Argument: Harder to keep the populace in line, if everyone has more power.
I think you’re missing the existential risk inherent in Alicorns or how precariously Equestria is balanced on the knife edge of extinction. Here’s a short list of possible extinction events: Nightmare Moon, Parasprites (Twilight enhanced), Discord, King Sombra, and god-knows-what from Star-Swirl the Bearded’s library. ‘Mere’ civilization ending events are Smarty Pants Doll (enchanted), Parasprites (unmodified), Windegos, Changelings, and the duplicating mirror. This is a world with Cuban Missile Crisis going on every other month and a rogue AI power-equivelent popping up every year . Imagine if Twilight had accidentally made parasprites carnivorous in addition to eating non-edibles? Game over, for everyone, forever. It’s not a world made safer by having more Alicorns. God-tier magic seems to override other Got-tier magic; in all God-tier confrontations, victory always goes to the initiator of each round of any fight. TLDR; offense > defense.
Also, you need to look at what Celestia herself has to gain. Right now she’s the God Empress of ponies. The only people capable of challenging her are her sisters and other deity class entities. If the world were to be eaten by omnivorous Von-Neuman parasprites tomorrow, she could teleport to another planet and (presumably) re-start the pony race. She’d be sad, but life would still go on. The only way that ponykind could experience a true extinction would be if she and her sisters were to die. For every pony that Celestia decides to uplift, she makes herself a little more vulnerable. What motivation does she have to do that?
Celestia is very selective about who she uplifts, judging by Twilight. Notably, Celestia makes sure that Twilight benevolent, very grounded with friendship, selfless, understands the nature of when (and when not to) use magic, understands the existential risks of magic (firsthand), has dealt with god-tier entities and understands their limitations. There’s a musical number about how Celestia’s been testing her to see if Twilight’s the kind of person who’d kill or enslave everypony if given limitless power. Twilight only gets uplifted when she passes all the tests.
Here’s a related question: You have just been uplifted by an immortal, Friendly AI. How do convince it that you should start uplifting everybody who asks instead of people whom the AI deems non-dangerous? …and why do you even want to convince it?
A large amount of the things you mention become less dangerous in the event of greater alicorn presence in Equestria, not more. Nightmare Moon, Discord and Chrysalis ALL almost won, and if even just a few dozen alicorns had existed, they wouldn’t have stood a chance in hell.
Now, the whole existential risk angle...is a very interesting point, since based on what I’ve just argued, the logical meeting-ground between the two would be to have a task force of alicorns, say, at least a dozen, but no more than a hundred, all comprised of ponies Celestia trusted sufficiently. The chance of alicorn-related existential risk increases, but the chance of the next season’s villain killing everyone plummets to nearly zero. So, given your predictions on the power of alicorns, you’re right. If we take the prior that alicorns automatically gain Celestia-level powers, it’s far, far too dangerous to give everyone that kind of power, and immortalising everyone is a very, very bad idea.
In fact, this very argument leads me to believe that, in order to provide the optimum amount of conflict in the story, alicorns need to be a lot more powerful than unicorns, but not automatically god-tier. Alicorns should have the potential to reach the power of Celestia and Luna, but imagine if Celestia and Luna were immortal unicorns: Based on their great amount of knowledge, they would still likely be more powerful mages than any other unicorn alive. So this could easily extend to alicorns as well. This still brings about the existential risk angle. Powerful mortals can cast spells like Want-It-Need-It and the altering of Parasprites already, but a lot more ponies would be capable of such things if they were alicornified. My own personal belief about alicorn power levels subscribes to this idea, but as another LWer pointed out, I shouldn’t make the world convenient for me. I should make it as inconvenient as possible while still allowing the protagonists to win, because that makes for a much, much better story than “Deathists are always wrong about everything forever.” But I don’t think this is a problem that allows rational protagonists to win. They’d have to back down.
As for your FAI question: The answer is, no, I don’t want to convince a Friendly AI of this, but Celestia is not a friendly AI. She’s immortal, she’s the ruler of Equestria, and she’s definitely much wiser than just about any mortal, but she’s not a superintelligence. She’s not so far beyond ponies in mental ability that the concept of challenging her judgement is ludicrous. She has pony-level intelligence, just a lot more years to learn things. But, as we can extrapolate from elderly humans, sometimes age has it’s deficits as well, making people more inflexible in their opinions. Your argument for existential risk is what would convince me if I were Twilight, not Celestia saying it’s too dangerous and me blindly trusting said judgement. Celestia knows more than Twilight, but not so much more that in an argument between the two, Celestia can never be wrong.
all comprised of ponies Celestia trusted sufficiently
You’re a god. You’ve got the ability to make other gods. You’ve got literally a million years to find people trustworthy enough. A single failure is a possible extinction event, and that nearly happened once already. How high do you set the bar for ‘trust sufficiently’?
She’s already working on the problem (and communicating with other alicorns about it, as seen at the end of S3Ep2). She’s increased the number by two within the last couple decades or so (Twilight, and I assume Cadance is young). Is the problem just that she’s going too slowly and cautiously?
(I do want to note I’m not trying to be hostile in any way. I just find this sphere of thought very intriguing.)
Well, this argument of mine was made before you pointed out the priority-based nature of magic in the show, based on the idea that more alicorns actually equals reduction of existential risk via the villain of the week. That particular argument is much weaker now.
If one doesn’t have a need to increase the alicorn numbers in order to protect Equestria, then you’re right. The bar should, in fact, be set extremely high. Even Cadence, the alicorn of love of all things, has tremendous power. She basically has the ability to mind-control ponies, and she can send at least some form of this ability across an ENTIRE CITY, as shown in the opener to Season 3.
Essentially, given the prior of “Any alicorn will have Celestia-level powers”, you’re right. It’s far too dangerous to turn alicorns with anything less than the most stringent of stringent security measures, and even then, things can go wrong.
Out of curiosity, as it’s likely the direction I’ll be taking the fanfiction. How would your arguments change if, instead of turning everyone into Celestia-analogues, alicornification had the effect of increasing a pony’s magic to, say, five times that of a unicorn of equivalent strength? (Earth ponies and pegasi would have to start at the beginning, but would have just as much potential for growth if they studied enough.) Celestia is thousands of years old, which is one of the reasons she’s so much more powerful than any mortal pony, not just the status of being an alicorn. She’s had a very, very long time to study and improve her magic. (The jury is still out on whether or not Celestia and Luna have the raw power to raise and lower celestial bodies, or whether or not they can do it because it’s their special talent, just like how Cadence has the ability to spread mood-altering magic across an entire city for literally days on end. Even the other princesses probably couldn’t do that.)
So, existential risk is lowered, but there’s still a greater risk of stuff like the Parasprite spell going wrong, or too much power being put into a Want-It-Need-It spell, or the more minor problems of potentially increased property damage from emotional outbursts or technical magical errors. More mages would be capable of dangerous feats, but not the kind of level we’re talking where a single alicorn going rogue without being stopped immediately is a potential civilisation-ending event, regardless of pre-alicorn magical ability.
