Shattered Kingdoms

It's unfortunate that every argument I make also has to be weighed and measured in triplicate. I thought it was a relatively sound argument. For example, do I need to weigh a dumbbell in order to figure out that adding another bar to each end will make it heavier? No, I do not. Yes, you care about what glasses you need, but did you study optometry and diagnose yourself to figure out the numbers, or did you just put them on when you received them and then conclude that, yes, these things work for me.

You appear to have read my post and think that I'm arguing that the world is not full of numbers. On the contrary, I am arguing that the engine which powers the real world has way more numbers than the SK engine. But unless you are a physicist, you aren't spending your life trying to reverse engineer how the engine works. Most people just look at what they can see with their five senses, accept reality for what it is, make a call about how to improve their life, and then move on.

But for better or for worse, I guess examples about ordinary people probably don't apply to anyone who is spending time posting in the forum of a MUD in 2014. If there are some people that do make spreadsheets in order to figure out how to plan their every day, this is probably one of the places where you will find them.

Note that my final comment above is not a slam on anyone. It's bitter irony, because I don't think of myself as an ordinary person, but I'm describing what I think ordinary people do. By running a MUD, I am a self-proclaimed king of the spreadsheets.

Oh man, I laughed out loud at those two posts.

Even physicists don't do this. The combustion engine has been working for about a hundred years and is well understood.

This is pretty daft. I don't have to do any mathematics when trying to lift something. I can tell by its mass versus the mass of something else if it is heavier or lighter than it due to the amount of work that my muscles have to do.



Yeah, they do, all the time. Unless you try to keep yourself in relatively good shape, as you can hurt yourself by trying to lift more than you're able or using improper technique.



Pretty sure no pair of glasses can fix your eyesight.



The word you're looking for is "chock". And no, they aren't. Pseudo sciences such as alchemy were based more on process. The holy grail of alchemy was to produce the philosopher's stone with which just about anything could be done. There are varying accounts of the number of steps used to accomplish this in alchemy but it generally follows the path of nigredo, albedo, citrinitas and rubedo. Chemistry later replaced this and was so good at its job that many of the elements you see displayed on the periodic table were not discovered until the 20th century. Yet the chemists were so good at it that they had filled out the table with their atomic weight, color, so on and so forth of what they expected those elements to be like.






Obligatory

How do you tell whether an item has 10 enchants or 4 enchants? You can't, that's how. Maybe a compromise here would be adding in an affect or when an item has 6 enchants and an item has 8?

Dumbbells usually have their weights embossed on them. Just like most products where one of the most important attributes is their weight. You don't go buy an average amount of milk or cars that their fuel consumption are slight. It seems you're arguing for some sort of common perception over exact knowledge and common experience says we kinda do both but not when something is important enough to know the specifics. I'd say that if magic existed, we'd know how many runes we would put on something since that's important.



Don't you think that the classes that get the identify spell would be the respective physicists in the SK world? We're talking about grand master magic users, I'd think they would have worked some method of knowing these things since it's right up their alley profession-wise. I like the view of the average person being a simpleton but professionally I know they're not and their complexity is far beyond the five senses and common sense. Sometimes. I'm getting the feeling we're going to get sidetracked into questions like, well if people rarely use numbers like you claim, why are there so many around or why science evolved and all that and that would be veering very far away from the subject.




You can tell the difference between 100 grams and 124 grams just by lifting? Do you have a calorimeter attached somewhere?



I'm not convinced you understand the difference between knowing if something is "heavy" and how much "heavier" if something is "heavier" than something else .



Lol can you please stick to subjects that you supposedly know, like measuring mass by lifting stuff like a proper physicist? Mathematics and geometry originally developed for commerce, construction, astronomy and magic. Since you're clearly a knob who doesn't realise that modern positivist realism unfortunately didn't always apply to science, let me inform you that once upon a time, numbers were seen as divine entities and magical symbols that could be used to alter reality. Pythagoras studied geometrical shapes because of their supposed mystical and sacred properties, firmly believed that numbers not only govern existence but the birth and death of gods, demi-gods and everything in between and his followers freaked out to such an extent when they discovered irrational numbers that their reaction entered the realm of myth. Plato, who more or less continued down that path thought that we couldn't even experience numbers in their true glory since they were in some sort of gilded universe of pure existence and we can only call down representations and other rubbish. There are plenty of examples of magical incantations in the Papyri Graecae Magicae that are basically nonsensical strings of vowels that you can only understand through their methods of number correspondences. All known idealist philosophers before those two were immersed in similar things like gematria and numerology, something that didn't stop until beyond the early modern era. I'll just cite here the famous example of medieval occult trolling known as Steganographia by Johannes Trithemius, in which he hid a more or less complete steganographic method underneath three books on summoning demons and angels and their magic squares. Kinda funny cause magical squares are featured in an SK area although they function as sudokus or something.

As for alchemy which I wasn't even talking about, you're basically describing some sort of Harry Potter-like stereotype based on popular conceptions of Enlightenment-era alchemy. This thing was nothing more than early metallurgy and material science cultivated by the Chaldeans, Egyptians and to some extent Jews, that people like Olympiodorus and Zosemus blew the lid on in the fifth century. All the jargon and obsfuscation were intentional so certain secrets like gold purification and other simple chemical-metallurgical processes would stay within a specific knowledge-and-power elit. Sort of like SK but wholly intentional. I'd recommend a few nice -but a bit dated today- works by Pierre Berthelot if I had any suspicion you'd be able to read them. As I already said, there's no point for me to give any examples on this here so bugger off with the trolling.

I regret starting this thread.

This is all way tldr.

DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE

DO YOU SEE IT NOW

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE THINGS

~A Haiku dedicated to woahboy

Are you sure that's a haiku?