NPC-ism, or why self-help rarely works without outside input

[SuperPulp2789]

NPC is the acronym for Non-Player-Characters

You know those characters, both allies and enemies, very limited in terms of what actions they can take and what decisions/storylines they can even think of

Compared to the PC, Player Character, that can have so many builds/strategies

I theorize that IRL, most people are NPCs. Thing is, they are NOT stupid or lazy, they DO have their own hopes and dreams, they just have a hard time thinking in versatile manners and perhaps acting upon them and at times their hopes and dreams are too much into conformity or counterfeit-individualism, the latter is "I paint with red, simply because everybody else paints with blue, I don't even like red"


Going back to how this affects behavior

I did say it's why it makes "self-help" so hard

We today have much knowledge/skills out there for cheap, problem is, we are more likely to "brute force" things

Or study and work hard to memorize without truly understanding and thinking we are understanding when we are just memorizing it, this goes for many skills

So this is why we go with teachers/mentors, problem is, after awhile they are also NPCs themselves and do not think too deeply either and everybody is there just to be there than to legitimately gain any skills


So why not try self education? Harder than it looks because most will have a hard time even making themselves show up, they will also severely doubt their own practices


I dislike that it's a fictional example, but Shen Wulong from Kengan Asura/Omega still amazes me in that his advice is ridiculously simple for a man with thousands of years worth of knowledge/skills/experience

Which was "work out, train your basics and revise them bit by bit for any flaws and also go look up some other techniques"

That was it, nothing esoteric at all

Which reminds me of pretty much all the philosophy and war-principle/strategy books I read. Which were, keep yourself cool, avoid overthinking but still think, be cautious, yet be decisive and you'll be alright. Plus some other simple stuff.


I think many of us NPCs severely romanticize the PCs and think they have some supreme talent or worked ridiculously hard, truth be told, it's a mix of talent, working hard and lastly working smart. Plus a mindset to play life like a videogame…..we do NOT play life like a videogame, we do NOT actually revise our strategies much if at all.

Unless we are following someone else who's a good guide, directly if possible



And TBF, what would happen if everybody was a PC? I'll tell you what'd happen

Way more chaos and it'd be a harder time getting people to follow for long, the moment they realize they're being screwed over by their so-called superiors.

Many ancient kingdoms like China and Egypt wouldn't have lasted long, because too many independent minded guys would be going against "traditions"




I swear, if a real life "soft" System Apocalypse were to occur, most people sure AF aren't minmaxing themselves or even gonna think if their current build was EVER a good idea

 

[humon]

In the case of empires, power has a habit of looking for potential challengers and eliminating them from the game before they can become a threat. As was alluded to when that one Roman king (according to Livy) swept a scythe over a field of poppies to cut off the heads of the tallest ones. You can also see this in the history of monastic traditions, where taking tonsure was a way for a tall poppy to keep his head attached, since his monastic vows would prevent him from ever challenging the ruling authority. Thus, monasteries and temples could become places of concentrated creativity.

On the topic of NPCs in general, I'm attracted to the work of Iain McGilchrist, regarding the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere is responsible for narrowly focused attention that allows you to complete a well-defined task in the most efficient way possible. The right hemisphere is responsible for paying attention to the world as a whole and tracking whether things make sense or not. What McGilchrist has observed is that when the left hemisphere is damaged, the patient can still function, but is less dextrous, less efficient at doing things, but when the right hemisphere is damaged, the patient suffers a lot of severe cognitive problems: losing track of half of the visual space, insisting on falsehoods and being unable to accept evidence to the contrary, mistaking people for objects, or objects for people, or thinking a dear friend or family member has been replaced by an impostor. This is because the left hemisphere of the brain does not track the context of the problem it's solving; it doesn't know why it's doing what it's doing, it just knows that it has to do it.

