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Distance Learning for fun and profit...

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Jacen1 said:
and that Shard has already been effectively neutered in this story
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It has? Cauldron deciding to stay out of things in Brockton doesn't make PtV cease existing. The scope of the story could widen. It almost has to since Brockton is rapidly becoming a much nicer place to live.

Seeing everyone's least favorite super conspiracy actually get behind and push a good cause for once would be pretty cool, not to mention raising RCB's blood pressure high enough that her brute status is the only reason she doesn't pop a vessel. I think it'd make a decent B plot.

This actually raises an interesting point, based on our discussion of out of context problems. Can PtV assist Taylor's research? She's working on standard science, not tinker tech, however its data the network doesn't have. How good is the precog? In theory once the network does know about it, it should be modelable just like any other branch of science, its not magic, just revolutionary.
 
BomeranG said:
One of the logical problem about PtV was: Why did the Entities even had the cycle experiments if they could AND did make a continious perfect predictive simulation and/OR future sight?

Just run the whole cycle with it and save the energy the other shards would require. They would at most need to land on Earth to get scans then just explode/harvest it when it ends without anyone having any idea something was happening.
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Because, surprise surprise, Pathing/Simulating a Cycle via Precog Shards consume more of the Entities' energy/lifespan than doing the Cycle the hard/physical way.
 
MWKillKenny84 said:
Because, surprise surprise, Pathing/Simulating a Cycle via Precog Shards consume more of the Entities' energy/lifespan than doing the Cycle the hard/physical way.
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Yes. That's what the story says. But Contessa uses hers constantly. To use it at all, it has to calculate ALL the possibilities even if it is to make sure it has no impact on the path.

Therefore it is possible to run it for decades easily. Because remember Contessa uses hers constantly since she got it but Eidolon keeps having his shards run out of energy constantly.

Either running the cycle on simulation is efficient enough. Or for some reason Thinker hooked her PtV to an energy reserve 100s times bigger (remember Contessa uses her path 24/7 but Eidolon uses his powers only in fights etc.) than all the high energy powers Eidolon uses combined.
 
BomeranG said:
Yes. That's what the story says. But Contessa uses hers constantly. To use it at all, it has to calculate ALL the possibilities even if it is to make sure it has no impact on the path.

Therefore it is possible to run it for decades easily. Because remember Contessa uses hers constantly since she got it but Eidolon keeps having his shards run out of energy constantly.

Either running the cycle on simulation is efficient enough. Or for some reason Thinker hooked her PtV to an energy reserve 100s times bigger (remember Contessa uses her path 24/7 but Eidolon uses his powers only in fights etc.) than all the high energy powers Eidolon uses combined.
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PtV isn't supposed to be a deployed shard though, so that's kind of a moot point. Hosts aren't supposed to have access to something that effective. So the fact that its a giant energy hog is fairly irrelevant, its not supposed to see common use.

The fact that there's a cycle at all implies that there's either limits to its predictive abilities (otherwise, why not just predict the cycle?) or that its energy budget is great enough to make running a cycle cheaper.

It's probably a bit of both.
 
BomeranG said:
Contessa
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Contessa is Human, her use of PtV is not on the level an Entity would use it. And even then, PtV would exhaust itself of energy in 300 years circa.

Also, note that the Cycle we see in Worm has been borked by EDEN 'accident', because a normal Cycle would see the Agents dispersed on a wide range of dimensional instances of a planet, not the few ones of canon.


BomeranG said:
Eidolon
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No, Eidolon's Shard is running out of fuel for the following reasons: first, it is a 'dead'/'harvested' Shard, meaning it is working on batteries instead of using naturally gathered energies from an empty Earth.

Second, it is a power hog that the Thinker Entity has never planned to introduce in the Cycle (EDEN lithocrash put a snag in that plan too).

And finally, it is also linked to the Enbringers' Control Nodes, and those are energy hogs too that theorycally should be activated only in the near-ending phase of a Cycle.
 
MWKillKenny84 said:
No, Eidolon's Shard is running out of fuel for the following reasons: first, it is a 'dead'/'harvested' Shard, meaning it is working on batteries instead of using naturally gathered energies from an empty Earth.

