retrospec | (no subject)

John R. Lunise
2/8 near Recolle
On the subject of horses, allow me to ask you a question: When you were a child, what was the name of the bear family who taught valuable life lessons in easily digestible books?
Chances are, you answered 'the Berenstein Bears'. And, as it happens, that is incorrect; it is the Berenstain Bears.
How can everyone misremember this? How can something so patently true turn out to be terribly false? Some people will tell you it is the 'Mandela effect', named after a shockingly large number of people believed Nelson Mandela died in prison... but simple mass misremembering is a fairly boring answer, isn't it?
Consider instead a possibility physics allows us: that infinite universes exist, that every possibility spawns a diverging universe. Consider then that these different universes must be ruled by mathematics and science, that were were able to observe them, some concrete, tangible difference must exist to distinguish them.
Consider also that the laws of physics as we know them are, in some cases, simply and utterly inoperable. The quantum scale, for example. Or a naked singularity. It is, therefore, conceivable that through some quirk of physics, some awesome miracle... we have merged or shifted into a world in which horses never existed, and chocobos always did.
Impossible, you say, and perhaps rightly so... but I have no better explanation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

John R. Lunise All very salient points, and in the case of the book quite likely... but far less applicable to the replacement of horses with birds, I think.

Hitori Togusa A fair point. Because I remember horses. Oh, do I remember horses. Walking death traps.
Hitori Togusa But if I go by the Mounted Division's Stables now? It's all birds.
Hitori Togusa The way the populace is treating it, it makes you think of your initial point: That it's been this way the entire time and we've just never noticed.

John R. Lunise Which implies so much I find incomprehensible or unbelievable that I much favor an alternative explanation.

Hitori Togusa Okay. But it's also odd that no one seems to have replied to your post or to Koutarou's pictures earlier with 'what is that?' Everyone who has access to this platform knows what a horse is?
Hitori Togusa But of course I'd probably be leaning towards a social explanation, I'll acknowledge my bias.

John R. Lunise And I have a scientific one, to be sure.
John R. Lunise You make a very salient point, though, with regards to a lack of responses. But do either of our theories explain that?
John R. Lunise The simplest explanation may be a biased feed algorithm like Facebook.

Hitori Togusa As in, the app would only show the posts to people who already know what horses are?
Hitori Togusa The investigative answer would be to find somebody outside of this network that still remembers them. Because if the populations have a 1 to 1 matchup, there is something even stranger than I think either of our theories can explain going on.

John R. Lunise On that point, we are in complete agreement.
John R. Lunise But it will be very difficult to look for said people without raising a lot of difficult questions.

Hitori Togusa I've got a few ideas, actually. The big one would be to simply ask some of my family from back home.
Hitori Togusa A quick google image search is bringing up reproductions of Japanese art with samurai riding chocobos. And I'm not sure what to think of that.

John R. Lunise The problem is eliminating everyone not on this network, which is of course unfeasible. Though we can calculate for statistical significance.