User:Najawin/Sandbox 10

The Web or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deflationism
Ah, The Web. I'm sure we've all thought about it. I know I have. Indeed, I thought about it for quite some time after the R4bp thread, in order to think about whether or not it might actually work for a satisfactory account of validity. I don't think it does, but there are some subtle issues here that we should discuss.

Firstly, is The Web Validity, or is it merely a tool we construct to help us talk about Validity? I think it's clear that The Web of Narrative Connections is clearly a useful tool - if it can be constructed - for any discussion of Validity, since individual authors should have their own views of the DWU in which a subset of their view of the DWU is roughly analogous to a subset of The Web. So it's useful even to someone who thinks that continuity shouldn't touch our validity rules at all, if only for how it impacts the views of others. Scrooge suggests it's the former.
 * I think that by "intended to be set in the DWU", we mean "intended to be part of the Web"

I think this position is... difficult to hold. First and foremost, what about a writer who simply doesn't want anyone to reference their work? A writer that is notoriously disagreeable? They actively discourage people from building off of their storylines whenever possible and try to insist that their work shouldn't loop back around to the rest of what other people are doing, but still write using DWU characters? It sounds almost familiar, if a bit too extreme, no? Is this hypothetical "Angry Harry" still writing for the DWU? Seems to be to me, even if they don't consider their work suitable for others to reference. How about a series that uses some DWU concepts in a completely disjoint way from how they've been used before, (maybe even says that it's "its own universe") perhaps there's some crossovers later on down the line, but there's no backwards narrative connections? (Okay, I'm teasing a bit there, it's not that extreme. But the basic principle applies. What if we take some DWU concepts, rip them free of their original context - you've even suggested that we could do this with an image, a design, to some extent - and then have them run forward in their original series, while they might in the future be fine referencing The Web.) Even if we accept something like The Web, what you're suggesting is too restrictive. But it needs to be this restrictive, because if not, if you allow these dead ends and false starts, then the way you've defined R4 doesn't quite work here.

Alright, now, next, and is it just me, or is this getting really dodgy? Like. Sure. We're dealing with natural language, not formal ones. But when we start trying to define a categorization scheme using the things we're supposed to be categorizing, I get very suspicious. This has historically been a losing play. The insistence of Czech, Tangerine and others to base validity on solely OOU considerations is very well thought out in this regard.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think the issue here is that this is just obviously wrong. The DWU as we mean it on this site is defined by our validity policies. Our article on Doctor Who universe says as much. And these validity policies change over time. It's simply not the case that "Valid" = "part of The Web (not a dead end or false start)". Perhaps, perhaps, this is what it should come to mean, in that we should use The Web as a guide to T:VS. But it doesn't mean that. The two terms are not synonymous, and I don't think it's clear that they even line up at the present time.

Now, nobody is saying The Web isn't important, just that it isn't synonymous with validity. Validity is merely what we make of it. Think of it like the legal/moral distinction. Perhaps we should base our laws off of morality. But legal positivists don't think there's any inherent correlation between them, whereas natural law theorists insist the opposite - "an unjust law is no law at all". I think even if our validity rules didn't correspond to The Web at all, they would still reflect The DWU as this wiki understood it, since we've defined the term to refer to what we construct using T:VS. And I don't think this is a radical position, I think it's the most reasonable one given the plain fact that most people here have lived under a time where certain things we all wanted valid were ostensibly invalid.

Now enough of that, let me explain why The Web isn't important.

Oh, I kid I kid, I jest I jape. It's useful. It's very useful. But I'd be wary to use it so closely as a guide to validity, even aside from the definitional concerns. It's a useful tool, but it should be something we temper with other factors. Why? Well, the same reasons that User:NoNotTheMemes alludes to. And, indeed, this is one of the reasons why I didn't try to offer a Grand Theory of Validity in my opening post. As someone with a copy of Sakurai and Napolitano on my bookshelf not six feet away from me I feel it's my duty to warn Scrooge away from this path with such scant provisions and scant preparation. Avoid its siren song!

At least in addition to this massive web of continuity concerns, we need to think about how our readers will benefit from what we deem valid and invalid, rather than how our editors will. I know some people IRL who are massive Doctor Who fans, just massive. And they despise the wiki and consider it near unusable because it mixes together EU content and show content. I keep telling them that this will never change, that it's a foundational principle of our wiki that all sources are equal, but it really puts them off. And our decision validate all of these R4bp works, well... Some of them frustrated them more than others, but to them it just wasn't helpful, it obscured things more than made it clear. And I don't want to suggest that every reader is like this, but my suspicion is that a lot of them are. One of the earliest conversations on how to deal with validity, which I linked above, Forum:The original inclusion debates, suggested to use italics to demarcate EU vs tv content. And this clearly didn't happen in the long term, though it actually did happen here and there in the early days, people just didn't do it consistently and it fell out of favor. And people have suggested more updated versions since then, see Thread:129501 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II. I think there are multiple concerns we need to balance when it comes to validity, these are just the two most obvious. I'm sure, given time, that we can come up with more. Reducing it to one concern is... Misguided in the extreme in my mind. And I certainly wouldn't wish to beg the question against those who feel the need to weigh the scales more heavily towards curating content towards our readers than I do.