Some of this may sound familiar, as pathologies of the modern world: people not listening to reason, blaming everyone but themselves when things go wrong, trying to solve complex problems with simple solutions, having only a hammer and seeing every problem as a nail, bureaucracies imposing draconian rules that end up being counterproductive, organizations pushing so strongly to eliminate a problem (eg. racism, poverty, gender disparity) that they end up making that problem worse through backlash. McGilchrist suggests that these are all problems of an over-functioning left hemisphere that is not being properly inhibited by the right hemisphere. He also believes that this may be the result of an education system that is structured to reinforce left hemisphere thinking while dismissing the holistic thinking of the right hemisphere as insignificant (since it can't be tested, counted, or measured). In other words: line go up make world better.

Oddly, in most men the right hemisphere is slightly larger than the left hemisphere (the front and back ends sort of wrap around the left to claim more space), while in women they are the same size. My gut instinct is that having a strong right hemisphere to inhibit the left is a necessary condition of using power responsibly. With power being historically held by men, it meant that men needed to develop this imbalance in order to compete with each other while women did not, since their power was limited (except in cases where they had subtle influence over kings and emperors -- but there were limits to that influence). You can look at how many stories have been written through time that were aimed at teaching boys how to be responsible with the use of power (while stories aimed at girls were more about not being fooled by shitty guys who are charismatic but don't commit).

Another thing I want to bring up is IQ, and the "breakfast question". Supposedly, people with 90 IQ or less have trouble with hypotheticals. If 100 IQ is the average, then 90 and below would represent a pretty significant portion of any population. And if they can't even imagine what they would have felt like if they didn't eat breakfast the other day, then I don't see how they can ever transcend NPC thinking. These are people who can be very productive at repetitive tasks, such as in a factory or a call centre, but you should not waste your time asking them to come up with a new way of doing things.

Setting that aside, there are also lots of NPCs among the more intelligent parts of the population, and I think that has more to do with people being not having enough time to really think about what they're doing. Even a great genius can be made to act foolishly if you put him under enough time pressure. Ever since the internet came around, people have had more and more things going on in their lives that distract them and don't let them stop and think about anything. So it should not be a surprise that they then act without thinking in a lot of contexts.

Another aspect of it may be that people are player characters within the contexts they know best (within a fandom, an academic subject, a trade skill, or some other technical field), and they only become NPCs when they are dealing with things they don't know very well. So a doctor may have a lot of interesting insights within the field of medicine he practices--theories he wants to test out, or new treatment methods he's working on--but then if you show him some mainstream news article about a foreign war he'll just react kneejerk like anyone else who doesn't have time to look into it. He's only got so much time in the day to think about anything, and if he's spending most of that time reading literature within his field, he has no time left over to research geopolitics, in that example.

And, like I mentioned before, the education system seems to train people in the direction of left-brain thinking, which might explain why the more education someone has, the more likely they are to be an NPC (or the old phrase, "So dumb only an intellectual could believe it"). High intelligence can be a double-edged sword, because it also comes with a higher ability for self-deception. The antidote to self-deception is wisdom, but wisdom is not taught in schools... you have to get it from your parents or from a cultural tradition (often religious, though many religions get corrupted and bastardized by NPCs when they get too large and bureaucratic). High intelligence without a matching level of wisdom can often be disastrous.

Finally, I could also paraphrase the line from the Screwtape Letters, where the demon Screwtape states that he and his kind want humans for food, while the Enemy (the big man upstairs) wants them to be sons. When a person lets himself be possessed by ideologies, vices, addictions, fandoms, and timewasting distractions, he becomes food for the (metaphorical) demons those things represent. Another way to put this, is that he becomes a casualty of fifth generation warfare (information warfare, waged by advertisers, scammers, cults, government propagandists, non-state propagandists, and social contagions alike). The world of the internet is a world where human attention is being farmed so that someone else can acquire money and power. To a wild boar, pigs on a farm are NPCs. Likewise, human NPCs are the ones who allow their minds to be farmed by a third party. You can understand why they do it--it's comfortable and predictable, and they may even live longer than their wild counterparts--but it always ends in the pig finding out one day that the farmer is not his friend.

Also, every zombie apocalypse movie is about this exact phenomenon. NPCs may be predictable and easy to outwit individually, but if there are hundreds of them and you're alone, and some force is possessing them to all attack you at once... what are you going to do?

