Thanks to my reviewers
My thanks to MrWrong, Steeltitan, and Dr Shaw, who read my draft and left their thoughts and critiques on the forums!
SCP-2405 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2405.
It's not badly written at all, but I feel like I've seen "random alternate universe generator" enough times now, complete with alternate timelines where the Foundation is given prominence of the events of the future.
This attempts to differentiate itself through the quiz bowl presentation device, but all that's really doing for me is undercutting suspension of disbelief. The scenarios you present are a wildly varying set of societies emerging under different conditions, but I have a hard time believing they're all going to have similarly organized systems of higher education, let alone a regular quiz bowl-format academic competition. I suppose that the existence of quiz bowls could be some sort of universal constant, but why? That seems sort of random, and not really in a compelling way.
Personally speaking, I'm just not really moved by lists of alternate universes where things are different presented on their own, and the setup isn't doing it a whole lot of favors in my reading.
I can see where you're coming from as far as the undercutting suspension of disbelief thing, although I'd like to point out that after the Foundation tested the file at least 759409 times, only 5 of them have had extremely divergent timelines. To me, this would suggest that quizbowl is an activity that is specific to timelines similar to our own, but that it can develop in more divergent timelines under certain circumstances. For example, in the nomad timeline, there is an extremely different education system (if we could even call it that), but a roughly analogous activity has developed as a means of competition between clan groups, which this SCP has picked up on.
As for the lists of random universes thing: yeah, that's fair. My intent with this article was to reimagine a mundane activity and its significance in circumstances that are extremely different from our own world.
Maybe including more entries set in normal history quiz bowls, or simply stating somewhere that the examples in the logs are the only extremely divergent viewings, would clear up that confusion
I think the quizbowl format for creating numerous alternate histories is pretty creative, and I like what you came up with. If this survives, it could be a good candidate for a collaboration test log!
I like it. Alt history has been done before but there is something uniquely subtle about this - where small details have much larger implications. Well written and the tone is appropriately clinical. +1
I like the concept- alternate realities whose history we explicitly only get in the form of trivia, as opposed to the usual "information that is trivia because we're here and thus have no context for it". And I really like the subtle implication that thing is really really uncontained (they got it from a file sharing website, they don't know how long it was up there for, and when you make copies in the usual way they retain the properties).
There are a couple things that are bugging me, though:
- Experiment 0's content has been left out because the event claims to take place in 2017, but Experiments 135383 and 279198 also depict events claiming to take place in 2017 (the same event, even), and their contents have been summarized and listed. I presume there's a reason that Experiment 0 raises "concerns regarding causality" when the other two don't- but it would be good to include that reason, because right now it reads like "we left this one out because it's from 2017… now let us tell you about these, which are from 2017", which is very dissonant.
- It's more or less implied that the Foundation makes and retains non-self-altering copies of the different videos (if nothing else, that's the only way a given file can be viewed multiple times, which means it's the only way to implement that CSES screening procedure), but it's never outright stated that this is the case. Since that would basically be part of the containment procedures, or at least necessary information for any research on the files, I think it ought to be included.
- It's certainly possible that viewers can identify the lighting in Experiment 759409 as gas lighting from the video. "due to a lack of functional electrical lighting", however, requires more explanation as to how it could be discerned from a video of a quiz bowl match. I'm sure it could- someone might make a comment about the relative quality of the lighting compared to other circumstances, or the lack of electricity or of electric lamps might be referenced in a question- but it's not something that people would expect to hear about in the normal course of events, so it would be good to explain how it was verified. (It's particularly odd for us to have heard a comment about the quality of the lighting from a setting where no one is doing any reading or writing…)
Experiment 0's content has been left out because the event claims to take place in 2017, but Experiments 135383 and 279198 also depict events claiming to take place in 2017 (the same event, even), and their contents have been summarized and listed. I presume there's a reason that Experiment 0 raises "concerns regarding causality" when the other two don't- but it would be good to include that reason, because right now it reads like "we left this one out because it's from 2017… now let us tell you about these, which are from 2017", which is very dissonant.
