Why vs. debating fails

In real life, if X and Y happen together, Z will happen, it'll all fit together, even if there's some chance, that chance is still a part of fitting together, all top tier harmony
If X and Y and Z had no meaning and studying them gave nothing but top confusion, we would devote 0% effort to studying it or anything, all things would be random, we'd be like Star Wars
In Star Wars we act as if X and Y cause Z, which is literally delusional, as in it is amazing we are all not on a watch list, we are deluded to top tier, X and Y do not cause Z, X and Y and Z are all caused by authors and editors and marketers, if they fit together it is never at very precise level but instead at very vague level
In fiction events from before do not make events from after happen, they are all just the whims of our world, we could make it 100% random if we wanted
"But we can pretend X and Y does cause Z!" - that is like pretending 1+1=3, you can pretend and you will tie in knots coming to cringe-tier conclusions with zero usefulness, every time an author makes a new Vader comic you sweat because you know your scaling will fall apart and have zero ability to see what the comic will come out as, unlike in real life where scientists know their theories will help them actually see things in advance

I agree that the vs. debating methodology we use has close to zero predictive power; however, I think the idea is to imagine "if the Star Wars universe were real at its exact current state", so the need to predict how a future publication may influence it is irrelevant because the base assumption doesn't say "if the Star Wars universe were real and constantly changed in accordance with future publications". Those future publications just make us instantiate a new hypothetical universe, but there's no reason to expect some sort of predictive correlation between each new instantiation.

Of course, you could just modify that thought experiment to say "what if we selected a random source we hadn't seen yet and tried to predict the outcome of the fights in it?". It's possible to have a data set that's so chaotic you can hardly predict one part of it from the rest, but in this case we're not leaving "the data is all fake" as an option, so if we operate under these assumptions we try to come up with the best in-universe explanations that we can, even if it ends up being really chaotic. Then the question of predictive power beyond the given data is intractable (but we could imagine that if our hypothetical universe existed, it would be predictive).

I agree that there's a hint of underlying nihilism, but that's OK - that Star Wars isn't real should hardly be a surprise to anyone. The debating can still be fun and engaging, so long as it's handled reasonably.

Moved to the appropriate forum.

The Ellimist wrote:I agree that the vs. debating methodology we use has close to zero predictive power; however, I think the idea is to imagine "if the Star Wars universe were real at its exact current state", so the need to predict how a future publication may influence it is irrelevant because the base assumption doesn't say "if the Star Wars universe were real and constantly changed in accordance with future publications". Those future publications just make us instantiate a new hypothetical universe, but there's no reason to expect some sort of predictive correlation between each new instantiation.

Of course, you could just modify that thought experiment to say "what if we selected a random source we hadn't seen yet and tried to predict the outcome of the fights in it?". It's possible to have a data set that's so chaotic you can hardly predict one part of it from the rest, but in this case we're not leaving "the data is all fake" as an option, so if we operate under these assumptions we try to come up with the best in-universe explanations that we can, even if it ends up being really chaotic. Then the question of predictive power beyond the given data is intractable (but we could imagine that if our hypothetical universe existed, it would be predictive).

I agree that there's a hint of underlying nihilism, but that's OK - that Star Wars isn't real should hardly be a surprise to anyone. The debating can still be fun and engaging, so long as it's handled reasonably.