 

[SuperPulp2789]

In the case of empires, power has a habit of looking for potential challengers and eliminating them from the game before they can become a threat. As was alluded to when that one Roman king (according to Livy) swept a scythe over a field of poppies to cut off the heads of the tallest ones. You can also see this in the history of monastic traditions, where taking tonsure was a way for a tall poppy to keep his head attached, since his monastic vows would prevent him from ever challenging the ruling authority. Thus, monasteries and temples could become places of concentrated creativity.

On the topic of NPCs in general, I'm attracted to the work of Iain McGilchrist, regarding the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere is responsible for narrowly focused attention that allows you to complete a well-defined task in the most efficient way possible. The right hemisphere is responsible for paying attention to the world as a whole and tracking whether things make sense or not. What McGilchrist has observed is that when the left hemisphere is damaged, the patient can still function, but is less dextrous, less efficient at doing things, but when the right hemisphere is damaged, the patient suffers a lot of severe cognitive problems: losing track of half of the visual space, insisting on falsehoods and being unable to accept evidence to the contrary, mistaking people for objects, or objects for people, or thinking a dear friend or family member has been replaced by an impostor. This is because the left hemisphere of the brain does not track the context of the problem it's solving; it doesn't know why it's doing what it's doing, it just knows that it has to do it.

Some of this may sound familiar, as pathologies of the modern world: people not listening to reason, blaming everyone but themselves when things go wrong, trying to solve complex problems with simple solutions, having only a hammer and seeing every problem as a nail, bureaucracies imposing draconian rules that end up being counterproductive, organizations pushing so strongly to eliminate a problem (eg. racism, poverty, gender disparity) that they end up making that problem worse through backlash. McGilchrist suggests that these are all problems of an over-functioning left hemisphere that is not being properly inhibited by the right hemisphere. He also believes that this may be the result of an education system that is structured to reinforce left hemisphere thinking while dismissing the holistic thinking of the right hemisphere as insignificant (since it can't be tested, counted, or measured). In other words: line go up make world better.

Oddly, in most men the right hemisphere is slightly larger than the left hemisphere (the front and back ends sort of wrap around the left to claim more space), while in women they are the same size. My gut instinct is that having a strong right hemisphere to inhibit the left is a necessary condition of using power responsibly. With power being historically held by men, it meant that men needed to develop this imbalance in order to compete with each other while women did not, since their power was limited (except in cases where they had subtle influence over kings and emperors -- but there were limits to that influence). You can look at how many stories have been written through time that were aimed at teaching boys how to be responsible with the use of power (while stories aimed at girls were more about not being fooled by shitty guys who are charismatic but don't commit).

Another thing I want to bring up is IQ, and the "breakfast question". Supposedly, people with 90 IQ or less have trouble with hypotheticals. If 100 IQ is the average, then 90 and below would represent a pretty significant portion of any population. And if they can't even imagine what they would have felt like if they didn't eat breakfast the other day, then I don't see how they can ever transcend NPC thinking. These are people who can be very productive at repetitive tasks, such as in a factory or a call centre, but you should not waste your time asking them to come up with a new way of doing things.

Setting that aside, there are also lots of NPCs among the more intelligent parts of the population, and I think that has more to do with people being not having enough time to really think about what they're doing. Even a great genius can be made to act foolishly if you put him under enough time pressure. Ever since the internet came around, people have had more and more things going on in their lives that distract them and don't let them stop and think about anything. So it should not be a surprise that they then act without thinking in a lot of contexts.

Another aspect of it may be that people are player characters within the contexts they know best (within a fandom, an academic subject, a trade skill, or some other technical field), and they only become NPCs when they are dealing with things they don't know very well. So a doctor may have a lot of interesting insights within the field of medicine he practices--theories he wants to test out, or new treatment methods he's working on--but then if you show him some mainstream news article about a foreign war he'll just react kneejerk like anyone else who doesn't have time to look into it. He's only got so much time in the day to think about anything, and if he's spending most of that time reading literature within his field, he has no time left over to research geopolitics, in that example.