For what it’s worth, this “Alicorn = force multiplier” thing was my original theory before I came up with this fanfiction idea, but it was pointed out to me that I shouldn’t use my powers as an author to make things too easy for myself. I agree with that, but considering how powerful your arguments are, I don’t think I’m being too easy on myself by weakening (not even eliminating completely) an argument that, in it’s current state, is unbeatable.
And don’t worry, I don’t consider you hostile in the slightest. It’d be rather stupid for me to consider the person with the best anti-alicorn arguments in a thread composed for the express purpose of hearing anti-alicorn arguments to be being hostile :)
The weaker alicorns are, the safer it is to create them and the more wiling Celestia would be to make them. If every alicorn could literally control the rotation of the entire planet with telekinesis on the first day, I think Celestia would probably be even more discerning than uplifting Twilight. Twilight might be a paragon of virtue, but she’s still the type of filly who will cast a spell given to her even when she has no idea what it does and it’s labeled as powerful and experimental. Conversely, if alicorns were just immortal winged unicorns with no extra powers, I assume the name of the show would be My Little Alicorn, with 99%+ of the population being alicorns. At least, I’d hope that would be the case given how benevolent Celestia seems.
For each level of power, there’s a different maximally safe rate of alicornification. Whether or not Celestia is already uplifting at that rate is a point of debate. (As a side note, the idea of Twilight discovering there’s a new magic to turn ponies into alicorns and then just casting it right away is such a Twilight thing to do.)
It’s an interesting analog to one of the ethical problems of uploading. Imagine a known serial killer is released from jail on his 100th birthday since he’s not a danger to the populace anymore. He knows he’s going to die soon, so he comes to your newly successful upload company. Do you allow him to upload? If you don’t he’ll die within ~5 years, if you do, he’ll do god-knows-what on the system.
My willingness to upload him would be based on how much damage he could do. I wouldn’t let him upload 1st for sure, or even within the top 10. But I probably wouldn’t be distressed after 10,000 uploads and we’ve already had a chance to see what hostile uploads can do (and it turns out not-so-bad).
For the purpose of this fanfiction, Celestia is able to uplift alicorns at a significantly higher rate than she currently is and other alicorns can either cast it, or learn to cast it. So logistically, it’s possible to increase alicornification at an exponential rate. Call it somewhere between 6 and 12 casts a year, for now: The exact rate isn’t all that important, what’s important is that it can be done, which means arguments then shift to “Should it be done?”
As for the power vs. safety thing, I agree, that’s definitely true, but what I was asking was, given this particular point on the spectrum, what would you think then? It’s clearly too unsafe to make everyone gods, as you’ve demonstrated, and it’s clearly perfectly safe if there’s zero dangers to making alicorns at all. But if ponies are significantly more powerful as alicorns, and thus had the potential to do more damage both deliberately and accidentally, but most ponies didn’t have the capacity to cause REALLY bad stuff to go down: What would your opinion be then?
If I were in Celestia’s shoes, my strategy would be to take the top .001% ‘friendliest[*]’ of the population each generation and turn them into alicorns. Fewer if some generations don’t have good candidates, and more if some generations are exceptional. The number of alicorns would grow exponentially as the population experienced exponential growth. From the other end of the equation, I’d use my influence as the God Empress to gradually raise the ‘friendliness waterline’ so that I could gradually lower the requirements from top .001% to top 1% to top 10% to eventually allowing everyone in.
Though this would be a process that could take, literally, millennia to fully complete (though it could probably be accelerated to ‘only’ a couple hundred years safely). I could easily envision Celestia seeing it utterly reasonable to have a multi-thousand year plan where pony wellfare steadily increases, the proportion of immortal ponies gradually increase as a fraction of the population, and risk is as minimized as possible. The plan is benevolent, meritocratic, and safe.
… but if I were Twilight? I’m not sure I would be comfortable waiting that long or seeing most of my family and acquaintances die first, (even assuming my friends, the other elements of Harmony, eventually become alicorns too). The plan is slow, needlessly callous, and accepts millions of unnecessary deaths.
Shifting my point of view from one side to the other drastically changes how acceptable I find each strategy. I suppose that is the mark of a good disagreement.
[*] Friendly as in FAI friendly or friendship=magic in pony terms. Not just the most effusive ponies.
That...is actually pretty brilliant. I was originally going to have Celestia be opposed to the idea of alicornification, but I may have Celestia change her mind to this. Cadence has the view of “We should make absolutely sure we’ve concluded things will work before proceeding”, which is likely to take decades, but not millenia. Twilight starts out with the view of “We should start right now, why the hell are we even hesitating?”
This is partly because of the big red flag of having the protagonist share my personal beliefs. In this fanfic, it’s unavoidable, however. Twilight is meant to be fairly rational, and thus, is meant to believe what’s correct, at least eventually. Obviously, I think that what I believe is correct, or I wouldn’t believe it. Starting Twilight out with a more reckless view, where my own view is closer to the Cadence stance, goes some way towards deflecting that problem.
Man, it’s times like this I wish I had a fifth alicorn to throw in, because I have too many views I currently want to showcase front and centre.
“Do it, and do it now.”
“Calculate everything out carefully, then act relatively decisively.”
“Steadily make it happen, over several millenia, gradually making it so that the very worst scum of society are still as harmonic as the best examples of pony virtue today.”
“Don’t do it, as we can’t accurately calculate the risk.”
“Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. You saw what happened with Nightmare Moon, didn’t you?”
Maybe I need a fifth main character, but I find the views are much more legitimised by having them be spoken by an alicorn, rather than a societal representative, who’ll be representing various arguments like overpopulation, pushing forward magical research, attacking the culture of the various pony races, etc. And there are only four alicorns, and randomly adding a fifth is a move I simply refuse to make.
With the exception of the third view, i.e, the one you just gave me, I was originally going to have Twilight, Cadence, Celestia and Luna hold those four views, from most supportive to least supportive. But your argument is just too good not to be featured in the fanfiction.
The easiest solution is likely to be to merge Argument 4 and 5 together, leaving Luna as the only true anti-alicornifying one, with the remaining three each believing it should be done in different ways, but I worry that might turn the fanfic too much towards the pro-alicorn view. That said, I might be able to make up for this by having a disproportionate amount of the social representatives be opposed to the idea.
I can see the problem with a powerless entity trying to advance arguments against those vastly more powerful than them.
What about an equally powerful entity to alicorns? Discord for example, might be opposed to it for his own reasons but adopt any argument that makes it less likely. (Though he, stylistically, may not fit at all into your fic anyhow.) Although, I can see how people may not like that evil guy is advancing the opposing argument. There are other immortal entities. Dragons perhaps. Whatever employs Cerberus or Ahuizotl.
