Real Life cannot be an overriding limitation on any question unless specifically requested

Question

I have finally found the perfect question to kick-start this discussion concerning what I believe is a growing undesirable behavior on Worldbuilding

• How can the Sea of Japan be drained?

The OP wasn't just a new user, before I upvoted her question she had a single reputation point and hadn't taken the tour yet. She was as new as new could be! And the very first reaction she received, both in comments and in answers, is "that's impractical!"

There was a day when participating worldbuilders would pick up the gauntlet and throw impracticality out the window to come up with creative, imaginative, clever, weird, funny, stupid, even controversial ways to solve the OP's problem. But today, we're growing into a habit of stating, proverbially... "well, you can't do that in real life, so you're screwed."

Real life cannot be an overriding limitation to worldbuilding

I have not taken the time to sort through the questions. There's a lot of them! It's actually exciting to see so many new users and new questions! But there have been enough questions to throw the proverbial flag in my consciousness. I've even started catching myself doing it! (And I've been chastised by others for not doing it!) Far too frequently either...

• Questions are being limited solely because in Real Life it's impractical or impossible. It used to be that was relegated to a Frame Challenge. (See also, When and how to challenge the back story?)

• Questions are appearing with startling frequency asking if it's possible for something fantastic to happen in Real Life. Think of it as, "please show me some blueprints to build my Death Ray!" That used to be rare. At least it feels to me that it used to be rare. And I suspect it's a consequence of the community's shift to expecting all questions to be answered from the perspective of Real Life. At least, if you read through our answers of the last few weeks... it sure looks that way. We're apparently becoming the place, not to figuratively bring imagination to life, but to literally being imagination to life. (If we could do that, even rarely, we should create our own site someplace where every post isn't Public Domain so that we could file all the patents!)

The problem is that imposing Real Life on any question without the express invitation by the OP to do so seriously limits the value of the site. To be blunt: there's no reason for the site to exist if questions can only be or should only be answered from the perspective of Real Life.

I'll create an example using one of the question types I hate the most: How could my fantastic creature evolve? I hate those questions because, simply, the creature didn't evolve in Real Life, so obviously there weren't any examples of evolutionary pressures in Earth's history that could justify the creature. Shame on me! I still hate the question because, frankly, what's the use of that information in any story, really? But who am I to forbid a creative and, therefore, productive answer just because I can't see beyond the limits of Real Life?

Rather than welcome a new user and ask questions clarifying the user's intent for the purpose of creating imaginative solutions, we immediately started complaining and pointing out the unreality of the question. On Worldbuilding! Frankly, most of the linked question's initial comments were little more than calling the OP's question "dumb" and, funny as they might have been to read, were actually quite mean and restrictive.

Proposal: Science is a great TOOL for helping worldbuilders build their worlds, but it is NOT a fundamental limitation save in the case of the hard-science tag

Even the science-based tag shouldn't (and doesn't!) mandate that science is the only expression of the solution. It only means that science should be the stepping stone we use to justify or rationalize an imaginative solution. But it seems to me we are, less and less, believing that. Instead, the site appears to be imposing science as the one and only valid perspective.

If you, the reader's, knee-jerk reaction to any question is, "you just can't do that!" you should train yourself to recognize that moment and force yourself to realize that you're not being creative.

I'm going to leave you with a personal, and therefore very blunt, consideration:

If hard science is the world you want to live in, you're participating on the wrong Stack. While we allow querents to tag their questions with the hard-science tag because, sometimes, the querent wants to express an idea as closely to the rules of real life science as possible, that simply is not the go-to first solution for worldbuilding. Participants who believe any (if not all) questions should be addressed principally by Real Life are welcome to leave this Stack and participate on the Physics, Earth Sciences, Astronomy, Geology, and Space stacks. Worldbuilding is a place where scientists and artists combine their experience to bring flights of fancy to life and imaginatively realize the most beautiful expression of "what if?"

Relevant Meta Posts:

• More strict scientific culture in Worldbuilding?

Answer 1

If the question doesn't specify the expected direction of answer, it's reasonable to infer from what information there is.

The Sea of Japan question doesn't specify any level of future tech, alternate reality, magic, etc. In fact, it could have been written for the Engineering stack. Since the question talks about a real-world country with a hypothetical but real-world problem, it is natural to assume the world being built has real-world-ish technology. That leads inevitably to the challenge of the premise, because the desired solution is so far removed from real-world.

