interested in subtly game-breaking abilities.
The game-breaking consequences of mind control, time travel, and the power to steal other powers are all particularly obvious, but I’m interested in things like e.g. Eliezer pointing out that he had to seriously nerf the Unbreakable Vow in HPMOR to keep the entire story from being about that.
I seem to be able to do this with almost any power to various degrees. Including ones I actually have, and ones that are common among humans. Any specifics you had in mind?
Really, ANY ability will reroll some chaotic stuff and be a valuable asset simply because it’s rare. Even a deliberating curse, if rare and interesting enough, can do things like be useful for research or provide unique perspectives to be studied. So really, the only limit to where a power stops being useful is where it’s only useful to someone else controlling you.
Hence, why anything properly rationalist that’s not going to be largely about breaking the setting must do something like give MANY the ability so the low hanging fruit is already gone, or make it inherently mysterious and unreplicable, or have some deliberate intelligence preventing it from getting well known, or something like that.
We may be operating on different definitions of what it means to “break” a setting. For example, how useful is flight by itself, really?
Many abilities seem potentially very useful if other people don’t know you have them, but become much less useful once you get found out:
The “energy blast” type abilities common among wizards and superheroes are not terribly combat useful in a setting with modern weapons. Their big use would be assassination: slip past metal detectors and pat-downs, baffle detectives… but once you get found out, no one wants you around and the police know the otherwise inexplicable burning death was probably you.
Mind-reading, if it has standard limitations on range, similarly becomes a lot less useful once you get found out and banned from everywhere.
Super-senses on a level comparable to what’s already possible with technology: lets you spy on people from a distance without anyone wondering what you’re doing with those binoculars… otherwise not so useful.
Thats because those are among the worst possible ways to use those abilities.
The energy blasts as usually depicted break conservation of energy; with a bit of physics trickery you can get time travel out of that. Even if not, they make you an extremely portable and efficient energy source, perfect for a spaceship where mass is critical and a human needs to come along anyway but it doesn’t matter in particular who since it’s for PR reasons.
Mind reading is a means of communication that does not require cooperation or any abilities in the target, and cant be lied through. Communication with locked-in patients, interrogation, extraction of testimonials from animals. And if you an find a way to yourself precommit, you also have fully reliable precommitment checking for everyone, lie detection for political promises, and the ultimate forensics tool.
If you combine the strengths of 2 kinds of system, you get something greater than the sum of it’s parts. So it is with human senses and digital sensors. The key here is bandwidth, and analysis. Sure, you can get all the same data onto a computer, but it won’t do much good there. Someone with true super-senses as flexible and integrated as their normal biological ones, after a few years for the brain to adapt if they were not available from birth, would most likely be able to see patterns at a glance that’d take large teams days or months to discover in some database format. The exact applications of this depend on what sense we’re talking about.
Common factors: Focus on things done with to cooperation of large numbers of other people, finding an economic niche, fundamental physics exploits, and/or using large and expensive equipment. If not that, look for a niche within the military as a specialized technician, most likely not in the field and if in the field then in some large vehicle with a crew of many. Almost NEVER is an efficient use of a power found in brawling or acting alone like all your descriptions where.
Wait, explain that? What is “a bit of physics trickery” here?
I know in HPMOR, Harry points out that violations of conservation of mass in magic imply FTL signaling, and I know from relativity FTL implies time travel, but Harry doesn’t even consider running off to get time travel from common spells. Assumed turning the theory into practice would be far from straightforward.
Heck, it’s not even obvious to me how you turn FTL travel into time travel in practice, if you don’t have control over what frame of reference you’re FTL in.
In the approximation of the True Laws Of Physics which is in use today—The Relativistic Standard Model—FTL (and subsidiarily time travel) is nonsense. Like, it’s gibberish. It is a description of a situation which not only does not happen, but which is a mathematical falsehood. It is impossible. It is like violation of conservation of energy, or violation of entropic developments.
The maths plainly states that assumptions like that leads to a contradiction, and we do in fact know that the Standard Model is complete and consistent (i.e. cannot encode formulas as objects).
Any hypothetical scenarios involving time travel will invariably be contrite, non-causal, and require classical mechanics. It is fiction, make of it what you will.
Oooh, that’s even better: from a contradiction, anything can be proved. Thus, if we can break conservation of energy we gain literal omnipotence.
… I am pretty sure that is not how it works.
To make a time machine out of an FTL drive, simply travel somewhere at near lightspeed and FTL back. Now you’re where you started, before you left.
Bit over a decade ago, when I was still a naive wild-eyed idealist blissfully unaware of anything realistic about people at all, I set up the foundations for most of my sci fi/fantasy/etc fictions. The piece of supertech I immediately had to nerf was technology based around a form of space compression—somewhere between the MCron Crystal (Marvel) and Dynocaps (Dragonball). And today, I’m still coming up with more reasons to nerf it heavily, to the extent that the civilization based around this technology must certainly have had a shady counsil of vagueness who developed a limited-scope AI to control production and block any of the scarier uses. This after I tied it to FTL capabilities (I’m trying very hard to prevent this from turning into timetravel, not that I’m too afraid to abuse that option for a crisis crossover or something).