Or political opponents like Zebra or Gryphon could have reasons to disagree with the plan (like I assume they would dislike the pony hegemony that would occur if everypony became alicorns tomorrow.) They wouldn’t be strictly equal to alicorns on the same power level, but would have some ability to back up their arguments with force, unlike a social representative.
As a side note, I’m a bit confused about Cadence and Twilight. I know that Twilight is sometimes heroically compulsive, but isn’t Cadence the avatar of love or something? I would imagine she’d be a lot more empathetic about suffering ponies and that Twilight would be more disposed to studying.
It’s not even really about magical power. Within the world, it’s about political power, and the fact that the alicorns are royalty. In reality, it’s about the nature of the fanfiction. Much of the fanfiction is about the discussion and debate between the four princesses of Equestria. Therefore, any pony that isn’t an alicorn tends to fade into the background a bit, taking the role of a driving force on the main characters. The main power that the alicorns have is the literary device of being major characters.
I spent two minutes arguing about why Discord was a stupid example, but then realised Discord is actually good now. Discord doesn’t really stylistically fit into any of those five arguments, however. Looking at him, I imagine he would abstain from the issue. I simply don’t see why he would care, period. The only thing he might do would be to try and get Fluttershy immortality, but even if he did take on that side, I don’t see him entering the political arena. Adding an OC immortal isn’t really something I want to do. For one, I suck at making characters, and for another, the thing I enjoy most about fanfiction is exploring the world that already exists.
The political opponents are really more of an obstacle than a character. In my opinion, they would be far better off as an abstraction: Instead of the Griffon Prince coming to Equestria to argue with the princesses, the argument is “The griffons won’t be happy if we do this, and there could be consequences.”
As for Twilight and Cadence, just because Twilight’s bookish doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. I assume she’d be on the forefront of research to solve mass-transformation-related problems, but to do that, it’s only logical that she convince the other princesses they should actually go ahead and agree to the transforming first. I agree that Cadence actually would be a likely candidate to take on the mantle of “We should transform everypony as fast as possible” but that argument is likely to be pretty soundly defeated in the first few chapters anyway. Thus, it’s better for the fic if Cadence has a pro-alicorn, but reasonably well thought out view. It’s okay for Twilight to hold that view for a while and still be rational, because it’s a snap judgement: She only finds out that Cadence and herself are immortal when she actually gets transformed. Before Celestia mentions it, Twilight assumes that only Celestia and Luna are immortal.
Essentially, it would make sense for Cadence to be an irrational character, but I think the fic is overall better to give Cadence a slightly different character and allow her to be more rational, and thus increase the amount of solid discourse within the story. It’s a sacrifice, but I think it’s one worth making. I actually think the irrational view is more in Cadence’s character, but the alicorns are already being bumped up in rationality to begin with: One more won’t be too odd. And a rationalist!Cadence would likely take on the role of “Do it once we’re sure it will work.” I actually have a scene I drafted out which has this particular argument in it, which I’ll send to you as an example of Cadence’s character. (I don’t want to make my comments TOO long in length, we already have a massive comment chain as it is!)
If you want a fifth main character, Shining Armor could fit the bill. His sister and his wife are both alicorns, so you could easily justify having uplifted him. Even if he’s still mortal, Twilight and Cadence would give his words a lot of weight.
Good point. Shining would be a good one as well, because I already figured out he’d probably be the next alicorn if alicornism won.
1) He’s a very skilled unicorn, so he can transform other alicorns.
2) He has a strong relationship with not one, but two of the royal alicorns.
3) He’s very important in the defense of the realm.
Hell, I’m pretty sure Shining is technically a prince now anyway. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch, and he could certainly appear in the same settings as the other four where other potential characters can’t. (Say, eating at the royal dining room at Canterlot Castle.)
The extinction-level battles portrayed in the show do not seem to run off of the rules of warfare, but off of an entirely binary system. None of the situations people were in trouble with would have been helped by having more Alicorns.
Queen Chrysalis gains her strength from feeding off the emotions of others, and the more magically powerful her subjects are, the more powerful she becomes. She became a God tier threat by feeding off Cadence/Shining. More alicorns would have only meant more super powered pegacorn changlings. She won initially because she acted first, then she was destroyed by a spell which was uncounterable (seemingly, as she doesn’t attempt to counter it).
Discord was infinitely more powerful than Celestia, until the Elements of Harmony came out then he was infinitely weaker. He invaded her own sanctum, took the Elements, then proceeded to wreck whatever he felt like. Later, Celestia’s magic protection on the Elements completely trumps Discord’s magic. In none of these cases do they seem to battle it out; they just understand that magic has a priority order. Whoever’s magic has higher priority, wins.
King Sombra, as a unicorn, singlehoofedly dominated then eliminated an empire full of unicorns. Again, offense beats defense. What’s the alicorn version of that after given time to reach full potential … a solar system? It’s a universe where everypony could already have an atomic bomb in their head. And then grant the option to add an order of magnitude more power by making them an alicorn.
The only occasion where a squad of alicorns would be useful would be in dealing with Nightmare Moon. And arguably things could have come out far worse if Nightmare Moon had been able to sway more alicorns to her side (NB: mind control magic exists in MLP universe). Also from Celestia’s perspective, the only other alicorn[*1] she ever knew almost succeeded at killing everything on the planet 1000 years before show start. She doesn’t know if the friendliness chance for an alicorn is 50⁄50, or if every alicorn except 1 is good, or if every alicorn except 1 is evil. And if she makes a mistake everybody, forever, dies.
As for the FAI parallel: Celestia is a lot smarter than other ponies but not orders of magnitude smarter. However, precognition and time travel exist in this universe. Celestia has, at times, shown unbelievable prescience with in her ‘wisdom’.[*2] Heck, in the first episode she either 1) saw the future or 2) is the least-responsible / most-lucky ruler ever. Sufficient ability to see the future is indistinguishable from super-intelligent decision making (though I grant that it doesn’t help for pattern matching or other benefits of intelligence). I’m not sure how much I could question the decisions of someone who could actually see the future.
[*1]I’m assuming it was just her and Luna then and that Cadence was a relatively recent addition. [*2]She has a track record of doing excellent versus foreseen problems and terrible versus unforeseen problems. Presumably her future-viewing is limited in scope and has some sort of resource cost.
I’d say you’ve got two out of three there. Based on lines Chrysalis says (When she beats Celestia, she says “Ah! Shining Armor’s love for you is even stronger than I thought! Consuming it has made me even more powerful than Celestia!”), her power doesn’t depend on the magical strength of the pony she’s feeding off, it’s all about love, and alicorns don’t necessarily love any more intensely than other ponies. The changelings would have been more powerful taking on alicorn forms, but it’s clear that that isn’t enough to win in one-on-one combat: The Mane 6 took out dozens on their own, and they weren’t even warriors. Twilight was the only pony who actually had the ability to do a lot of damage in a fight, and arguably Pinkie. Shining loved Cadence much more than most ponies love other ponies, which gave Chrysalis the power to beat Celestia. When the two fought, Celestia was actually the one to attack first, and it was a fairly straight contest of strength which Celestia lost. You’re right about the uncounterable nature of the love spell that defeated the changeling invasion though.