Category Theory is a Lie and Alexander Grothendieck Set Mathematics Back 100 Years
So perhaps I'm just too set in my ways, but I don't fully understand Scrooge's response about linear time invalidity for contradiction. His argument doesn't seem even slightly analogous to me. Let me explain why using some handy dandy commutative continuity diagrams. Here's the terminology you need to understand these diagrams, okay? "VN", where N is a number means that this is the Nth "Valid" story we're considering for the diagram, "IN" means this is the Nth "Invalid" story, "V1->V2" means something like "V1 informs the continuity of V2", or "V2 is trying to be in continuity with V1". "V1-/->V2" means the negation of that, and "V1<->V2" and "V1<-/->V2" means that we erase the time dependence of our previous relations.

So back in the days of yore, we had the following two stories, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1, & I1\\ \end{array} $$. You might ask why I'm not including an arrow here. Because, frankly, my argument has no need for it. V1 and I1 might have related continuities, they might not. (EG: It's hard to deny that Shalka is continuous from the classic series.) My argument does not assume that invalid stories and valid stories are intentionally discontinuous. Indeed, it considers the entire issue a red herring. Now, given these two stories, we can consider another story that references the two of them. $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$. Now, I2 was made invalid, and this, crucially, was because of the connected arrows, because of a pattern present in this diagram, namely, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & I1 & \rightarrow & ? & \Rightarrow & I1 & \rightarrow & I2\\ \end{array} $$. The sequels/prequels to invalid stories thread changed this. Now, depending on factors other than patterns in these diagrams, both $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ and $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow V2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ can exist. The R4bp thread concluded with the idea that considering diagrams of the form, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow V2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ we can replace them with $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow V2 & \leftarrow & V3\\ \end{array} $$. This is asymmetric. Scrooge suggests the issue is one of looking at the same graph while removing the time element. I wish to submit that this is clearly false. If we're considering diagrams of the form $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow \quad ? & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ and simply deciding whether "?" is to be valid or invalid, I don't see how changing this diagram to $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \leftrightarrow \quad ? & \leftrightarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ changes the calculation one whit. (Indeed, it's arguably because of this change that my argument works! We need there to be a symmetry between going from $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \leftarrow & I1 & \Rightarrow & V1 & \leftarrow & V2\\ \end{array} $$ to $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & ? & \leftarrow & I1 & \Rightarrow & I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ and there just isn't without assuming time invariance. My argument really was that using these arrows at all was circular reasoning, given how our diagrams were populated, but time invariance actually makes it stronger. Otherwise this second form of the argument only works on diagrams of the form $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ which is a rather different issue.)

Perhaps the difference will become more apparent if we chart out his proposed counter example and why I don't think they're similar?

Scrooge suggests we consider the following diagram instead: $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V2 & \nrightarrow & V3 \\ & \uparrow & \nearrow \\ & V1 \\ \end{array} $$, or, if you prefer, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V2 & \nrightarrow & ? \\ & \uparrow & \nearrow \\ & V1 \\ \end{array} $$. And this is clearly non analogous, right? I mean, even if you insist that my hypothetical has to populate the continuity relationship between V1 and I1, a view I straightforwardly reject, even if you apply time invariance to this graph as well (bear with me, this is actually the one issue here, diagonal arrows can't do this on mediawiki, so I'm going to turn it into a box diagram) $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V2 & \nleftrightarrow & ? \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & V1 & = & V1 \\ \end{array} $$, in this analogy, there's still a giant hole - that both stories already propagating the diagram are already valid, and the "non continuous" arrow is a relationship between one of them and the new story we're considering, not between the previous stories that already are present in the diagram.

Now, one might argue, perhaps we shouldn't privilege past states of the diagram over future ones. That if we fill in those continuity arrows between I1 and V1 from my example we get $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \nrightarrow & I1 \\ & \downarrow & \swarrow \\ & ? \\ \end{array} $$ and then adding time invariance to this diagram gives us $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \nleftrightarrow & I1 \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & ? & = & ? \\ \end{array} $$ and then when we realize that in his example we clearly agree with validity for the question mark, so we do so here as well, and then this back propagates to I1. So $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \nleftrightarrow & V3 \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & V2 & = & V2 \\ \end{array} $$. Potentially then all structures of the form $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & X & \nleftrightarrow & X \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & X & = & X \\ \end{array} $$ are either all valid or invalid?

Perhaps this is what Scrooge is suggesting all along? It's not time invariance wrt media, it's time invariance wrt the decisions we make about these pieces of media. I don't really think he is? I'm just trying to steelman this argument. I don't really see a reading in which the two are analogous otherwise. Like - it's got some weird implications for how we conduct validity debates at the very least. At this point, not being a category theorist, and that's probably the best way to think about this, I think I have to beg off discussion ever so slightly, but my intuition is that this is precisely the reductive version of R4 Scrooge has suggested and people have not largely been fans of. It's that instead of springboarding off of Unearthly Child our web springboards off of every piece of DWU media. That's my guess. (I think this is the first time I've ever wished Amorkuz was here - I think he was an algebraist?)