OK, I can see why Experiment 0 might be confusing, so I explicitly stated why it might raise those concerns. Basically, the researchers think that Experiment 0 is a recording of the future in the timeline that they are in, whereas the other experiments are from alternate timelines.
It's more or less implied that the Foundation makes and retains non-self-altering copies of the different videos (if nothing else, that's the only way a given file can be viewed multiple times, which means it's the only way to implement that CSES screening procedure), but it's never outright stated that this is the case. Since that would basically be part of the containment procedures, or at least necessary information for any research on the files, I think it ought to be included.
Well, the Special Containment Procedures already references "videos derived from SCP-2405," which I think should satisfy this concern.
It's certainly possible that viewers can identify the lighting in Experiment 759409 as gas lighting from the video. "due to a lack of functional electrical lighting", however, requires more explanation as to how it could be discerned from a video of a quiz bowl match. I'm sure it could- someone might make a comment about the relative quality of the lighting compared to other circumstances, or the lack of electricity or of electric lamps might be referenced in a question- but it's not something that people would expect to hear about in the normal course of events, so it would be good to explain how it was verified. (It's particularly odd for us to have heard a comment about the quality of the lighting from a setting where no one is doing any reading or writing…)
That's fair, and I've changed that description to a more general one about electronic appliances.
On Experiment 0: OK, but that raises further questions…
- If the contents are classified because it might be from our future, but the only way to determine whether it's from our future is to view the contents, then who decided to classify it (and how likely is it that they were wrong, since this was before they were using an expert system)?
- Given that all the 750000+ videos claim to be from a future, how much 'weirdness' is necessary to mark a given video's contents as 'not our future' and declassify them (where's the line between "this reality clearly diverged from ours before the present day" and "this reality might be possible in 2017 if something very strange happened to us tomorrow"?), and how many other videos have failed to reach that threshold and been classified as possible actual futures?
The second one in particular sounds like it could be an interesting line of inquiry for a tale or supplement or something- does the Foundation have a big restricted archive of Possible 2017 ACF Final Matches (as opposed to the less-restricted archive of Alternate 2017 ACF Final Matches)? Does anybody think it might be a good idea to look at that archive and use it as a map of possible near futures, to make important decisions?
On the storage of SCP-2405-derived videos: good point, my bad. :)
On Experiment 759409: good move, but I think you're aiming for "electrical"; "electronic" is more specific. Lightbulbs are electrical but not electronic.
If the contents are classified because it might be from our future, but the only way to determine whether it's from our future is to view the contents, then who decided to classify it (and how likely is it that they were wrong, since this was before they were using an expert system)?
The Foundation doesn't think that Experiment 0 is from our future because of its content, necessarily, but because of the context in which it exists. SCP-2405 purports to depict an event in the future, but when it is viewed, it depicts an alternative future, which you might think of as a kind of temporal interference. However, when one looks at the actual video data, they can avoid this interference and see what SCP-2405 is meant to depict: the 2017 ACF Nationals finals in the Baseline.
Given that all the 750000+ videos claim to be from a future, how much 'weirdness' is necessary to mark a given video's contents as 'not our future' and declassify them (where's the line between "this reality clearly diverged from ours before the present day" and "this reality might be possible in 2017 if something very strange happened to us tomorrow"?), and how many other videos have failed to reach that threshold and been classified as possible actual futures?
The Foundation believes that all of the experiments past Experiment 0 are not representations of the Baseline future, for the reasons I mentioned above. The purpose of the neural networks is more for distinguishing iterations that are of interest to the Foundation because they show something new about SCP-2405.
On Experiment 759409: good move, but I think you're aiming for "electrical"; "electronic" is more specific. Lightbulbs are electrical but not electronic.
Thanks, good catch.
This isn't bad, but it's pretty bland - there are TONS of alternate universe skips already, and there's no thought-provoking angle. I'm apathetic - not scared, not curious, not caring, not nervous, this just sort of is there and, well, OK?
I wonder how many people that come to this website will actually be attending.
If you're referring to the actual IRL 2017 ACF Nationals tournament… some non-zero number.
Are you going to edit it to 2018, like some of the other future SCP's?
/forum/t-1725338/scp-2405#post-
page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