As for Discord and Sombra, you have good points. Especially with Discord. It seems fairly obvious that Discord is stronger than Celestia, as Celestia is powerless to stop him in Season 2, but at the same time, when Celestia cast a spell on the Elements, Discord didn’t even TRY to do anything to overcome the protections of the one thing in Equestria that could stop him. As you said, that’s a pretty clear indication that he knew it would be a waste of his time to try.
I’m assuming Sombra had some sort of power source: My best guess is that he fed off the negative emotions of his subjects, which caused a feedback loop where he became more evil and more powerful and caused more misery which looped until he was strong enough to fight the alicorns and win without the Elements of Harmony backing them up. Said power source would in fact be FAR more dangerous in the hands of an alicorn, even the version of an alicorn I intend to use in my story, where alicorn-ness is basically a force multiplier for magic, rather than an instant pass to godhood.
As for the precognition: If Celestia could see the future, the fic would turn out extremely differently. In fact, the entire fic would probably only last one or two chapters. As soon as Twilight finds out Celestia can see the future, her likely response would be to use that. She could make up her mind to do X, where X is a series of factors that could influence how the alicornified society would develop. If none of them work out positively, game over. As you said, you can’t really argue with someone who sees the future with tremendous reliability. If one of them does turn out favourable, Celestia has no leg to stand on, and logically would have to give in. In fact, if it turns out that, for the fic to make logical sense, Celestia must have sufficient precognition to make this a possibility, I simply won’t write it.
There are other potential reasons behind the first episode turning out as it did. Chief among them is that Twilight and the others THOUGHT they had to save Equestria, but in reality, Celestia was waiting to intervene. She wanted Twilight and the others to succeed, because the Elements would be stronger and have a better chance of working if they did, but if they were clearly outmatched, Celestia would have stepped in herself. (Even this is a risk, but I don’t find it too difficult to believe Celestia would take some level of risk to get her sister back to her pre-NMM state.)
So, to summarise my stance:
Binary magic: Agree.
Celestia is comparable to FAI: DIsagree.
As for the precognition: If Celestia could see the future, the fic would turn out extremely differently.
She could have a variant of the Pinkie sense—uncontrolled limited precognition. Or it could be that there are feedbacks such that in order for it to work she needs to avoid all involvement in the proceedings (which is why she works through agents so much) - and introducing an endemic threat would require her to basically recuse herself from her own civilization, which seems a bit much.
(There’s actually a comic regarding Chrysalis’ return. I haven’t read it, but from what I understand Chrysalis specifically targets Twilight to feed on her magic because she recognizes her as unusually powerful. Judging by how much magic in the MLP universe is modified by emotions, my guess is that it’s an additive or multiplicative factor for changlings when they feed. (As an aside, I’d totally choose Rainbow Dash in a fight. She punches houses into rainbow explosions.))
I’d assume that any future sight is extraordinarily limited, magically costly, and marginally useful. I’d guess Celestia uses it is the first episode, maybe uses it in Dragonshy, then notably doesn’t use it for 1st Discord or Chrysalis, then uses it again for the Crystal Empire and 2nd Discord.
In both episodes we see causality-breaking effects (Pinkie Keen and It’s About Time), it results in closed loop time travel. I haven’t invested too much thought into it, but can closed loop time travel be exploited via traveling to the future? It seems a very risky proposition, since we’ve already determined that time-travel can and will force paradoxes. You may only get one shot at seeing a future (and you can’t avoid the consequences), rather than being able to pick-and-choose possible futures. In this case, the more vague the future is, the better.
As an aside...I just remembered Twilight can already time travel. Yeah… that would make for some confusing debates.
I’ll have to check out that comic if the Chrysalis argument comes up, I suppose.
I’m not sure what you mean by trying to exploit closed-loop time travel through travelling to the future. Do you mean using future sight to see a desirable future and then trying to get there?
As for time travel, in this particular fic, my best answer is simply “Hell no.” If it comes up, Twilight and the alicorns can simply decide it’s a Really Bad Idea to use it, and they’re right, since nobody actually understands how the hell it works, because it violates causality in that fashion. Alternatively, I borrow an answer I saw in a fanfiction once: It can only be used once in a pony’s lifetime. And, obviously, the alicorns being immortal and all wouldn’t use up one of their precious uses of the spell for anything short of “The situation is hopeless, and Equestria is now 100% doomed.” (That is to say, I assume Celestia would have used it IF her attempt to jog Twilight’s memory against Discord had failed.) The second I saw that time travel episode, I was like “Oh crap.” because I knew that it would add a new layer of complexity to any realistic fanfiction I tried to write, in the sense that I would have to come up with some way to write it off. I am not smart enough to deal with time travel. I am nowhere near smart enough. As HPMOR points out, even stable time loops are ridiculously complicated and drive people stark raving mad with regularity.
My favorite explanation: since causality tries to avoid paradoxes, most time-travellers get squished by large rocks or natural disasters before they can act, because they would have tried to change things. Even if they were going to try and avoid changing the past, they would have inevitably made mistakes, so the only consistent result is either ignorance and co-incidence or dyeing almost immediately. Or the time spell failing due to unforseen problems, if you’re feeling generous.
As far as I understand it, causality is just the relationship between cause and effect. If I’m right, saying it tries to avoid paradoxes is like saying gravity acts whenever someone falls off a cliff to prevent them from flying.
If I really needed to explain away time travel in this fic, I’d probably have a future Twilight show up and say “Whatever you do, do NOT use time travel. I don’t care how bad it is. Even if Equestria is going to be destroyed if you don’t. DO. NOT. MESS. WITH. TIME.”
Fortunately, I don’t see any situation in this fic where Twilight would even want to use time travel. Arguments aren’t one-time only things, you can always come back with another counterpoint later against a rational opponent who’s arguing for the sake of finding out who’s right, rather than to win social status or something. And any losses of social status that may occur in the fic are nowhere near worthy of time-travel to fix them, it’d be like cleaning a house by burning it to the ground and building a new one.
As far as I understand it, causality is just the relationship between cause and effect. If I’m right, saying it tries to avoid paradoxes is like saying gravity acts whenever someone falls off a cliff to prevent them from flying.
That was a somewhat anthropomorphic allusion to the Novikov self-consistency principle. But yes, it is.
Fortunately, I don’t see any situation in this fic where Twilight would even want to use time travel.
Fair enough.
EDIT:
If I really needed to explain away time travel in this fic, I’d probably have a future Twilight show up and say “Whatever you do, do NOT use time travel. I don’t care how bad it is. Even if Equestria is going to be destroyed if you don’t. DO. NOT. MESS. WITH. TIME.”
You realize the canonical example of time travel was a stable loop, right? As was that pinkie-sense business.
