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comment by gwern · 2022-10-03T22:31:40.626Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Some comments on the SCP-style worldbuilding here:
- Mouse Utopia is extremely sus. Aside from the original mouse research being super sketchy, there are many historical examples of humans like Pitcairn Island or Easter Island or Antarctic bases where bad things like murder or extensive sexual abuse happen, but nothing like 'the beautiful ones' has ever happened.
- The timelines on food consumption sound absurdly optimistic; people eat a lot of food, and there's not actually that much food in a mega-retailer like a Walmart or Costco when you start talking about maintaining hundreds of people for years & still only depleting a few % of the total inventory. Those freezer shelves just ain't that big! This is why logistics is hard and stores need to restock daily to not run out of stuff, any kind of rumor can lead to brief stockouts, why interruptions in supply chains can lead to shortages within weeks, and estimates of food-supply on hand in developed countries tends to look like weeks, not years - it takes a mountain of food to feed one person for a few years. Either it needs to be multiple orders of magnitude bigger or getting resupplies.
- The ending is positive, but maybe you didn't intend that... Drilling through solid rock with hand tools is insanely difficult, with inches per day good progress (even leaving aside the problem that simple tools like sledgehammers will be ruined quickly and irreplaceable in this setting until the next iteration), and a giant tunnel through solid rock so long that you can take days to travel it (so >50 miles) could not have been made by hand by thousands of iterations*; therefore, the tunnels pre-exist and were made by the experimenters, and only the concrete seals (which are extremely easy to break, on the order of a few man-months) need to be broken; and so therefore each PriceCo starting population is now net-positive in terms of colonization - they have enough surplus calories initially to reach the next PriceCo, and so can set up a colonization wave throughout the PriceCo network, and eventually either fill up the network and escape out, hinder future experiments, or catch the shadow people via specialization+luck, thereby breaking the system.
* if you argue that x inches/day * thousands of iterations is enough if you stretch the numbers hard enough, you're forgetting that it's much worse than that because of the tyranny of the rocket equation, ie. you have to supply the workers at the hypothetical rock face: you need someone to walk several days back and forth just to supply a worker briefly, and the longer the tunnel gets, the worse supply efficiency gets exponentially.
Replies from: alexbeyman↑ comment by Alex Beyman (alexbeyman) · 2022-10-03T22:54:38.257Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It does not say anywhere that every group finishes the tunnel, nor that the tunnel is filled in between cycles. But it does hint that there have been many many groups before who lived and died without leaving the starting PriceCo. This solves the problem of tunnel length vs digging time.
Food supply duration is solved by farming, as explained in the story. There is an unlimited supply of energy and water, after all.
The other issues remain, but then, it's fiction meant to entertain and is tagged as such.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2022-10-05T19:27:47.653Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
But it does hint that there have been many many groups before who lived and died without leaving the starting PriceCo. This solves the problem of tunnel length vs digging time.
That makes the problem worse, not better, because now you are postulating that groups somehow fail to do the very obvious and empirically easy thing to try to escape, and that the few who do are now even more implausibly superhuman at chipping tunnels hundreds of miles long out of solid rock.
There is an unlimited supply of energy and water, after all.
Bracketing the problem of seeds (seeds in regular foods would be unfertilized, AFAIK, but we'll postulate a gardening department with some usable vegetables like tomatoes), farming is a lot harder than just stirring in some energy and water. You are losing irreplaceable minerals every cycle due to extensive inefficiencies everywhere: every visit to the bathroom, organic material is lost permanently. Look at Biosphere 2 or efforts at engineering stable closed ecosystems: it is not easy! That's why farmers rely so heavily on fertilizer, crop rotation, and other things. As written, the most basic outcome is that they start farming with the bags of soil in a gardening department, are weakened badly by low calorie harvests (no wheat or other cereal seeds in most gardening departments, and if you're lucky and there's some for a purpose like 'catgrass' it'll be a bunch of growing seasons before you have enough to spare to eat rather than replant...) and in the long run, protein deficiency as they use up stores, lose a bunch of crops to various errors (possibly contaminating everything), and the soil becomes exhausted.
it's fiction meant to entertain and is tagged as such.