And, like I mentioned before, the education system seems to train people in the direction of left-brain thinking, which might explain why the more education someone has, the more likely they are to be an NPC (or the old phrase, "So dumb only an intellectual could believe it"). High intelligence can be a double-edged sword, because it also comes with a higher ability for self-deception. The antidote to self-deception is wisdom, but wisdom is not taught in schools... you have to get it from your parents or from a cultural tradition (often religious, though many religions get corrupted and bastardized by NPCs when they get too large and bureaucratic). High intelligence without a matching level of wisdom can often be disastrous.

Finally, I could also paraphrase the line from the Screwtape Letters, where the demon Screwtape states that he and his kind want humans for food, while the Enemy (the big man upstairs) wants them to be sons. When a person lets himself be possessed by ideologies, vices, addictions, fandoms, and timewasting distractions, he becomes food for the (metaphorical) demons those things represent. Another way to put this, is that he becomes a casualty of fifth generation warfare (information warfare, waged by advertisers, scammers, cults, government propagandists, non-state propagandists, and social contagions alike). The world of the internet is a world where human attention is being farmed so that someone else can acquire money and power. To a wild boar, pigs on a farm are NPCs. Likewise, human NPCs are the ones who allow their minds to be farmed by a third party. You can understand why they do it--it's comfortable and predictable, and they may even live longer than their wild counterparts--but it always ends in the pig finding out one day that the farmer is not his friend.

Also, every zombie apocalypse movie is about this exact phenomenon. NPCs may be predictable and easy to outwit individually, but if there are hundreds of them and you're alone, and some force is possessing them to all attack you at once... what are you going to do?

Click to shrink...

When it comes to learning

I think it's best to apply three things

SHU HA RI

Follow

Break Away

Transcend


People are too focused on trying to either follow the rules or breaking them, when those who are possibly the best, are those who know the rules well enough to know how to break them

It's like the LEGO MOVIE

Emmett becomes a Master Builder, possibly the best one, because he knew the instructions really well, but also knew to break them very well

Many people are gonna be as you said, extremely repetitive and unimaginative. Whilst fooling themselves they are not. Others are gonna be only creatives and experts in one field and be completely blown away and easily fooled elsewhere.


I hate to say it, but religion does help bring a sense of humbleness and admitted limitations. Go be a sinner, but remember that a higher power exists and you can/will screw up. Just how to realize when you do, otherwise you're gonna all be screwing up.


I think it's fine to be a follower, just remember you choose your master still: A servant instead of a slave.


Going back to SHU HA RI

The real problem is fear, the concept is simple, but most people may need someone else to push them. Then they find out they're not afraid whilst doing it, just need to feel they're on the path, any path.

 

[humon]

Another point about wisdom that I forgot to mention, but it ties into what you just said, is that there are two ways to acquire it. The hard way is to go out and make mistakes and get your ass kicked, and then learn from your failures. The easy way is to listen to your elders, because they already got their asses kicked a long time ago and learned some lessons from it, and they will happily tell you what they know, if you ask, so that you don't have to get your ass kicked yourself. A wisdom tradition is this second process but codified across many generations, so that it might have been 6000 years ago when our ancestors made stupid mistakes and got their asses kicked by reality, and someone thought to write down in a book what they did wrong. The why is a bit fuzzy, because these things are hard to understand, but at least having that record of what went wrong in the past, people have a place to start. Understanding the why is the pursuit of philosophers and theologians. But the why is also very important, because when people stop asking why, then it stops being wisdom and instead it becomes dogma.

Also I forgot to say, the example you gave earlier, of the ancient guy Shen Wulong, reminds me of the kind of advice Bruce Lee would give about fighting: there are no styles, only one human style if you have two arms and two legs. Try different techniques, keep the ones that work for you, discard the ones that don't. And then practice constantly. As we all know, Bruce doesn't fear the fighter who knows 1000 kicks, but rather the fighter who knows one kick but practiced it 1000 times.