Second, it is a power hog that the Thinker Entity has never planned to introduce in the Cycle (EDEN lithocrash put a snag in that plan too).

And finally, it is also linked to the Enbringers' Control Nodes, and those are energy hogs too that theorycally should be activated only in the near-ending phase of a Cycle.
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Also, he's using the Shards he accesses at a much higher level than normal, which is why his powers are so strong; but between them being "dead" and him using so much of their power they're running out of juice much faster than other Shards.
 
TypoNinja said:
This actually raises an interesting point, based on our discussion of out of context problems. Can PtV assist Taylor's research? She's working on standard science, not tinker tech, however its data the network doesn't have. How good is the precog? In theory once the network does know about it, it should be modelable just like any other branch of science, its not magic, just revolutionary.
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The problem with that is that Taylor is generating new Data constantly in in a growing multitude of fields. This means the number of things that need to be modeled is growing faster then the models are being generated.

Currently, PtV is unable to model the city Taylor lives in. I expect, over time, the amount it can't model will increase as more and more new developments spread.

Yes, there will come a point where PtV may start to compensate. However, so long as Taylor can pull inspiration from outside of the region the Shards can directly observe she and those around her will remain unpathable wildcards.

Right now, Cauldron is working under the premise that letting DARPA pay for Taylor's work will ultimately give the same benefits as doing so themselves without expending their own resources, as well as making non-parahumans more effective in the final battle. In other words, DARPA is advancing their goals, just so long as the PRT is able to gain access to the end results of the project.

Right now, the only obstacle to the PRT getting Taylor's inventions in a few years is the shear amount of ill will RCB is building up. Someone really should sit her down and explain how she's singlehandedly obstructing Taylor from benefiting Cauldron and the PRT...
 
I just had what I would normally call a shower thought but since I'm currently at work that label isn't applicable. Had to share. Really tired so this might not make much sense.

Is it better to be confidently incorrect or inconfidently correct?
I know the best would be to be confidently correct followed closely by inconfidently incorrect but those first two I sort of see-saw a bit about which is worse. It could be argued either way I guess.

Just to tie it into the thread and avoid attention from the top. Taylor is someone who is constantly confidently correct in her work. If I had to find someone for the other categories... Void_Cowboy for confidently incorrect. Hmm... can't think of any characters for the other choices.
 
Personally, I think it's better to be inconfidently correct than confidently incorrect. Yeah, it's not ideal, and you can will cave to arguments that you shouldn't on why you're incorrect, but you can get second opinions, you can lay out your reasoning to someone - even just a stuffed animal/rubber duck/convenient rock, you can verify, whether you won the argument over to go your way or not, whereas if you're confidently incorrect human psychology makes it all too easy to throw out data that contradicts your conclusion.
 
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E M Berner said:
Is it better to be confidently incorrect or inconfidently correct?
I know the best would be to be confidently correct followed closely by inconfidently incorrect but those first two I sort of see-saw a bit about which is worse. It could be argued either way I guess.
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There's really no question. Confidently incorrect is the worst option, confidently correct is the best, and the other two honestly probably swap positions depending on circumstances -- sometimes it's better to be inconfidently incorrect, sometimes it's better to be inconfidently correct.
 
E M Berner said:
Is it better to be confidently incorrect or inconfidently correct?
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I decided in my late teens that I was ignorant. So, I decided to work on remedying the situation. One of the ways to do this was a continued statement of "I'm not sure". It has proved very useful over the years since. And, I'm not dead, yet!

So, I think I'll say being 'inconfident' has been a major part of my life. I'll leave my actions and the judgement of others as a way to tell whether I get to suffix that with 'correct' or 'incorrect'. :)
 
sdwood said:
There's really no question. Confidently incorrect is the worst option, confidently correct is the best, and the other two honestly probably swap positions depending on circumstances -- sometimes it's better to be inconfidently incorrect, sometimes it's better to be inconfidently correct.
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There are circumstances where the third factor of being decisive is critical, which may make decisive confident incorrect better than indecisive inconfident correct (depending on just what you're incorrect about of course). Though if you can manage to be simultaneously decisive and inconfident that's a valuable skill I think.
 