It took me much longer to realize how much nerfing of powers unrelated to the above tech I needed to do, partially because I was trying to avoid breaking the laws of physics too horribly (this universe runs on a sort of mangling of GR and M-Theory that assumes fundamental forces each get something resembling a dimension, and that attempts to break the light-speed barrier have lots of wide-reaching consequences).
A few things I’ve had to seriously remodel (mostly for the sake of in-universe physics not breaking, though I’m sure there are obvious uses/flaws here I’ve missed):
Light manipulation. The version I started out with was written as superweight (tvtropes) type IV, when the applications I had in mind were more indicative of a potential V or VI. Since tried to tone down so that this character hovers between II and III (the distinction is a little vague), but I’m sure I’m still underutilizing this character even with all the restrictions I’ve added. (Invisibility, holograms, filtering specific wavelengths to minimize radiation risks, screwing with radio communication, sometimes can weaponize directly with lasers and x-rays and such).
Gravity manipulation. This one perplexes me most, even though it seems like it’s become relatively clear what limitations it should have—denser matter is more easily affected, sources of gravity can be boosted or reduced on specific objects, all within a finite range. Not precise enough to simulate telekinesis, yet I feel like I’m missing some crucial issues with this power.
Variations on “interversal connections”; that is, we have a multiverse that would take too long to explain, but spaces or objects in universes can remain connected, after a fashion. These are generally unstable, so those that we see are generally related to intelligence, just because intelligences can find ways to maintain them. The broadest versions tend to catch any high-energy particles entering the affected area and replace them with particles from the connected universe (so if you shot a stream of gamma rays at one of these, you’d get a small amount of hydrogen out of it). These can become more specialized until we have people that can summon and manipulate stellar matter (these tend to be the scariest mofos around, and get appropriate attention from any governments who learn of them), or in some unique cases, people that can “turn into water” (or rather, swap with a mass of water in the connected universe), generate ice/magma/metal, etc. It hasn’t really come up yet, but I expect that special relativity tries to be conserved after a fashion, with matter elsewhere being fed into the power-supplying universe, and if anyone measured the delay, it would turn out as one would expect given distances involved.
I had nebulous “ki power”, which I’ve since remodeled as being related to a unique sort of substance that I’m pretty sure would turn the first quantum physicist with appropriate equipment to study it into a god. However, I only realized that god part very recently. I don’t think I can explain it without a long trek through my mythos, but things we’ve seen related to this substance (and its even scarier source) include: walking talking skeletons (can produce the stuff as a byproduct of feeding on organic matter), people with the most intense exposure becoming effectively immune to aging but with continually degrading cognitive function (and as a bonus, they can pretty much ignore gravity and wind resistance exactly as much as they want), lesser exposure has been associated with abilities such as fireballs, limited flight/hovering, some degree of pyro/electrokinesis. And the ability of the substance to replicate, of course.
In a completely different direction, there is a more fantasy-esque universe with souls, gods, and magic as facts of nature, except this is part of the same multiverse as the above, so I realized that the laws of physics couldn’t be all that different. So I had the creator-god (effectively a backup of a pre-scientific human mind with way more resources to devote to naive conceptions of wisdom), reallocate the weak nuclear force to manage souls, and the sun god (or rather, the superintelligence the creator built to handle the finer details of physics) having a more reductionist/lifist stance. Shenanigans ensue, which resulted in me realizing that, if one of this world’s souls wound up in our world, it would turn into a transmutation bomb. Commence panic when I realized that I had a character that I really like getting stuck in one of the more Earth-like worlds in desperate need of a soul-shield, less all the neutrinos give him soul-cancer before all the surrounding gases get zapped with a pound of W and Z bosons and start the biggest Fluorine explosion ever. On the “bright” side, I can now have a supervillain summon the dead from that world and use them as transmutation bombs whenever I need something sufficiently horrifying.
Oh, and I keep glossing over wind manipulation. It’s treated as simple and boring in-universe, when it probably shouldn’t be. I’m sure if I did some number-crunching, there’d be a lot of scary possibilities here that I’ve overlooked. The character who specializes in this can use it to fly and may or may not be able to summon hurricane-force winds or stronger. Most other examples are much more mundane; the most impressive demonstrations are some directed gusts being used to push people a little. Combine this with the first two (light and gravity), and the space program might get considerably cheaper.
In all of this, I expect I’m missing something world-breaking that half of LW would notice within five minutes of having the powers explained (or maybe just introduced—do you need to know that someone generates his fireballs by burning in a weird chemical unwanted bodyhair (and subdermal fat when that runs out) to think of issues that arise from someone with the power to toss fireballs around?).