In fact, this very argument leads me to believe that, in order to provide the optimum amount of conflict in the story, alicorns need to be a lot more powerful than unicorns, but not automatically god-tier.
Wouldn’t that weaken the already-weak pro-death argument?
It does, in fact, weaken the anti-alicorn argument (Different from the pro-death argument, even though they still wind up the same) but with the amount of ammunition I’ve gotten from LessWrong, the anti-alicorn side is no longer weak in the slightest.
I think you’re missing the existential risk inherent in Alicorns or how precariously Equestria is balanced on the knife edge of extinction. Here’s a short list of possible extinction events: Nightmare Moon, Parasprites (Twilight enhanced), Discord, King Sombra, and god-knows-what from Star-Swirl the Bearded’s library. ‘Mere’ civilization ending events are Smarty Pants Doll (enchanted), Parasprites (unmodified), Windegos, Changelings, and the duplicating mirror. This is a world with Cuban Missile Crisis going on every other month and a rogue AI power-equivelent popping up every year . Imagine if Twilight had accidentally made parasprites carnivorous in addition to eating non-edibles? Game over, for everyone, forever. It’s not a world made safer by having more Alicorns. God-tier magic seems to override other Got-tier magic; in all God-tier confrontations, victory always goes to the initiator of each round of any fight. TLDR; offense > defense.
Also, you need to look at what Celestia herself has to gain. Right now she’s the God Empress of ponies. The only people capable of challenging her are her sisters and other deity class entities. If the world were to be eaten by omnivorous Von-Neuman parasprites tomorrow, she could teleport to another planet and (presumably) re-start the pony race. She’d be sad, but life would still go on. The only way that ponykind could experience a true extinction would be if she and her sisters were to die. For every pony that Celestia decides to uplift, she makes herself a little more vulnerable. What motivation does she have to do that?
Celestia is very selective about who she uplifts, judging by Twilight. Notably, Celestia makes sure that Twilight benevolent, very grounded with friendship, selfless, understands the nature of when (and when not to) use magic, understands the existential risks of magic (firsthand), has dealt with god-tier entities and understands their limitations. There’s a musical number about how Celestia’s been testing her to see if Twilight’s the kind of person who’d kill or enslave everypony if given limitless power. Twilight only gets uplifted when she passes all the tests.
Here’s a related question: You have just been uplifted by an immortal, Friendly AI. How do convince it that you should start uplifting everybody who asks instead of people whom the AI deems non-dangerous? …and why do you even want to convince it?
A large amount of the things you mention become less dangerous in the event of greater alicorn presence in Equestria, not more. Nightmare Moon, Discord and Chrysalis ALL almost won, and if even just a few dozen alicorns had existed, they wouldn’t have stood a chance in hell.
Now, the whole existential risk angle...is a very interesting point, since based on what I’ve just argued, the logical meeting-ground between the two would be to have a task force of alicorns, say, at least a dozen, but no more than a hundred, all comprised of ponies Celestia trusted sufficiently. The chance of alicorn-related existential risk increases, but the chance of the next season’s villain killing everyone plummets to nearly zero. So, given your predictions on the power of alicorns, you’re right. If we take the prior that alicorns automatically gain Celestia-level powers, it’s far, far too dangerous to give everyone that kind of power, and immortalising everyone is a very, very bad idea.
In fact, this very argument leads me to believe that, in order to provide the optimum amount of conflict in the story, alicorns need to be a lot more powerful than unicorns, but not automatically god-tier. Alicorns should have the potential to reach the power of Celestia and Luna, but imagine if Celestia and Luna were immortal unicorns: Based on their great amount of knowledge, they would still likely be more powerful mages than any other unicorn alive. So this could easily extend to alicorns as well. This still brings about the existential risk angle. Powerful mortals can cast spells like Want-It-Need-It and the altering of Parasprites already, but a lot more ponies would be capable of such things if they were alicornified. My own personal belief about alicorn power levels subscribes to this idea, but as another LWer pointed out, I shouldn’t make the world convenient for me. I should make it as inconvenient as possible while still allowing the protagonists to win, because that makes for a much, much better story than “Deathists are always wrong about everything forever.” But I don’t think this is a problem that allows rational protagonists to win. They’d have to back down.
As for your FAI question: The answer is, no, I don’t want to convince a Friendly AI of this, but Celestia is not a friendly AI. She’s immortal, she’s the ruler of Equestria, and she’s definitely much wiser than just about any mortal, but she’s not a superintelligence. She’s not so far beyond ponies in mental ability that the concept of challenging her judgement is ludicrous. She has pony-level intelligence, just a lot more years to learn things. But, as we can extrapolate from elderly humans, sometimes age has it’s deficits as well, making people more inflexible in their opinions. Your argument for existential risk is what would convince me if I were Twilight, not Celestia saying it’s too dangerous and me blindly trusting said judgement. Celestia knows more than Twilight, but not so much more that in an argument between the two, Celestia can never be wrong.
You’re a god. You’ve got the ability to make other gods. You’ve got literally a million years to find people trustworthy enough. A single failure is a possible extinction event, and that nearly happened once already. How high do you set the bar for ‘trust sufficiently’?
She’s already working on the problem (and communicating with other alicorns about it, as seen at the end of S3Ep2). She’s increased the number by two within the last couple decades or so (Twilight, and I assume Cadance is young). Is the problem just that she’s going too slowly and cautiously?
(I do want to note I’m not trying to be hostile in any way. I just find this sphere of thought very intriguing.)
Well, this argument of mine was made before you pointed out the priority-based nature of magic in the show, based on the idea that more alicorns actually equals reduction of existential risk via the villain of the week. That particular argument is much weaker now.
If one doesn’t have a need to increase the alicorn numbers in order to protect Equestria, then you’re right. The bar should, in fact, be set extremely high. Even Cadence, the alicorn of love of all things, has tremendous power. She basically has the ability to mind-control ponies, and she can send at least some form of this ability across an ENTIRE CITY, as shown in the opener to Season 3.
Essentially, given the prior of “Any alicorn will have Celestia-level powers”, you’re right. It’s far too dangerous to turn alicorns with anything less than the most stringent of stringent security measures, and even then, things can go wrong.
Out of curiosity, as it’s likely the direction I’ll be taking the fanfiction. How would your arguments change if, instead of turning everyone into Celestia-analogues, alicornification had the effect of increasing a pony’s magic to, say, five times that of a unicorn of equivalent strength? (Earth ponies and pegasi would have to start at the beginning, but would have just as much potential for growth if they studied enough.) Celestia is thousands of years old, which is one of the reasons she’s so much more powerful than any mortal pony, not just the status of being an alicorn. She’s had a very, very long time to study and improve her magic. (The jury is still out on whether or not Celestia and Luna have the raw power to raise and lower celestial bodies, or whether or not they can do it because it’s their special talent, just like how Cadence has the ability to spread mood-altering magic across an entire city for literally days on end. Even the other princesses probably couldn’t do that.)