I do agree that the tone needs to be less hostile and more encouraging to add information to questions, but given the apparent lack of effort put into preparing the question, I understand that the first reaction is "Have you thought about what you're proposing?". Comments along that line are a better alternative than a close vote for "unclear".

I'm all for ice wizards and wormholes to create more usable land for the Japanese, but despite the intriguing premise, I'm not going to waste my creative energy going off on a tangent that the OP 95% likely can't use for their story/world.

Answer 2

I see that the Sea of Japan question has received frame challenges in nearly every answer. Perhaps Elementilas' is the exception.

But I think that it is a natural response, not to the fact that the question asks about something fanciful, but to the fact that the question is only one paragraph long and doesn't show any research. It also doesn't give any background information - does Japan even have the cooperation of both Koreas and Russia? Just listing the countries and funding involved can elicit an answer that's taking their means and resources into account.

This question, on the other hand, describes all those things. Now this question is a reality check (even if it lacks the tag) so frame challenges are intended here, but they are also more in depth and a few answers roll along with it.

I think there's a happy middle road. If the Sea of Japan question were four paragraphs long instead of one paragraph, and described the resources and expectations in greater detail, then I don't think it would have had quite the same response.

Answer 3

I think that questions can better avoid this circumstance by adding more detail about goals and constraints. The Sea of Japan question seems fine to me, generally, but leaves completely undefined terms like "most effective" which are necessary to frame the answer. The question is interesting enough to attract attention but underspecified.

Leaving it unbounded makes it difficult to identify a "good" answer, let alone the best, because the answers aren't even necessarily talking about the same thing. If a population boom is necessitating land reclamation from the Sea of Japan, are we talking about Japan dedicating all of its GDP to the task until it's done? Or some more sustainable amount, maybe? Do we care about fault tolerances, risk over ten years, risk over a century, or similar? Is "the shortest amount of time" meant to equate to "acceptably fast to alleviate the current population boom", and does it matter if the latter is impossible? What about a huge array of hand pumps, to keep the booming population occupied and distracted from their current, cramped conditions? Are frame challenges like "live on a flotilla" or "develop Rapture" reasonable answers?

I agree that "this idea is unrealistic" is not a useful answer outside of questions tagged with reality-check, but I also think that unbounded questions about methods are likely to receive such an answer. I think that this question would have had a better reception if it asked about time, in the sense of "how quickly could Japan drain the Sea of Japan for land reclamation purposes using current technology?". This is an unreasonable expectation of a brand-new user, but perhaps other, more experienced users can nudge questions like this one onto a track that will produce better responses.

But as written, it may be that the best answer to this question is "this won't work for what you want", whether that's followed up with a frame challenge or not. In such a case (whether you agree that this is an example of one or not) it makes more sense (to me) to work on editing questions rather than expecting better prior restraint among all possible answerers.

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I also think that, here and on SE more broadly, there are issues with kindness, tone, and the incentives for faster, more direct, and simpler answers. Those exist above and outside of any particular question, but they may be more significant on questions like this one.

Answer 4

The problems with questions like these is that they show zero effort on the part of the asker. They're essentially throwing their question at the wall and hoping an answer will stick.

By the same logic, a zero effort answer saying nothing more than "handwave it" should be a completely valid answer to such a question, yet somehow I doubt users here would be happy to upvote it.

If someone hasn't gone to the effort of putting even the smallest amount of thinking into their question, that means they aren't trying to build their own world, they're just plagiarizing bits of others' worlds. Is that really something we want to reward?

Answer 5

The question is Valid, But some answers are poor taste.

The question might be terse, but implies current technology and society. most answers point to some or another doable thing.

But one answer strikes me as particularly poor taste. It proposes that Japan, the only country that ever had been nuked in an act of war, uses nuclear weapons to vaporize the sea.

But to say it frankly: Japan has an extreme disfavorably look to hate on nuclear weapons. Japan has a constitution that bans it from waging aggressive war or having a military. Yes, they don't have a military! They have a police that is armed to the teeth with helicopter carriers and fighter jets, but no military. They have a treaty with the USA since 1960 that banned any stationing of nuclear weapons by the USA in their country and before Okinawa was returned in 1972, the US had to remove their nukes there too. Japan signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty. They also uphold three non-law principles that, while not a fact of law, are express policy of the state: Japan will never manufacture, possess or even allow nukes on Japanese soil.