Finally a quote from Thomas Sowell: "You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing"

 

[SuperPulp2789]

Another point about wisdom that I forgot to mention, but it ties into what you just said, is that there are two ways to acquire it. The hard way is to go out and make mistakes and get your ass kicked, and then learn from your failures. The easy way is to listen to your elders, because they already got their asses kicked a long time ago and learned some lessons from it, and they will happily tell you what they know, if you ask, so that you don't have to get your ass kicked yourself. A wisdom tradition is this second process but codified across many generations, so that it might have been 6000 years ago when our ancestors made stupid mistakes and got their asses kicked by reality, and someone thought to write down in a book what they did wrong. The why is a bit fuzzy, because these things are hard to understand, but at least having that record of what went wrong in the past, people have a place to start. Understanding the why is the pursuit of philosophers and theologians. But the why is also very important, because when people stop asking why, then it stops being wisdom and instead it becomes dogma.

Also I forgot to say, the example you gave earlier, of the ancient guy Shen Wulong, reminds me of the kind of advice Bruce Lee would give about fighting: there are no styles, only one human style if you have two arms and two legs. Try different techniques, keep the ones that work for you, discard the ones that don't. And then practice constantly. As we all know, Bruce doesn't fear the fighter who knows 1000 kicks, but rather the fighter who knows one kick but practiced it 1000 times.

Finally a quote from Thomas Sowell: "You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing"

Click to shrink...

Dogma, yeah

At times given how prevalent the whole work till you die stuff that East Asia has got

I am surprised they got guys like Miyamoto Musashi and Sun Tzu who were remarkably chill and acknowledging of limitations

Confucius, I think, didn't really think too much on how after at some point. You get zero actual appreciation of knowledge and a whole lot of guys who just memorized stuff and dumped them, aren't really wise and are over pressured.

Or that the power dynamics means that a stupid and shitty elder can afford to NOT really care about the longterm of his family, he'll be dead when it starts imploding. He may love, but that can be distorted.

 

[humon]

In any civilization you may see a correlation between times of existential warfare and the rise of brilliant thinkers; and conversely a correlation between times of long peace and the absence of wise thought. Necessity drives innovation. When a civilization is up against a challenge to its survival, either it will come up with some smart shit that will save it, or it will hold onto a failing dogma and be destroyed (empires on the verge of collapse always double down on their worst traits). When survival is guaranteed by hegemony or good times, then it is not so important to think outside of the box. People can gain personal advantage in easy times by abusing others, with the side effect of degrading the integrity of their clan and society as a whole, and they can get away with doing this because they know they will survive either way. But then everybody starts acting this way, society breaks down, and survival is no longer guaranteed, and that's when the crisis comes that separates the player characters from the rest.

As the saying goes, you need plenty of food, plenty of weapons, and the trust of the people. If you have to give up one of these things, give up weapons. If you have to give up a second thing, give up food. Because if you lose trust, then you've lost everything.

An elder who lets his family implode after he is dead will not be around to see it, but his reward for such actions is that no one will be alive in 100 years to remember his surname. Just as God said to Moses: I will visit the sins of the fathers onto the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. People might get away with being selfish in their lifetimes, but it comes back around on their descendants in the end. In the east, this is the legacy of Lenin and Mao. In the west, this is the legacy of the baby boomers and deficit spending. It's the same story of sacrificing the future for the present.

I mean, Confucius is held up as a grand master (the fuzi part of his name, right?) because he established an order for society that put social relationships into their proper place. The bond between father and son was the highest of all, even higher than between a lord and his vassal. I took that to mean that if a lord commanded his vassal to kill his own son, the vassal would be bound by Confucian philosophy to rebel against his lord. So to consider a shitty elder who does not care about his family in the long term, this sounds to me to be very much against Confucianism. Though maybe you are talking about an elder who is misguided and believes he is doing the right thing for his family when it is actually the wrong thing, and this may instead be the product of external manipulation.

One more thing I want to share is that I heard on a podcast somewhere a couple years ago, someone said that if your goal is to extract the maximum amount of wealth from a population, a pretty good strategy for doing it is to disrupt the transmission of wisdom between generations. Why? Because a fool and his money are soon parted.