So, existential risk is lowered, but there’s still a greater risk of stuff like the Parasprite spell going wrong, or too much power being put into a Want-It-Need-It spell, or the more minor problems of potentially increased property damage from emotional outbursts or technical magical errors. More mages would be capable of dangerous feats, but not the kind of level we’re talking where a single alicorn going rogue without being stopped immediately is a potential civilisation-ending event, regardless of pre-alicorn magical ability.
For what it’s worth, this “Alicorn = force multiplier” thing was my original theory before I came up with this fanfiction idea, but it was pointed out to me that I shouldn’t use my powers as an author to make things too easy for myself. I agree with that, but considering how powerful your arguments are, I don’t think I’m being too easy on myself by weakening (not even eliminating completely) an argument that, in it’s current state, is unbeatable.
And don’t worry, I don’t consider you hostile in the slightest. It’d be rather stupid for me to consider the person with the best anti-alicorn arguments in a thread composed for the express purpose of hearing anti-alicorn arguments to be being hostile :)
The weaker alicorns are, the safer it is to create them and the more wiling Celestia would be to make them. If every alicorn could literally control the rotation of the entire planet with telekinesis on the first day, I think Celestia would probably be even more discerning than uplifting Twilight. Twilight might be a paragon of virtue, but she’s still the type of filly who will cast a spell given to her even when she has no idea what it does and it’s labeled as powerful and experimental. Conversely, if alicorns were just immortal winged unicorns with no extra powers, I assume the name of the show would be My Little Alicorn, with 99%+ of the population being alicorns. At least, I’d hope that would be the case given how benevolent Celestia seems.
For each level of power, there’s a different maximally safe rate of alicornification. Whether or not Celestia is already uplifting at that rate is a point of debate. (As a side note, the idea of Twilight discovering there’s a new magic to turn ponies into alicorns and then just casting it right away is such a Twilight thing to do.)
It’s an interesting analog to one of the ethical problems of uploading. Imagine a known serial killer is released from jail on his 100th birthday since he’s not a danger to the populace anymore. He knows he’s going to die soon, so he comes to your newly successful upload company. Do you allow him to upload? If you don’t he’ll die within ~5 years, if you do, he’ll do god-knows-what on the system.
My willingness to upload him would be based on how much damage he could do. I wouldn’t let him upload 1st for sure, or even within the top 10. But I probably wouldn’t be distressed after 10,000 uploads and we’ve already had a chance to see what hostile uploads can do (and it turns out not-so-bad).
For the purpose of this fanfiction, Celestia is able to uplift alicorns at a significantly higher rate than she currently is and other alicorns can either cast it, or learn to cast it. So logistically, it’s possible to increase alicornification at an exponential rate. Call it somewhere between 6 and 12 casts a year, for now: The exact rate isn’t all that important, what’s important is that it can be done, which means arguments then shift to “Should it be done?”
As for the power vs. safety thing, I agree, that’s definitely true, but what I was asking was, given this particular point on the spectrum, what would you think then? It’s clearly too unsafe to make everyone gods, as you’ve demonstrated, and it’s clearly perfectly safe if there’s zero dangers to making alicorns at all. But if ponies are significantly more powerful as alicorns, and thus had the potential to do more damage both deliberately and accidentally, but most ponies didn’t have the capacity to cause REALLY bad stuff to go down: What would your opinion be then?
If I were in Celestia’s shoes, my strategy would be to take the top .001% ‘friendliest[*]’ of the population each generation and turn them into alicorns. Fewer if some generations don’t have good candidates, and more if some generations are exceptional. The number of alicorns would grow exponentially as the population experienced exponential growth. From the other end of the equation, I’d use my influence as the God Empress to gradually raise the ‘friendliness waterline’ so that I could gradually lower the requirements from top .001% to top 1% to top 10% to eventually allowing everyone in.
Though this would be a process that could take, literally, millennia to fully complete (though it could probably be accelerated to ‘only’ a couple hundred years safely). I could easily envision Celestia seeing it utterly reasonable to have a multi-thousand year plan where pony wellfare steadily increases, the proportion of immortal ponies gradually increase as a fraction of the population, and risk is as minimized as possible. The plan is benevolent, meritocratic, and safe.
… but if I were Twilight? I’m not sure I would be comfortable waiting that long or seeing most of my family and acquaintances die first, (even assuming my friends, the other elements of Harmony, eventually become alicorns too). The plan is slow, needlessly callous, and accepts millions of unnecessary deaths.
Shifting my point of view from one side to the other drastically changes how acceptable I find each strategy. I suppose that is the mark of a good disagreement.
[*] Friendly as in FAI friendly or friendship=magic in pony terms. Not just the most effusive ponies.
That...is actually pretty brilliant. I was originally going to have Celestia be opposed to the idea of alicornification, but I may have Celestia change her mind to this. Cadence has the view of “We should make absolutely sure we’ve concluded things will work before proceeding”, which is likely to take decades, but not millenia. Twilight starts out with the view of “We should start right now, why the hell are we even hesitating?”
This is partly because of the big red flag of having the protagonist share my personal beliefs. In this fanfic, it’s unavoidable, however. Twilight is meant to be fairly rational, and thus, is meant to believe what’s correct, at least eventually. Obviously, I think that what I believe is correct, or I wouldn’t believe it. Starting Twilight out with a more reckless view, where my own view is closer to the Cadence stance, goes some way towards deflecting that problem.
Man, it’s times like this I wish I had a fifth alicorn to throw in, because I have too many views I currently want to showcase front and centre.
“Do it, and do it now.”
“Calculate everything out carefully, then act relatively decisively.”
“Steadily make it happen, over several millenia, gradually making it so that the very worst scum of society are still as harmonic as the best examples of pony virtue today.”
“Don’t do it, as we can’t accurately calculate the risk.”
“Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. You saw what happened with Nightmare Moon, didn’t you?”
Maybe I need a fifth main character, but I find the views are much more legitimised by having them be spoken by an alicorn, rather than a societal representative, who’ll be representing various arguments like overpopulation, pushing forward magical research, attacking the culture of the various pony races, etc. And there are only four alicorns, and randomly adding a fifth is a move I simply refuse to make.
With the exception of the third view, i.e, the one you just gave me, I was originally going to have Twilight, Cadence, Celestia and Luna hold those four views, from most supportive to least supportive. But your argument is just too good not to be featured in the fanfiction.
The easiest solution is likely to be to merge Argument 4 and 5 together, leaving Luna as the only true anti-alicornifying one, with the remaining three each believing it should be done in different ways, but I worry that might turn the fanfic too much towards the pro-alicorn view. That said, I might be able to make up for this by having a disproportionate amount of the social representatives be opposed to the idea.
I can see the problem with a powerless entity trying to advance arguments against those vastly more powerful than them.
What about an equally powerful entity to alicorns? Discord for example, might be opposed to it for his own reasons but adopt any argument that makes it less likely. (Though he, stylistically, may not fit at all into your fic anyhow.) Although, I can see how people may not like that evil guy is advancing the opposing argument. There are other immortal entities. Dragons perhaps. Whatever employs Cerberus or Ahuizotl.
