Elfthreads!

[jalapeno_dude]

Didn't Tolkien just intend it to be the Christian afterlife?

[DanielH]

I shall give Eru the benefit of the doubt, because he has so clearly earned it with everything else he's done, and assume it's one of those afterlife deals where everybody only wakes up after the end of the world.

[DanielH]

In Silmaril they keep saying that knowledge about marriage is an infohazard. Could they safely say “there is a secret to nonstandard marriages, and if you know the secret you can marry a wider selection of people and may or may not be able to control whether any given thing will lead to marriage” without telling them the secret that this sentence is almost the entirety of the needed knowledge? It seems safe but also lets people be practically fully informed when they decide.

[Kappa]

That feels a little bit like telling people there's a secret to rendering star wishcoins safe to use. Like, on the one hand you're not technically telling them how, and on the other hand if they think about it for thirty seconds, make an obvious guess, and then check the obvious guess...

[Ezra]

Well, they might at least get to decide whether to think about it for thirty seconds.

[DanielH]

And whether to check the obvious guess. The point isn't too keep it secret, the point is to reduce the infohazard. If it weren't an infohazard they would be happy to tell everybody. This does potentially give other people the ability to spread an infohazard, I suppose.

[Kappa]

Well, with stars the problem is that someone might have the train of thought "I wonder if wishing it safe naively with another coin will work", with marriage the problem is that at an inopportune moment someone might have the train of thought "I wonder why knowing the secret by itself makes marriage harder to control, is it really that easy to make yourself uncontrollably marriageable... ... ... ...oops"

[Ezra]

I'm falling behind in my understanding of which worlds connect to which others. Could we see an updated summary of that again soon, either as a map or as a text summary like the one at the start of "map of worlds"?

[Alicorn]

I'm planning to redraw the map soonish (with the IC names like "Stork" instead of "Cycle" and some stuff fiddled around so that Vanilla Arda can reasonably be "south") and I can upload that once I have it.

[Ezra]

Sounds good!