scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3ox3ax.md

[RT] It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue

• Author: u/capsless despiser of hpmor*

• URL: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/

• Score: 71

• Created: 2015-10-15T22:57:35

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u/capsless [+14] despiser of hpmor (a minute later)

following the age-old tradition of posting ssc fiction here, and breaking the age-old tradition of never using capitals. better sacrifice myself to the volcano gods, i guess

u/None [+26] (an hour later)

Dammit Scott, I've been working on a story based on that logic puzzle for months now, and I'm about two days into this short and it's already 10x better. shakes fist at heaven volcano

u/ScottAlexander [+22] (3 hours later)

I'm interested in seeing it if you want to share.

u/want_to_want [+6] (17 hours later)

Wow, you're on Reddit! Wheeeeeee

I'm cousin_it btw

u/None [+4] (18 hours later)

Wait, you are!?

Holy crap, everyone is here. Creepy.

THE CABAL IS HERE.

u/LiteralHeadCannon [+12] (3 hours later)

I wonder if the only reason that no-one has induced a self-improvement loop by consuming more and more sparkroot is because everyone concludes, past a certain amount of sparkroot, that if it were possible to induce a self-improvement loop by consuming more and more sparkroot, someone would have already, which has clearly not happened, and therefore the risk of death-by-overdose infinitely outweighs the potential for a self-improvement loop.

Clearly we need to force-feed someone indefinite amounts of sparkroot to see what happens. If the answer is "they die", then we add an entry to the Tablets Of Enku that says "don't eat too much sparkroot" and then never speak of it again.

u/SvalbardCaretaker [+24] Mouse Army (3 hours later)

that line about terrible sickness afterwards seem to be specifically included for this very purpose. Short overdose is possible, but at cost.

u/satanistgoblin [+13] (4 hours later)

One would eat enough sparkroot to find a cure for symptoms of overdose?

u/None [+6] (9 hours later)

Not necessarily, sparkroot makes you think a bit faster/clearer but it doesn't allow you to magically acquire information from nowhere.

u/SvalbardCaretaker [+14] Mouse Army (13 hours later)

Well it looks like it does kinda? "Upon my first taste of sparkroot I knew volcanoes are upswellings of magma in the crust" -

either sparkroot allows you to integrate all of the sensory data you have ever acquired to coherent models upon models - with the implication that normal human sensors are good enough to get plate tectonics, which I highly doubt - or you get extrasensory data.

u/philip1201 [+3] (22 hours later)

You can get Newtonian gravity from the motion of visible planets and the sun. You can get a rough idea of phase transitions and thermodynamics by watching cookery. Matter appears to be preserved in all understood cases.

Volcanoes physically grow during an eruption. Magma cools into rock, and appears in the caldera. Since matter can't just be created, it makes sense that it came from below. Since rock and magma are the same, and the Earth is huge, and the caldera narrow, the layer of solid rock has to be thin compared to the size of the Earth, since a column of magma below the volcano can remain molten for centuries. So it makes sense that the solid rock is but a crust, and the magma came up from below for some reason.

u/SvalbardCaretaker [+7] Mouse Army (22 hours later)

Yeah no, I'm not buying it. Sure, molten rock comes out of the earth - but "upswelling of magma in the earths mantle" - nah, thats too big of a leap.

the layer of solid rock has to be thin compared to the size of the Earth Privileging the hypothesis.

How do you infer a layer of solid rock at all?

Equally possible is a fully solid earth with a single spot where unknown processes create lots of heat

u/LiteralHeadCannon [+2] (4 hours later)

Gonna come clean - I read the story very quickly and forgot that line.

u/Transfuturist [+6] Carthago delenda est. (7 hours later)

Beautiful, but the simplest solution would have been to cut everyone's (E: left) eyes out on the first day.

u/avret [+19] SDHS rationalist (11 hours later)

I guess that is the...

Sunglasses

optical solution.

Brief pause

Oh god why did I put sunglasses on over empty eye sockets it burns why

u/adad64 [+4] Chaos Legion (16 hours later)

Didn't the law say eyes? You realy only need to remove one.

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (16 hours later)

Point.

The point that is cutting out one of each pair of eyes.

u/diraniola [+3] (9 hours later)

But would that have been the optimal solution?

u/lvwolb [+2] (14 hours later)

How would that have solved anything? They already knew each other's eye colors.

u/Sylocat [+1] Canterlot Campaign (15 hours later)

Even more so if they didn't have eyes.

