Are Evolution/Geological PODs inherently ASB subjects?

Which forum should host threads with Evolutionary/Geological PODs?

  • Alien Space Bats?

    Votes: 34 18.5%
  • Before 1900?

    Votes: 27 14.7%
  • A dedicated new subforum?

    Votes: 123 66.8%

  • Total voters
    184

SunDeep

Banned
The ASB forum is currently labelled 'asb and other magic', or something like that.

Were it called 'asb, magic and deep divergence' that would make things more... politically acceptable, perhaps.

Besides, it's Iain's board and he can do whatever he wants. This whole poll is, imo, a bit presumptuous, especially the way some people are wording their posts.

A few of the posts may be worded a bit presumptiously, but the poll was just to gauge public opinion, to see how people in general feel about this issue. And given that 111 people thus far have come out and said that they would prefer a new forum/sub-forum, you'd presume that at least half of those voters would at least take the trouble to visit that new forum/sub-forum if one were created, and that at least a tenth of the 'yes' voters may be interested enough to bother posting new threads there. The accumulated evidence in this poll, and speed with which those votes were collected, would seem to suggest that the proposed forum/sub-forum would be at least as active as the Future History Discussion forum; potentially even more so.

As such, based upon the evidence stacking up against it, the argument that such a forum/sub-forum couldn't hope to support itself is now baseless, disproven beyond reasonable doubt. Now, it's just down to Iain and the other moderators' personal opinions. While they aren't obliged to do anything, and we have to accept their decision, I'd like to believe that they are still prepared to listen to the people who post on their forum, taking our views and opinions into account before making their decisions. Only their actions can show whether my faith in them, our faith in them, is well-placed or not.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
One other thing that's been bugging me, is that butterfly nets are commonly employed in AH by writers who understandably don't feel like thinking about every possible divergence everywhere in the world, or those who wish to preserve a certain event occurring (like the European discovery of Australia) because it's an interesting "framing event".

In the context of a non-anthropocentric PoD, the emergence of anthropoid life functions as a nice framing event, as a reference point from which to look at the altered world.

In fact, it can be argued that in any alternate time-line, or alternate universe, all events that are random will have different outcomes, which means that everyone conceived after the PoD from our universe will have a chance to be born a different sex and with different characteristics. The new universe will have alterations to certain random occurrences in the brains of animals, and thus every event in the lives of historical characters which involves an animal (like, for example, Aurangzeb nearly getting trampled by an elephant) also has a chance of being different. This would mean that all PoDs that don't include all of these different outcomes can be accused of employing the butterfly net on a massive scale. The reality is that AH authors cherry pick the random events that they want to change and which are interesting to the narrative and leave everything else the same.

Also, the climate is part and parcel to the study of human history. The study of alternate climates or altered climatic events I would think would be a welcome aspect of alternate history.
 
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A few of the posts may be worded a bit presumptiously, but the poll was just to gauge public opinion, to see how people in general feel about this issue. And given that 111 people thus far have come out and said that they would prefer a new forum/sub-forum, you'd presume that at least half of those voters would at least take the trouble to visit that new forum/sub-forum if one were created, and that at least a tenth of the 'yes' voters may be interested enough to bother posting new threads there. The accumulated evidence in this poll, and speed with which those votes were collected, would seem to suggest that the proposed forum/sub-forum would be at least as active as the Future History Discussion forum; potentially even more so.

As such, based upon the evidence stacking up against it, the argument that such a forum/sub-forum couldn't hope to support itself is now baseless, disproven beyond reasonable doubt. Now, it's just down to Iain and the other moderators' personal opinions. While they aren't obliged to do anything, and we have to accept their decision, I'd like to believe that they are still prepared to listen to the people who post on their forum, taking our views and opinions into account before making their decisions. Only their actions can show whether my faith in them, our faith in them, is well-placed or not.

The problem with that is that only people who are interested in the subject are likely to vote in the poll which naturally gives it a bias to those who want a separate forum. I think Darthi's suggestion is the most sensible one, an amendment to the description of the ASB forum. I voted to keep in ASB on those grounds but I would guess that most people just wouldn't bother to vote (like the European elections happening today). I don't think that 111 people is really enough to create a new sub forum, you guess that a 10th of them would contribute regularly, that's not really a lot of people to sustain a sub forum in a place like this actually a good geologic timeline probably has more chance of being read in the ASB forum. I think the better argument is to ask Ian to remove/change the word magic which has a pejorative feel for those who are trying to put together serious timelines.
 
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Dorozhand

Banned
Once you start with Chaos Theory, you have leapt beyond ASB and entered a realm that makes my pointy little head hurt.

Chaos theory is ultimately what we're working on the assumption of with all AH, elsewise the universe is deterministic and all AH is ASB.
 
I think it should have it's own sub-forum but that's just me. :)

Or else have the ASB forum split into two. One that involves magic/ISOT/Fan-fics, etc. And a second that involves geog. and the like. Would make the good threads get buried less quickly.

BTW - since when did the ASB section become the new game-of-thrones section? :mad::(
 
In a way, geology is deterministic in its nature.

Geology is a fickle mistress and not deterministic at all. It's generally a series of small events that happen over millions and millions years that lead to other small events over millions and millions of years. A small change can have huge ramifications down the road.
 
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