 

[SuperPulp2789]

In any civilization you may see a correlation between times of existential warfare and the rise of brilliant thinkers; and conversely a correlation between times of long peace and the absence of wise thought. Necessity drives innovation. When a civilization is up against a challenge to its survival, either it will come up with some smart shit that will save it, or it will hold onto a failing dogma and be destroyed (empires on the verge of collapse always double down on their worst traits). When survival is guaranteed by hegemony or good times, then it is not so important to think outside of the box. People can gain personal advantage in easy times by abusing others, with the side effect of degrading the integrity of their clan and society as a whole, and they can get away with doing this because they know they will survive either way. But then everybody starts acting this way, society breaks down, and survival is no longer guaranteed, and that's when the crisis comes that separates the player characters from the rest.

As the saying goes, you need plenty of food, plenty of weapons, and the trust of the people. If you have to give up one of these things, give up weapons. If you have to give up a second thing, give up food. Because if you lose trust, then you've lost everything.

An elder who lets his family implode after he is dead will not be around to see it, but his reward for such actions is that no one will be alive in 100 years to remember his surname. Just as God said to Moses: I will visit the sins of the fathers onto the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. People might get away with being selfish in their lifetimes, but it comes back around on their descendants in the end. In the east, this is the legacy of Lenin and Mao. In the west, this is the legacy of the baby boomers and deficit spending. It's the same story of sacrificing the future for the present.

I mean, Confucius is held up as a grand master (the fuzi part of his name, right?) because he established an order for society that put social relationships into their proper place. The bond between father and son was the highest of all, even higher than between a lord and his vassal. I took that to mean that if a lord commanded his vassal to kill his own son, the vassal would be bound by Confucian philosophy to rebel against his lord. So to consider a shitty elder who does not care about his family in the long term, this sounds to me to be very much against Confucianism. Though maybe you are talking about an elder who is misguided and believes he is doing the right thing for his family when it is actually the wrong thing, and this may instead be the product of external manipulation.

One more thing I want to share is that I heard on a podcast somewhere a couple years ago, someone said that if your goal is to extract the maximum amount of wealth from a population, a pretty good strategy for doing it is to disrupt the transmission of wisdom between generations. Why? Because a fool and his money are soon parted.

Click to shrink...

If there are geniuses in peacetime, I expect many to have their accomplishments ignored for more politically accepted geniuses

I wouldn't put off one of the first proper mecha engineer guys NOT being very welcome at the big parties of the ultra rich who think they're "scientific" but merely dabble and are in it for appearances sake

And yeah, I do mean misguided elders, ones who think they're doing good and smart, but really have too many issues themselves to recognize when they're screwing up

East Asian Family structures can make the clan head into a tyrant and his kids into future tyrants ruling it over nephews, cousins and so on. Playing with inheritance and stirring resentment. Even the Mother-In-Laws are tyrannical towards their new daughter-in-laws, in part because they had not much power when initially entering the relationship themselves. So they gotta take it out on future generations.

The Asian Tiger Mom thing is made with love, but not necessarily much thought into actual mental stability. So on occasion, you get stories like Jennifer Pan murdering her parents and only succeeding in getting her mother killed.

So ultra focused on studies that they neglected to see if she actually was legitimately smart outside of class or able to truly interact with people. Didn't realize how toxic a codependent relationship could be.

I think there was a big rebellion in China, lead by a repeated failure of their Imperial Bureaucracy exams who thought he was Jesus Christ reincarnated. Love and Discipline, must be tempered with actually seeing if the results are stable.


I think the problem with depending too much on Social Trust would be something along the lines of that meme involving an anthropomorphic dog in a burning house

Except he's making other dogs stay inside said burning house, his own family and friends, whom he keeps telling that everything's fine and not to even use a fire extinguisher, because it'd ruin his calm



I dislike using fictional examples and I admit, I only watched scenes of Transformers ONE

But I can understand how Megatron and the High Guard came to their conclusions. The name "Prime" was severely tainted by Sentinel Prime, the thought that Sentinel was the good guy for so long. Helped justify his actions that turned the newborn cogless into a underclass. The High Guard didn't receive help, because too many fell for Sentinel's lies.