Ace Dreamer said:
I decided in my late teens that I was ignorant. So, I decided to work on remedying the situation. One of the ways to do this was a continued statement of "I'm not sure".
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I came to the same conclusion around 10th grade, and even tackled the problem the exact same way, if in another language.
Then, like a week after I started doing it, as I was randomly talking to my psychology teacher, he suddenly asked me why I was doing it, and if it made me feel smarter or superior, or something.
He just walked away afterwards, and I still don't know what that was about.
 
Options said:
I came to the same conclusion around 10th grade, and even tackled the problem the exact same way, if in another language.
Then, like a week after I started doing it, as I was randomly talking to my psychology teacher, he suddenly asked me why I was doing it, and if it made me feel smarter or superior, or something.
He just walked away afterwards, and I still don't know what that was about.
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People learn about psychology for a number of reasons. One can be because they have doubts about themselves. Or, they found themselves doing it because understanding about how minds (might) work made them more certain about life. I've met people who are... very uncomfortable about uncertainty in their life. It could imagine someone with that approach being very defensive,,,

Psychology is... a very messy subject. I considered writing a Worm fanfic which involved (Asimov-style, Hari Seldon) psychohistory, to predict the behaviour of groups of people, but never got beyond vague plans. I wonder if psychology which really works is one of the 'distance learning' programmes Taylor could watch?
 
Ace Dreamer said:
Psychology is... a very messy subject. I considered writing a Worm fanfic which involved (Asimov-style, Hari Seldon) psychohistory, to predict the behaviour of groups of people, but never got beyond vague plans. I wonder if psychology which really works is one of the 'distance learning' programmes Taylor could watch?
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It might work...for the alien races themselves. Not humans. It's extremely doubtful that they have the exact same psychology and psychological disorders as we do.

If nothing else, our bodies are different, and hormonal fluctuations would be very divergent.
 
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Lycanthromancer said:
It might work...for the alien races themselves. Not humans. It's extremely doubtful that they have the exact same psychology and psychological disorders as we do.

If nothing else, our bodies are different, and hormonal fluctuations would be very divergent.
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Taylor doesn't just use what she gets off the channel mindlessly, though. She takes it, makes it her own, and invents all the things.

Given a working alien psychohistory framework she might well be able to make the necessary adaptations to make it applicable to humans.

However, I don't think that would be likely for an mpPi Taylor, especially a non-Omake one. They pretty consistently seem to pick a small relatively personal scope on which to exert control, and leave everything else except the most straightforward macro problems (endbringers, for instance) alone so long as it stays out of her sphere. Psychohistory wouldn't seem all that relevant.
 
Aineko said:
Taylor doesn't just use what she gets off the channel mindlessly, though. She takes it, makes it her own, and invents all the things.

Given a working alien psychohistory framework she might well be able to make the necessary adaptations to make it applicable to humans.
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Two species from entirely different evolutionary trees on entirely different planets would have almost nothing in common, aside from the broadest generalities that would come with convergent evolution, though. It'd be like trying to figure out the structure of one bacterium from studying another bacterium, only the second bacterium is actually a naturally occurring nanobot made from a crystalline lattice, superconducting metals, and electrical pulses instead of organic molecules. Sure, they might have similar behaviors in their natural environment due to serving the same basic function as the rock-bottom of the food chain, but there are so many differences that any similarities would be almost entirely coincidental, and the differences would be vast.
 
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Lycanthromancer said:
Two species from entirely different evolutionary trees on entirely different planets would have almost nothing in common, aside from the broadest generalities that would come with convergent evolution, though. It'd be like trying to figure out the structure of one bacterium from studying another bacterium, only the second bacterium is actually a naturally occurring nanobot made from a crystalline lattice, superconducting metals, and electrical pulses instead of organic molecules. Sure, they might have similar behaviors in their natural environment due to serving the same basic function as the rock-bottom of the food chain, but there are so many differences that any similarities would be almost entirely coincidental, and the differences would be vast.
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Taylor was able to figure out their language(s?), and they have educational broadcasts in a recognizable format that she could understand parts of before understanding the language. There's a good deal of common ground.

