Pedagogical note: something that feels like it’s missing from the fable is a “realistic” sense of how demons get created and how they can manipulate the hill.
Fortunately your subsequent real-world examples all have this, and, like, I did know what you meant. But it felt sort of arbitrary to have this combo of “Well, there’s a very concrete, visceral example of the ball rolling downhill – I know what that means. But then there are some entities that can arbitrarily shape the hill. Why are the demons weak at the beginning and stronger the more you fold into demon space? What are the mechanics there?
It’s not the worst thing, and I don’t have any ideas to tighten it. Overall I do think the post did a good job of communicating the idea it was aiming at.
Updated the long paragraph in the fable a bit, hopefully that will help somewhat. It’s hard to make it really concrete when I don’t have a good mathematical description of how these things pop up; I’m not sure which aspects of the environment make it happen, so I don’t know what to emphasize.
Pedagogical note: something that feels like it’s missing from the fable is a “realistic” sense of how demons get created and how they can manipulate the hill.
Fortunately your subsequent real-world examples all have this, and, like, I did know what you meant. But it felt sort of arbitrary to have this combo of “Well, there’s a very concrete, visceral example of the ball rolling downhill – I know what that means. But then there are some entities that can arbitrarily shape the hill. Why are the demons weak at the beginning and stronger the more you fold into demon space? What are the mechanics there?
It’s not the worst thing, and I don’t have any ideas to tighten it. Overall I do think the post did a good job of communicating the idea it was aiming at.
Updated the long paragraph in the fable a bit, hopefully that will help somewhat. It’s hard to make it really concrete when I don’t have a good mathematical description of how these things pop up; I’m not sure which aspects of the environment make it happen, so I don’t know what to emphasize.