It's fiction, yes - high-concept world-building fiction which lives or dies on the plausibly of the world-building which it goes into extensively. (Certainly it's not a character-driven story, as there are no characters in it, only cardboard cutouts and talking stereotypes.)
My point is that most of your errors are easily fixed if you think about it a little more. You don't need Mouse Utopia at all - it's a bad title because there's a thousand things named that already, and there's plenty of ways such a prison-society is doomed (eg shadow-people-worshipping cults) without invoking exotic and probably fraudulent rodent studies. The logistic point could be easily addressed by simply making the PriceCo 10-100x longer on each side, which is more eldritch, makes supplies large enough that one would have to start actually calculating it out to see how erroneous it is, and further addresses other problems (it is highly unlikely that large distinct tribes could stably form, they need a lot more space, or that two groups could just hang out in the same PriceCo for weeks without knowing each other - such warehouse buildings just aren't that big, you'd see or hear each other, if only from getting very very bored and getting up to walk and use the bathroom and water fountain). The positive ending is too subtle for most readers to deduce and needs to be made much blunter; or if you really had intended the negative ending, it's easy enough to just drop the absurdity of them chiseling out the tunnel and instead make the concrete a multi-year effort which breaks the original tools & use the rocket/jeep equation as the fatal barrier, which will be both actually plausible and educational for a reader.
Replies from: alexbeyman↑ comment by Alex Beyman (alexbeyman) · 2022-10-05T21:34:07.357Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
>"and that the few who do are now even more implausibly superhuman at chipping tunnels hundreds of miles long out of solid rock."
No, there have just been a lot of them over a very long period of time. Each made a little progress on the tunnel before dying out.
>"Look at Biosphere 2 or efforts at engineering stable closed ecosystems: it is not easy!"
This is not a true closed system.
>"and in the long run, protein deficiency as they use up stores, lose a bunch of crops to various errors (possibly contaminating everything), and the soil becomes exhausted."
Indeed, it doesn't last. Our dispute here is then merely one of how many years.
>"It's fiction, yes - high-concept world-building fiction which lives or dies on the plausibly of the world-building which it goes into extensively."
It's horror fiction, specifically. I speculate you read a lot of hard scifi. Hard scifi is like a blueprint for the future, the focus is plausible details. Horror is more like a literary nightmare. Things only need to make sense to the degree that dream logic makes sense, but unravels if you pry at it enough. That is a feature, not a bug.
>"it's a bad title because there's a thousand things named that already, and there's plenty of ways such a prison-society is doomed (eg shadow-people-worshipping cults) without invoking exotic and probably fraudulent rodent studies."
Only if the purpose is to maximize plausibility. Mouse utopia is something most readers from a wide variety of backgrounds will already know about. It reads instantly, and sets expectations for parallels. I compare this to the gun store scene in the original Terminator. Why would the T-800 want a pistol with a laser sight? What does a robot need help with aiming for? The laser sight's purpose was visual symbolism, to communicate a sense of near futurism to the audience and that Arnie's character is a sophisticated but stone cold, precise killer.
The rest of your post is basically "Why didn't you write it like I would write it" to which I say, because I am not you. I may not write to your taste, there are undoubtedly many who do. I will take what useful advice you included under advisement but put down most of your sticking points to a difference in our preferences and philosophies of story telling.
↑ comment by gwern · 2022-10-16T14:09:04.600Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Each made a little progress on the tunnel before dying out.
Which is impossible: if each one made a little progress, how did the later ones make a little progress as well when the task is so much harder due to the extraordinary distance? Did they learn how to teleport? Build a little high-speed levitating railroad to get to the end of the tunnel for the day's supplies? Ask the Russians how you supply a front line which is ever further away...