Also, mass action models tend to largely work without needing (or, often, having) details about the finer resolution elements. I was initially thinking things like population genetics or ecology in biology, but I think it goes well beyond that - fluid mechanics can boil down a complex blend of molecules to a few key numbers and work. It's possible that the whole system of alien psychohistory is predicated on something that just doesn't apply for human society, but it seems at least as likely that it isn't. Humans might need variations on the parameters that would be very strange to a practitioner of alien psychohistory, but that's where Taylor would come in.
 
Options said:
I came to the same conclusion around 10th grade, and even tackled the problem the exact same way, if in another language.
Then, like a week after I started doing it, as I was randomly talking to my psychology teacher, he suddenly asked me why I was doing it, and if it made me feel smarter or superior, or something.
He just walked away afterwards, and I still don't know what that was about.
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You know I have had a similar conversation. For me it was me ending most of my declarative statements with "as far as I know" and this seemingly triggered a teacher who thought this implied I didn't know anything or that I was lying to her face. Got quite a few strong words out of her. I was a very confused 13 or 14 year old.

You see I used the phrase as a reminder to people that I knew my knowledge was limited and that I was aware of this and they should be too. Too many of my classmates regularly made declarations of "fact" I knew to be untrue or incomplete and this drove me nuts so I wanted to be different.

It was since I had VERY poor social skills and thus couldn't imply my level of uncertainty in another way I started ending some of my sentences like that. Can't say I have great social skills now but I have studied the subject for some 40 years now so I am at least competent... maybe.

Edit: had to update the age, remembered more about this and realised it was a bit later, after I switched schools, it happened.
 
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Ace Dreamer said:
I considered writing a Worm fanfic which involved (Asimov-style, Hari Seldon) psychohistory, to predict the behaviour of groups of people, but never got beyond vague plans.
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Major problem with that; in Asimov's own stories, a single parahuman was enough to throw the predictions of Psychohistory way off tract, and it took years of active effort after his death to get things back to where they were supposed to be.

Psychohistory only works when individual actions can be ignored as part of the collective movement of history. Unfortunately, in a setting full of Parahumans, that is not the case. When the model needs to be changed due to a different city being wiped out by an Endbringer every three months, Psychohistory can't be said to work for very long at all...
 
TypoNinja said:
The fact that there's a cycle at all implies that there's either limits to its predictive abilities (otherwise, why not just predict the cycle?) or that its energy budget is great enough to make running a cycle cheaper.
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They run the cycle because they have always run the cycle. Like, remember, the big thing Eden was looking for was a solution to the problem of Entites eventually overcrowding the multiverse and falling back into their cannibalistic infighting. A problem with any number of simple solutions, such as limiting the number of offspring you produce, to maybe figuring out more efficient uses of resources, or not, you know, blowing up every planet you find that is useful to running the cycle. They are not really learning anything, they are just acquiring knowledge.
 
E M Berner said:
You see I used the phrase as a reminder to people that I knew my knowledge was limited and that I was aware of this and they should be too.
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Yep, I feel you got the underlying reasoning perfectly. "Show those around me that I'm aware of my own lack of knowledge, and they should be too."
Thing is, I knew I was doing it, but those around me? Not so much. It seems that I can't easily condense all of that in a word or two, without first explaining the logic behind it.
And when I start speaking, using words that have some obvious meaning to them, that isn't at all obvious to anyone but me, it makes people think I'm using them wrong on purpose.
 
serra2 said:
They run the cycle because they have always run the cycle. Like, remember, the big thing Eden was looking for was a solution to the problem of Entites eventually overcrowding the multiverse and falling back into their cannibalistic infighting. A problem with any number of simple solutions, such as limiting the number of offspring you produce, to maybe figuring out more efficient uses of resources, or not, you know, blowing up every planet you find that is useful to running the cycle. They are not really learning anything, they are just acquiring knowledge.
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The latter strategy doesn't make any difference in the long run. The former only helps if you're willing to adjust down to no more than replacement, and consume resources more sustainably, and still will eventually hit a wall in the very long run as available resources ultimately shrink.
 
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