9.3 KiB
The Study of Anglophysics by Scott Alexander
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Author: u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy*
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URL: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/03/the-study-of-anglophysics/
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Score: 40
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Created: 2016-05-15T12:25:35
Post:
Comments:
u/DCarrier [+19] (4 hours later)
I don't know how you guys feel about reposting comments onto the reddit part, but I figured out how to "solve" their physics last time and I wanted to post it somewhere other than five comments from the bottom.
Instead of actually isolating each letter, all you need to do is come up with reactions that produce extra of each letter, and use them together. For example, if you want to make a cat, you use (crab -> bar + c) + (bead -> bed + a) + (tart -> tar + t) = crab + bead + tart -> bar + bed + tar + cat.
This can be further improved upon. In this case, you’d need to put the bar, bed, and tar into the nanofab afterwards to get another crab, bead and tart. Consider the e-producing reaction axe -> ax + e. Since ax is a synonym for axe, you can just keep using it, and get as much e as you want.
Unfortunately, you probably won’t find synonyms that nice for every letter. You can use combinations to get letters, but that would seem to be too difficult.
Then I realized you just need matrices. For each pair of synonyms, you make one row in the matrix by subtracting the letters of one from the other. For example, axe = ax gives (0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0). Couch = sofa gives (-1,0,2,0,0,-1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0). Hopefully, you get an invertible matrix. If it isn’t invertible, just remove the linearly dependant synonyms and find some more. Once you have the matrix, just invert it.
Now each row represents a reaction that takes a certain set of objects, and produces those same objects plus a letter. You can produce capsules for each letter so that you can stick them together to produce whatever it is you need. Alternately, you can make a vector representing the number of each letter in whatever you want to produce, multiply the matrix by that, and use the given reactions to produce that object.
To stop the world from ending, couldn’t he just have used the reaction sound + grin -> ground + sin? There doesn’t seem to be anything forcing the reaction to go in a particular direction.
u/None [+15] (8 hours later)
It seems to me that creating SIN as a means of averting the end of the world is just asking for a bad time.
u/ulyssessword [+5] (a day later)
Do synonyms exist (as anglophysical reality)? Somon gave the True Names as "rock" and "wheat", not "rock or stone or granite or pebble" and "wheat or grain or seed or food"
EDIT:
We tried the experiment again with a zinc vial – zinc because it was implausible that there was an ZINC + E anagram lurking out there – and ended up with a mat of eels. Through this whole time, we had been debating the problem of ambiguity – who was to say that our granite was GRANITE rather than ROCK or even STONE – and the answer seemed to be that Dr. Adwell – or whoever was watching Upstairs – was mostly sympathetic to our efforts. Well, the sympathy ended when we started trying to isolate single letters. ZINC became METAL and thence EEL MATs.
u/DCarrier [+4] (a day later)
Through this whole time, we had been debating the problem of ambiguity – who was to say that our granite was GRANITE rather than ROCK or even STONE – and the answer seemed to be that Dr. Adwell – or whoever was watching Upstairs – was mostly sympathetic to our efforts. Well, the sympathy ended when we started trying to isolate single letters. ZINC became METAL and thence EEL MATs.
u/Pandomy [+10] (2 hours later)
In case anyone might prefer this story in audio form, the HPMoR podcast read it while waiting for new HPMoR chapters to come out.
u/None [+4] (an hour later)
Also check out the interactive fiction game Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short if you like settings that run on linguistics.
You can play it online here, but the standalone gblorb emulators like Gargoyle are less laggy.
u/xamueljones [+7] My arch-enemy is entropy (2 minutes later)
Since the last time this was posted to the subreddit was two years ago, and we have UNSONG (by the same author) constantly being posted to here, I thought this was worthy of a repost. Also if we are going to read a story about traveling to a world with drastically different rules of physics, then Eliezer's rant is mandatory reading.
Side Question: Does anyone know of any off-line copies of articles from Scott's blog? I've been thinking about making my own copy of it, but I don't want to go through all of the work to make a nice version if one already exists.
u/RMcD94 [+7] (36 minutes later)
https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/225eak/rt_the_study_of_anglophysics/
Might as well link the last discussion thread we had on it. Doesn't seem like 2 years ago
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)
Time and life flies by, doesn't it?
u/RMcD94 [+6] (an hour later)
Indeed it does, hurry up immortality so it seems less worrying.
u/Lugnut1206 [+5] (10 hours later)
I like his rant, but realize that in the context of this story those flaws are handled by how the world apparently works off of the English professor's subconscious. Basically, "it works because it should."
u/None [+3] (15 days later)
Eliezer's wrant is just wrong, though. In Norse World, people still work, presumably through the power of an animating force, rather than through chemical reactions. It makes perfect sense for a chemical-human to be translated to an animating-force-human, and and for the chemical-match to be translated to a just-wood-match. Presumably people would be perfectly fine if they were placed into a vaccum-sealed chamber, because they never needed oxygen in the first place.
The rant is completely inapplicable unless something in the story shows that animating-force-people can't survive in vaccum-sealed chambers or such, but that seems unlikely.
u/Chevron [+1] there is no antimemetics division (12 hours later)
Well now I've heard of Unsong, so thanks!
u/Green0Photon [+2] Student in Cyoria, Minmay, and Ranvar (a day later)
Dude, UNSONG is the best. Uriel FTW.
u/Chevron [+5] there is no antimemetics division (a day later)
THERE ARE MANY FISH METAPHORS
u/space_fountain [+1] (3 hours later)
Interesting rant, but there are plenty of solutions to that problem if you allow some kind of magic. In particular, I'm thinking of having magic work by subtly adjusting the laws of physics. Why would such a thing evolve. Well what if some parts of human physiology doesn't actually work in our universe. I don't really care why exactly, but it doesn't seem that impossible. It's not like we are in the habit of running particle accelerates through humans or even animals. If this was the case than it would be reasonable that chemical reactions inside a human would continue functioning as normal, but nothing would be known for sure about things outside.
u/None [+3] (2 hours later)
I just have to say, just to feel normal again; holy shit! Can you imagine if this concept was actually real? And there was some way to verify that it was the guy's ascended conciousness running the show in his new world? Not only would this resolve the Fermi Paradox (the creator of our world imagined an inhabited planet in a universe, not a universe filled with inhabited planets) but who would want to stay on Earth when you could, theoretically, essentially upload your mind to a new universe on your deathbed? EDIT: If all of the above was true, what would you do?
u/Arancaytar [+3] (6 hours later)
I see some foreshadowing of Scott's current Unsong story, with the word/name magic.
Mh. ... I'm not sure why their nanofactory can cope with the weird physics when they can't even get matches to work.
u/abcd_z [+2] (18 hours later)
Things work on a conceptual level there. A nanofactory is something that works exactly the way a nanofactory is supposed to.
The more relevant question is, "Why didn't the nanofactory eventually reduce to something else?"
u/ulyssessword [+2] (a day later)
Nanofactories are resistant to being reacted, in much the same way as AI is resistant to being created.
u/Arancaytar [+2] (2 days later)
I did an anagram search and found, eg., an ACORN, a TOY and a FAN.
u/None [+1] (2 hours later)
I wonder if this could work as a setting for a video game.
u/Roxolan [+6] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (3 hours later)
Sure. It's just one step removed from Scribblenauts.
u/None [+1] (4 hours later)
Wait, this was by Scott? I had no idea. That's fantastic.