A rule simply by the explicitly strongest, rather than the guy who is supposedly the "good guy", is less likely to make people feel manipulated. Because it's a tyranny where it's by a guy who explicitly and openly doesn't care, rather than one who pretends at caring and makes policies to better manipulate people.

 

[SuperPulp2789]

I have heard people use Machiavelli as a bad example of leadership

When really, they are overdependent on "chivalry" and "social contract"

Thing is, I think even Machiavelli is ultimately pragmatism, both good and bad people need it

Weaker people need it, to recognize when or how they're being manipulated

Social Trust can work together with Enlightened Self Interest


Don't depend too much on one


And for both, when the trust is broken, you must keep count and eventually retaliate either via soft or hard measures

Like no longer buying from companies that aren't doing quality control at all

 

[humon]

Misguided elders... well, it calls to mind that famous quote from CS Lewis: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

I think the answer to that problem lies in Egyptian mythology: Osiris, god of the state, was old and blind, and could not see that Set, his serpent brother, was lying to him and manipulating him. What had to happen was that Osiris' son Horus, the falcon god of true vision, had to go into the underworld and fight a battle with Set. Horus wins this battle, but loses an eye in the process (it's never easy). When he returns to Egypt, he gives that severed eye to Osiris so that the state can see clearly again.

Makaveli is very pragmatic and gives very sensible advice for the most part (along with a lot of good rap tracks), but I think the part that makes people associate him with evil is just the part where he says you have to destroy your rivals completely, including their kids and everything. This advice, scaled up to the level of nations and family lineages, means he is advocating genocide. The Christian vision that his contemporary critics would have followed was one where defeated enemies can be persuaded not to seek revenge, because the final judgement takes place in the next life and not this one. Thus, it is no longer necessary to murder your rival's children to prevent them from rising up and attacking you 20 years later. But that only works if everyone believes there is such a thing as a next life.

Thus, Machiavellianism can be thought of as a fallback position for surviving in a world where people act in bad faith, while Christianity is a forward position one can occupy when people act in good faith. The synthesis, then, is something like the tit-for-tat strategy of prisoner's dilemma algorithms: I cooperate with those who have a history of cooperating, and I defect against those who have a history of defecting. Free speech for those who respect free speech; silence for those who want to silence me. Life for those who respect life; death to those who love death (as in the jihadist taunt, "we love death more than you love life" -- give people who say that what they love most).

 

[SuperPulp2789]

Misguided elders... well, it calls to mind that famous quote from CS Lewis: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

I think the answer to that problem lies in Egyptian mythology: Osiris, god of the state, was old and blind, and could not see that Set, his serpent brother, was lying to him and manipulating him. What had to happen was that Osiris' son Horus, the falcon god of true vision, had to go into the underworld and fight a battle with Set. Horus wins this battle, but loses an eye in the process (it's never easy). When he returns to Egypt, he gives that severed eye to Osiris so that the state can see clearly again.

Makaveli is very pragmatic and gives very sensible advice for the most part (along with a lot of good rap tracks), but I think the part that makes people associate him with evil is just the part where he says you have to destroy your rivals completely, including their kids and everything. This advice, scaled up to the level of nations and family lineages, means he is advocating genocide. The Christian vision that his contemporary critics would have followed was one where defeated enemies can be persuaded not to seek revenge, because the final judgement takes place in the next life and not this one. Thus, it is no longer necessary to murder your rival's children to prevent them from rising up and attacking you 20 years later. But that only works if everyone believes there is such a thing as a next life.

Thus, Machiavellianism can be thought of as a fallback position for surviving in a world where people act in bad faith, while Christianity is a forward position one can occupy when people act in good faith. The synthesis, then, is something like the tit-for-tat strategy of prisoner's dilemma algorithms: I cooperate with those who have a history of cooperating, and I defect against those who have a history of defecting. Free speech for those who respect free speech; silence for those who want to silence me. Life for those who respect life; death to those who love death (as in the jihadist taunt, "we love death more than you love life" -- give people who say that what they love most).