Or political opponents like Zebra or Gryphon could have reasons to disagree with the plan (like I assume they would dislike the pony hegemony that would occur if everypony became alicorns tomorrow.) They wouldn’t be strictly equal to alicorns on the same power level, but would have some ability to back up their arguments with force, unlike a social representative.
As a side note, I’m a bit confused about Cadence and Twilight. I know that Twilight is sometimes heroically compulsive, but isn’t Cadence the avatar of love or something? I would imagine she’d be a lot more empathetic about suffering ponies and that Twilight would be more disposed to studying.
It’s not even really about magical power. Within the world, it’s about political power, and the fact that the alicorns are royalty. In reality, it’s about the nature of the fanfiction. Much of the fanfiction is about the discussion and debate between the four princesses of Equestria. Therefore, any pony that isn’t an alicorn tends to fade into the background a bit, taking the role of a driving force on the main characters. The main power that the alicorns have is the literary device of being major characters.
I spent two minutes arguing about why Discord was a stupid example, but then realised Discord is actually good now. Discord doesn’t really stylistically fit into any of those five arguments, however. Looking at him, I imagine he would abstain from the issue. I simply don’t see why he would care, period. The only thing he might do would be to try and get Fluttershy immortality, but even if he did take on that side, I don’t see him entering the political arena. Adding an OC immortal isn’t really something I want to do. For one, I suck at making characters, and for another, the thing I enjoy most about fanfiction is exploring the world that already exists.
The political opponents are really more of an obstacle than a character. In my opinion, they would be far better off as an abstraction: Instead of the Griffon Prince coming to Equestria to argue with the princesses, the argument is “The griffons won’t be happy if we do this, and there could be consequences.”
As for Twilight and Cadence, just because Twilight’s bookish doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. I assume she’d be on the forefront of research to solve mass-transformation-related problems, but to do that, it’s only logical that she convince the other princesses they should actually go ahead and agree to the transforming first. I agree that Cadence actually would be a likely candidate to take on the mantle of “We should transform everypony as fast as possible” but that argument is likely to be pretty soundly defeated in the first few chapters anyway. Thus, it’s better for the fic if Cadence has a pro-alicorn, but reasonably well thought out view. It’s okay for Twilight to hold that view for a while and still be rational, because it’s a snap judgement: She only finds out that Cadence and herself are immortal when she actually gets transformed. Before Celestia mentions it, Twilight assumes that only Celestia and Luna are immortal.
Essentially, it would make sense for Cadence to be an irrational character, but I think the fic is overall better to give Cadence a slightly different character and allow her to be more rational, and thus increase the amount of solid discourse within the story. It’s a sacrifice, but I think it’s one worth making. I actually think the irrational view is more in Cadence’s character, but the alicorns are already being bumped up in rationality to begin with: One more won’t be too odd. And a rationalist!Cadence would likely take on the role of “Do it once we’re sure it will work.” I actually have a scene I drafted out which has this particular argument in it, which I’ll send to you as an example of Cadence’s character. (I don’t want to make my comments TOO long in length, we already have a massive comment chain as it is!)
If you want a fifth main character, Shining Armor could fit the bill. His sister and his wife are both alicorns, so you could easily justify having uplifted him. Even if he’s still mortal, Twilight and Cadence would give his words a lot of weight.
Good point. Shining would be a good one as well, because I already figured out he’d probably be the next alicorn if alicornism won.
1) He’s a very skilled unicorn, so he can transform other alicorns. 2) He has a strong relationship with not one, but two of the royal alicorns. 3) He’s very important in the defense of the realm.
Hell, I’m pretty sure Shining is technically a prince now anyway. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch, and he could certainly appear in the same settings as the other four where other potential characters can’t. (Say, eating at the royal dining room at Canterlot Castle.)
Based on canon, the optimal size for such a task force would probably be six.
I estimate a one in five chance that this actually happens in season four.
The extinction-level battles portrayed in the show do not seem to run off of the rules of warfare, but off of an entirely binary system. None of the situations people were in trouble with would have been helped by having more Alicorns.
Queen Chrysalis gains her strength from feeding off the emotions of others, and the more magically powerful her subjects are, the more powerful she becomes. She became a God tier threat by feeding off Cadence/Shining. More alicorns would have only meant more super powered pegacorn changlings. She won initially because she acted first, then she was destroyed by a spell which was uncounterable (seemingly, as she doesn’t attempt to counter it).
Discord was infinitely more powerful than Celestia, until the Elements of Harmony came out then he was infinitely weaker. He invaded her own sanctum, took the Elements, then proceeded to wreck whatever he felt like. Later, Celestia’s magic protection on the Elements completely trumps Discord’s magic. In none of these cases do they seem to battle it out; they just understand that magic has a priority order. Whoever’s magic has higher priority, wins.
King Sombra, as a unicorn, singlehoofedly dominated then eliminated an empire full of unicorns. Again, offense beats defense. What’s the alicorn version of that after given time to reach full potential … a solar system? It’s a universe where everypony could already have an atomic bomb in their head. And then grant the option to add an order of magnitude more power by making them an alicorn.
The only occasion where a squad of alicorns would be useful would be in dealing with Nightmare Moon. And arguably things could have come out far worse if Nightmare Moon had been able to sway more alicorns to her side (NB: mind control magic exists in MLP universe). Also from Celestia’s perspective, the only other alicorn[*1] she ever knew almost succeeded at killing everything on the planet 1000 years before show start. She doesn’t know if the friendliness chance for an alicorn is 50⁄50, or if every alicorn except 1 is good, or if every alicorn except 1 is evil. And if she makes a mistake everybody, forever, dies.
As for the FAI parallel: Celestia is a lot smarter than other ponies but not orders of magnitude smarter. However, precognition and time travel exist in this universe. Celestia has, at times, shown unbelievable prescience with in her ‘wisdom’.[*2] Heck, in the first episode she either 1) saw the future or 2) is the least-responsible / most-lucky ruler ever. Sufficient ability to see the future is indistinguishable from super-intelligent decision making (though I grant that it doesn’t help for pattern matching or other benefits of intelligence). I’m not sure how much I could question the decisions of someone who could actually see the future.
[*1]I’m assuming it was just her and Luna then and that Cadence was a relatively recent addition.
[*2]She has a track record of doing excellent versus foreseen problems and terrible versus unforeseen problems. Presumably her future-viewing is limited in scope and has some sort of resource cost.