Though I suppose they could have cut out one eye each and said that the rule specifically refers to "Eyes, plural."

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (16 hours later)

If they ensure that none of their group has a pair of blue eyes before they know that they themselves have blue eyes, no one has to die by the law.

u/None [+2] (18 hours later)

Do they have sufficient medical care so as not to die from gouging out their eyes?

u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (18 hours later)

Ask Scott.

u/JackStargazer [-1] Primordial Apologist (16 hours later)

I think the simplest solution would have been not to write a law that forced 99.99% of your population to commit suicide under a certain easy to reach condition.

I mean, was the guy who wrote those things not on sparkroot? Where did those tablets come from anyways?

u/None [+6] (17 hours later)

I like to imagine that the original colonists of the island enjoyed a brief period of sparkroot-y genius before realizing that the only way to keep some well-intentioned idiot high on sparkroot from destroying the world was to tie up everyone's heads in pointless ritual. And if they ever needed to work against a world-ending threat, they'd still have the root.

u/JackStargazer [+4] Primordial Apologist (18 hours later)

And if they ever needed to work against a world-ending threat, they'd still have the root.

But they wouldn't really be able to since on alternate Tuesdays they'd have to dance on one leg and recite pi or kill themselves.

u/HlynkaCG [+1] (2 days later)

That was pretty much my theory as well.

u/notmy2ndopinion [+6] Concent of Saunt Edhar (3 days later)

I feel like there is an allegory on introspective self-awareness, touching the edges of this...

“Who even decides these things!” she asked. “Why is it wrong to know your own eye color?”

“The eye is the organ that sees,” said Calkas. “It’s how we know what things look like. If the eye knew what it itself looked like, it would be an infinite cycle, the eye seeing the eye seeing the eye seeing the eye and so on. Like dividing by zero. It’s an abomination. That’s why the Volcano God, in his infinite wisdom, said that it must not be.”

Also, somewhere on the island, there HAS to be a child with a canoe, a bag of corn, a duck and a fox.

u/BadGoyWithAGun [+4] (a day later)

I can't escape the association of a certain other intellectually gifted tribe that also denies mixing with Europeans, sacrifices body parts and worships a volcano demon.

u/Subrosian_Smithy [+1] Nudist Beach (13 days later)

What tribe?

u/BadGoyWithAGun [+2] (13 days later)

A certain Israelite tribe, if you will.

u/electrace [+9] (5 hours later)

So... everyone seems pretty chill about killing the Spanish guy, even though they killed him due to a law they no longer believe in, and the fact that he ended up making their lives better.

u/aeschenkarnos [+18] (9 hours later)

They live in a very un-empathetic society, and to some extent practice orange/blue morality.

u/itaibn0 [+4] (3 days later)

Don't forget that he tastes great with ketchup.

u/JackStargazer [+4] Primordial Apologist (16 hours later)

They haven't really internalized the change in morals yet.

u/LiteralHeadCannon [+2] (17 hours later)

I'm thinking the blue-eyed islander problem out and I'm thinking that the following things are true:

• If you, as an outsider, convince the islanders collectively of any true statement that implies that there's at least one blue-eyed islander, all the blue-eyed islanders will leave the island.
• If you, as an outsider, convince the islanders collectively of any false statement that implies that there's at least one blue-eyed islander, they will collectively correct themselves, realizing that it's false. Probably no one will leave the island. (EDIT: Or maybe everyone leaves the island?! IDK, I think my original conclusion was false now that I'm thinking about it more.)

u/RMcD94 [+0] (16 hours later)

Uh, wouldn't you have to bathe on the first day?

A = 0, b=1 for all n x =1

u/None [+5] (16 hours later)

The story doesn't mention it, but of course, this is a reference to the Fermat theorem. It requires a, b, x and n to be non-zero integers. If you don't take that into account, you should conclude that they must bathe every day, because any x can be very easily represented as a sum of powers of some non-integers a and b.

u/RMcD94 [+1] (16 hours later)

Oh yeah that was dumb of me, don't know how I didn't follow it to its logical conclusion there. With a as 0 you can do everything.

I had not heard of that before hence not getting reference thanks for info

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