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Is it wrong if I consider the last line to be VERY black comedy

Frankly, I think I had this conversation or almost did with someone else before

Think of it as the difference between a more Moral Society and a more Polite Society

The first will impose itself on others and be very indignant, even if at times righteously so. The latter whilst NOT very moral, will avoid the worst of excesses, why? Because they will shoot the F out of you if you do

It's why till now I get pissed at those wanting Prohibition alongside a Comics Code Authority or a Hayes Code for general entertainment media

I don't blame entertainment media for a LOT of immoral stuff, I blame it on the so-called authority figures people are supposed to learn from failing utterly or being corrupted themselves. Lots of people have been drinking alcohol for millennia, many surprisingly functional, same for drugs. I blame it more on specific ones being too dangerous for a person's body and mind alongside having other issues they tried turning to drink and drugs to deal with them


So I can say, a Polite Society will protect a LOT of things and to an extent, be able to justify letting it out on the markets, still. Because a LOT of PCs have self control. Whilst the supposedly Moral Society will end up going NPC in its obsession with destroying it. Because NPCs don't necessarily have self control, even the religious ones may not have reached enlightenment mixed with pragmatism to see how things work, so they'll be a weird annoying bother.


Society after awhile is predictable, both the PCs and NPCs

 

[humon]

Some of what I said I've also said before in other places.

I wouldn't use Moral Society and Polite Society as terms. Moral and polite are overloaded words that could mean a lot of different things to different people, but I understand what you mean. I note that Prohibition was pushed by women (and some charlatan men who enabled them), and probably every other moral panic is the same. This may be the natural way that it has to be: Men create possibilities and women curtail them. Because in reproduction men are the mutators and women are the selectors. Half of men will die childless so that the other half, chosen for their virtues, will father a more adaptable next generation. So too with culture, men will invent a lot of different ways of being and acting and thinking, and then women will get together and decide to shut some of those down. It works when there is a balance between these two forces of experimenting and selecting. But it falls apart if one force takes over and dominates the other, or if the selecting force gets manipulated to select for maladaptive things.

Something else I was thinking about just now, as relates to strategies for prisoner's dilemmas, is that if your robot happens to be following an 'always defect' strategy, the only way for it to win is to make sure that no other robots are able to cooperate with each other. So when you see attacks on family values, healthy relationships, and honest work, it may be this strategy at work. This is what happened in the mouse utopia experiment, where gangs of psychopathic mice went around attacking the mice that were still trying to have families. It also works at the level of geopolitics, where one world power may have as its strategy to make sure that no other two world powers can form productive alliances with each other. In a world where everybody mistrusts everyone else, the winner is asshole.

 

[SuperPulp2789]

Some of what I said I've also said before in other places.

I wouldn't use Moral Society and Polite Society as terms. Moral and polite are overloaded words that could mean a lot of different things to different people, but I understand what you mean. I note that Prohibition was pushed by women (and some charlatan men who enabled them), and probably every other moral panic is the same. This may be the natural way that it has to be: Men create possibilities and women curtail them. Because in reproduction men are the mutators and women are the selectors. Half of men will die childless so that the other half, chosen for their virtues, will father a more adaptable next generation. So too with culture, men will invent a lot of different ways of being and acting and thinking, and then women will get together and decide to shut some of those down. It works when there is a balance between these two forces of experimenting and selecting. But it falls apart if one force takes over and dominates the other, or if the selecting force gets manipulated to select for maladaptive things.

Something else I was thinking about just now, as relates to strategies for prisoner's dilemmas, is that if your robot happens to be following an 'always defect' strategy, the only way for it to win is to make sure that no other robots are able to cooperate with each other. So when you see attacks on family values, healthy relationships, and honest work, it may be this strategy at work. This is what happened in the mouse utopia experiment, where gangs of psychopathic mice went around attacking the mice that were still trying to have families. It also works at the level of geopolitics, where one world power may have as its strategy to make sure that no other two world powers can form productive alliances with each other. In a world where everybody mistrusts everyone else, the winner is asshole.

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When it comes to Family Values

I maintain that the parents if depicted, can't always be shown in a positive light or that they are always right

Same for the kids, if they rebel, they might solely be doing so to spite their parents rather than being truly right