I’d say you’ve got two out of three there. Based on lines Chrysalis says (When she beats Celestia, she says “Ah! Shining Armor’s love for you is even stronger than I thought! Consuming it has made me even more powerful than Celestia!”), her power doesn’t depend on the magical strength of the pony she’s feeding off, it’s all about love, and alicorns don’t necessarily love any more intensely than other ponies. The changelings would have been more powerful taking on alicorn forms, but it’s clear that that isn’t enough to win in one-on-one combat: The Mane 6 took out dozens on their own, and they weren’t even warriors. Twilight was the only pony who actually had the ability to do a lot of damage in a fight, and arguably Pinkie. Shining loved Cadence much more than most ponies love other ponies, which gave Chrysalis the power to beat Celestia. When the two fought, Celestia was actually the one to attack first, and it was a fairly straight contest of strength which Celestia lost. You’re right about the uncounterable nature of the love spell that defeated the changeling invasion though.
As for Discord and Sombra, you have good points. Especially with Discord. It seems fairly obvious that Discord is stronger than Celestia, as Celestia is powerless to stop him in Season 2, but at the same time, when Celestia cast a spell on the Elements, Discord didn’t even TRY to do anything to overcome the protections of the one thing in Equestria that could stop him. As you said, that’s a pretty clear indication that he knew it would be a waste of his time to try.
I’m assuming Sombra had some sort of power source: My best guess is that he fed off the negative emotions of his subjects, which caused a feedback loop where he became more evil and more powerful and caused more misery which looped until he was strong enough to fight the alicorns and win without the Elements of Harmony backing them up. Said power source would in fact be FAR more dangerous in the hands of an alicorn, even the version of an alicorn I intend to use in my story, where alicorn-ness is basically a force multiplier for magic, rather than an instant pass to godhood.
As for the precognition: If Celestia could see the future, the fic would turn out extremely differently. In fact, the entire fic would probably only last one or two chapters. As soon as Twilight finds out Celestia can see the future, her likely response would be to use that. She could make up her mind to do X, where X is a series of factors that could influence how the alicornified society would develop. If none of them work out positively, game over. As you said, you can’t really argue with someone who sees the future with tremendous reliability. If one of them does turn out favourable, Celestia has no leg to stand on, and logically would have to give in. In fact, if it turns out that, for the fic to make logical sense, Celestia must have sufficient precognition to make this a possibility, I simply won’t write it.
There are other potential reasons behind the first episode turning out as it did. Chief among them is that Twilight and the others THOUGHT they had to save Equestria, but in reality, Celestia was waiting to intervene. She wanted Twilight and the others to succeed, because the Elements would be stronger and have a better chance of working if they did, but if they were clearly outmatched, Celestia would have stepped in herself. (Even this is a risk, but I don’t find it too difficult to believe Celestia would take some level of risk to get her sister back to her pre-NMM state.)
So, to summarise my stance:
Binary magic: Agree. Celestia is comparable to FAI: DIsagree.
She could have a variant of the Pinkie sense—uncontrolled limited precognition. Or it could be that there are feedbacks such that in order for it to work she needs to avoid all involvement in the proceedings (which is why she works through agents so much) - and introducing an endemic threat would require her to basically recuse herself from her own civilization, which seems a bit much.
(There’s actually a comic regarding Chrysalis’ return. I haven’t read it, but from what I understand Chrysalis specifically targets Twilight to feed on her magic because she recognizes her as unusually powerful. Judging by how much magic in the MLP universe is modified by emotions, my guess is that it’s an additive or multiplicative factor for changlings when they feed. (As an aside, I’d totally choose Rainbow Dash in a fight. She punches houses into rainbow explosions.))
I’d assume that any future sight is extraordinarily limited, magically costly, and marginally useful. I’d guess Celestia uses it is the first episode, maybe uses it in Dragonshy, then notably doesn’t use it for 1st Discord or Chrysalis, then uses it again for the Crystal Empire and 2nd Discord.
In both episodes we see causality-breaking effects (Pinkie Keen and It’s About Time), it results in closed loop time travel. I haven’t invested too much thought into it, but can closed loop time travel be exploited via traveling to the future? It seems a very risky proposition, since we’ve already determined that time-travel can and will force paradoxes. You may only get one shot at seeing a future (and you can’t avoid the consequences), rather than being able to pick-and-choose possible futures. In this case, the more vague the future is, the better.
As an aside...I just remembered Twilight can already time travel. Yeah… that would make for some confusing debates.
I’ll have to check out that comic if the Chrysalis argument comes up, I suppose.
I’m not sure what you mean by trying to exploit closed-loop time travel through travelling to the future. Do you mean using future sight to see a desirable future and then trying to get there?
As for time travel, in this particular fic, my best answer is simply “Hell no.” If it comes up, Twilight and the alicorns can simply decide it’s a Really Bad Idea to use it, and they’re right, since nobody actually understands how the hell it works, because it violates causality in that fashion. Alternatively, I borrow an answer I saw in a fanfiction once: It can only be used once in a pony’s lifetime. And, obviously, the alicorns being immortal and all wouldn’t use up one of their precious uses of the spell for anything short of “The situation is hopeless, and Equestria is now 100% doomed.” (That is to say, I assume Celestia would have used it IF her attempt to jog Twilight’s memory against Discord had failed.) The second I saw that time travel episode, I was like “Oh crap.” because I knew that it would add a new layer of complexity to any realistic fanfiction I tried to write, in the sense that I would have to come up with some way to write it off. I am not smart enough to deal with time travel. I am nowhere near smart enough. As HPMOR points out, even stable time loops are ridiculously complicated and drive people stark raving mad with regularity.
My favorite explanation: since causality tries to avoid paradoxes, most time-travellers get squished by large rocks or natural disasters before they can act, because they would have tried to change things. Even if they were going to try and avoid changing the past, they would have inevitably made mistakes, so the only consistent result is either ignorance and co-incidence or dyeing almost immediately. Or the time spell failing due to unforseen problems, if you’re feeling generous.
As far as I understand it, causality is just the relationship between cause and effect. If I’m right, saying it tries to avoid paradoxes is like saying gravity acts whenever someone falls off a cliff to prevent them from flying.
If I really needed to explain away time travel in this fic, I’d probably have a future Twilight show up and say “Whatever you do, do NOT use time travel. I don’t care how bad it is. Even if Equestria is going to be destroyed if you don’t. DO. NOT. MESS. WITH. TIME.”
Fortunately, I don’t see any situation in this fic where Twilight would even want to use time travel. Arguments aren’t one-time only things, you can always come back with another counterpoint later against a rational opponent who’s arguing for the sake of finding out who’s right, rather than to win social status or something. And any losses of social status that may occur in the fic are nowhere near worthy of time-travel to fix them, it’d be like cleaning a house by burning it to the ground and building a new one.
That was a somewhat anthropomorphic allusion to the Novikov self-consistency principle. But yes, it is.
Fair enough.
EDIT:
You realize the canonical example of time travel was a stable loop, right? As was that pinkie-sense business.
Wouldn’t that weaken the already-weak pro-death argument?
It does, in fact, weaken the anti-alicorn argument (Different from the pro-death argument, even though they still wind up the same) but with the amount of ammunition I’ve gotten from LessWrong, the anti-alicorn side is no longer weak in the slightest.