This is not a true closed system.
Indeed, but as written, the resets take place after everyone has died, which requires it to be stable for decades or centuries, which is wildly unlikely when Biosphere 2 couldn't keep it stable for like a year.
Things only need to make sense to the degree that dream logic makes sense, but unravels if you pry at it enough. That is a feature, not a bug.
This is bait-and-switch: "I'm going to do high-concept SCP SF worldbuilding literally set in a high-tech underground planet of vaults and focus on the details extensively all the way to the end - well, except when I get lazy and don't want to fix any details even when pointed out with easy fixes by a reader, and then it's all 'oh it's only horror fiction, it was never meant to be in a spirit of hard sci-fi, I'm not you, and I wrote it like I wanted to, there's no arguing taste'". Yeah, that's great, but I read it in the spirit conveyed.
(And even with all that, that doesn't excuse endorsing scientific myths like Mouse Utopia: yes, Mouse Utopia makes a great story - that's why you know it in the first place! because it's bullshit but it's a great story! Now the question is, why do you not care and feel no shame at making the reader more wrong, rather than less wrong?)
Replies from: alexbeyman↑ comment by Alex Beyman (alexbeyman) · 2022-10-18T01:02:08.153Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Because the purpose of horror fiction is to entertain. And it is more entertaining to be wrong in an interesting way than it is to be right.
>""I'm going to do high-concept SCP SF worldbuilding literally set in a high-tech underground planet of vaults"
I do not consider this story scifi, nor PriceCo to be particularly high tech.
>"and focus on the details extensively all the way to the end - well, except when I get lazy and don't want to fix any details even when pointed out with easy fixes by a reader"
All fiction breaks down eventually, if you dig deep enough. The fixes were not easy in my estimation. I am thinking now this story was a poor fit for this platform however
↑ comment by gwern · 2022-10-18T01:23:56.098Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Because the purpose of horror fiction is to entertain.
And it is more entertaining if the reader is sold on the worldbuilding instead of thinking to themselves 'decades? has this guy ever done his own grocery shopping? does he realize how little food a standard PriceCo warehouse contains?', and buy into the high-concept SF before the twist reveal ending that it was horror all along and the world-building and Robinson Crusoe stuff was a trap that the reader fell into just like the characters in every loop do.
And it is more entertaining to be wrong in an interesting way than it is to be right.
Arguably true of Mouse Utopia (I'm not saying it's not interesting or entertaining, I'm saying that it is false and I think you are doing a minorly bad thing by endorsing it), but not the others, which are neither interesting nor right.
I do not consider this story scifi, nor PriceCo to be particularly high tech.
You don't consider a story of mad science societal engineering across millennia of underground generation-ship-style arcologies, with implied brainwashing or cloning tech of some sort, and literal invisibility cloaks, to be 'high tech'?
The fixes were not easy in my estimation. I am thinking now this story was a poor fit for this platform however.
That is one way you could react to criticism, sure: not make a single fix and leave. If you only want adulatory feedback, then yes, I do not think the LW platform is for you.
comment by [deleted] · 2022-10-13T04:48:16.212Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree with the other commenters about the worldbuilding holes, but I personally didn't find them distracting enough to be an issue. The stone in particular didn't even register as a hole -- in the text it's implied that this has happened countless times, so I figured the authorities don't reset things outside the store and just spawn a fresh concrete block.
I really liked the ending. The reveal of endless stone followed by salvation and then a final twist of the knife with a fresh priceco was a great ride.
comment by M. Y. Zuo · 2022-10-07T13:50:58.893Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Strongly upvoted for effort since it was sitting at -4 karma.
Though I do also think the setting has really unbelievable parts as gwern mentioned.
The quality of writing isn't high enough to encourage the careful reader to gloss over those parts so it read mostly like an average YA fiction story to me.
With a lot of editing this might be worth a reread.