Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
There are those who don't?
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
There are those who don't?
The way I figure it, these are counter-arguments to one another. From watching Homura, we know that a meguca likely goes through multiple individual cubes from a single cleansing (she had twelve going at once:
*Incidentally, those grief cubes look to be about the size of sugar cubes, and there are 128 sugar cubes in a pint, so a GCU really might be a pint full of grief cubes.
Huh. Well, compare to the thousands of meguca in the Tokyo region, and I don't know if we're really going to make much of a difference that way.
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Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
This quest is awesome! Maybe-
*wall of math*
-I'll just sit over here and lurk.
*wall of math*
-I'll just sit over here and lurk.
Feel free to vote on plans and discuss ideas and propose strategies.This quest is awesome! Maybe-
*wall of math*
-I'll just sit over here and lurk.
Math is the framework, not the engine of this quest.
Huh... is that estimate based on population?
That suggests that the heavy recruitment is making things worse.
Or maybe that helix is using "Tokyo" to refer to the larger metropolis.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This quest is awesome! Maybe-
*wall of math*
-I'll just sit over here and lurk.
Just think of it as having a free accountant.
I'm referring to the greater metropolitan area.
Greater Tokyo Area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
34.5 million population.
As I say in my signature, feel free to comment about priorities or ideas or interpretations. There are those who love to math everything to the hundreth and they handle the math. People in this thread are actually pretty good about letting arguments actually sway them instead of hunkering down in a position and defending it at all costs.-I'll just sit over here and lurk.
Ah, you're probably right. The greater metropolitan area has ~38 million people (source: Wikipedia) giving us a sustainable population of 1500-1800, which they're currently under. Sill, training 12 people every six months isn't going to help much with that, the problem is just to big for us to deal with now.
I like the idea of selling information to Nagoya though.
@inverted_helix
I never got a response to this post:
What is the expected cost of this? 0 meguca months as is surmise?
I never got a response to this post:
What is the expected cost of this? 0 meguca months as is surmise?
Hmm that's a tricky one because I'd expect significant negotiation over what is being exchanged for what. (Plus I'd have to come up with that and try to gauge what to value things at.)
Might want to set up some sort of point buy exchange system for trades like that.
@inverted_helix, are any of these viable training/research subjects? I don't expect any but the first, possibly the third to be something we can actually do right now, but as our group begins to expand we're going to need to be able to do something about the grief spiral equation or we're going to be losing people every month, simply by law of averages.
Out of curiosity do you really want hypnosis to be that easy and effective? Because I have a feeling that you'd be rather quickly regretting that. I've said earlier that I don't want to go for extreme Manchurian Candidate/Simurgh mind shenanigans, but if you really want them...
Honestly even just in the way you put it basically any time they entered combat they'd be shut down and get killed off.
Getting psychology training is something to look into but it takes a long long time. It's not something you're going to manage in short order, and I doubt you could get people to lock someone up for a prolonged period for the marginal gain.
I don't know, I think you can almost do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on your own out a workbook and it sounds like it would be effective at reducing the risk and severity of Grief Spirals. The main cost would be in assigning someone to make sure people are doing it right, which could be represented as a 2-3 month research project while they get the hang of it, followed by an ongoing cost in meguca-months (1 person per X population).
That very article says meta-analysis found it was only helpful when guided by a professional.
Post hypnotic suggestions don't really work the way they do in movies. For one, they need constant reinforcement to remain effective, and mostly require the active reinforcement of the person being hypnotized. A hypnotic trance is more like... well, have you ever been really into a movie, or a book, enough so that afterwards you feel like you're "coming up for air"? Do you find yourself remembering that book/movie, more than you remember the details of life before or after? That's a hypnotic trance.
You are probably over estimating how much training is needed to serve that role. I'm sure you could get someone adequate in a few months if you didn't need any kind of general psychological expertise out of them (which we don't).
EDIT: Also, it's not "only useful when guided by a medical professional", it's "only useful when guided, for example, by a medical professional". There's no indication that medical expertise is actually needed.
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Number one, why would that be helpful? Number two it would still be lethal the first time you were in combat because feelings of panic are pretty much found in anyone going into combat.
Number three, I'm not really buying into the idea at all. I remember virtually every book I've read or movie I've ever seen. I don't remember much of my own life. But that's not some hypnotic trance, that's the nature of storytelling. Stories always have a certain consistency and cohesion that real life simply doesn't have. Real life is random in a way that makes remembering it far more difficult than the series of events seen from carefully chosen angles you see in stories. The way the mind links memories together makes it easier to recall such things than the inconsistencies of real life.
And I could wreck your whole group in no time at all with high power hypnosis and no outside resources at all.
Except general psychological expertise is entirely what you're seeking. You're not looking at resolving a specific sort of problem, you're looking at trying to emotionally stabilize a group of people selected for being emotionally volatile (keeping in mind that is one of the things Incubators select for). For whom even normal emotional swings of life could be fatal. That's like playing psychology in Legendary Difficulty.
That's sort of like saying that allowing our girls to learn Tai Chi implies that everyone will start throwing around ki blasts like in Street Fighter or Dragonball. Hypnosis does have an existence outside of Hollywood and stage magic.
In the end, I'm not really trying to do silly things like program people like computers; I'm trying to get people to associate a panic attack with common breathing exercises and calming techniques, aimed at slowing down a spiral enough to let you cram more cubes into a person before her head explodes. It's Pavlov, not Not You See Me Hollywood-style mind control.
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Not really. The same techniques apply to all forms of emotional instability and people who aren't bad enough to need them wouldn't be included in the studies in the first place. I don't think our girls are worse than the average subject of CBT, they need extra stability because emotional upsets can be directly fatal but that doesn't mean it can't help at all.
The abstract of the meta-analysis in question says:
so I feel that having someone spend a couple of months guiding a dozen people through this should give enough experience to have a significant impact.
Well, this is our first time trying to trade something so we'd have to figure all that out.
Maybe you'd come back to us mid turn and say:
They are willing to offer you this many "points" for what we offered, and then give a list of things they are willing to trade with a "point cost" for each of those things?
Right now though I just need to know how many meguca months you are charging for it.
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Also, no thank you to hypnotism please
Huh, I thought I posted this like an hour ago. If I did, oops, my internet is not loading all these pages very well.
I... think it'd be easier for everyone if we did not try to equate grief spirals with actual mental disorders. No matter how you try to model that sort of thing, someone is going to wind up offended as it either being 'too easy' or 'too difficult.'
Like, grief spirals are clearly a magic mental disorder, it's cool if you can solve that sort of thing magically, but it gets a lot less cool if you try to bring in tools from RL because then it starts getting a wee bit personal.
Off the top of my head we could research, magically:
1. How to 'transfer' grief from one puella to another
2. How to numb emotions, or put someone in a protective 'emotion coma'
2.5 This could probably help protect against telepathic intrusions, actually.
3. How to replicate Kaoru's song through magitech
4. etc. etc. etc.
To take a relatively benign example, exposure therapy is really easy in theory. Someone who is scared of spiders should try and walk into a spiderweb whenever they see one. They see it, they walk into it, and slowly they will get over their fear of spiders. That's sort of how you train astronauts to do well under pressure, and ditto with surgeons. You bombard them with every conceivable scenario and they slowly become these people who can do amazing things no matter what the situation because they're used to pressure, instead of us mere mortals who tend to fumble around and do somewhat worse.
If you suggest to someone who is phobic of spiders to do this a bunch of them will start will crawling up the walls to get away from your crazy-ass notion no matter how reliable it has proven to be. Depressed people probably won't (grief spirals are pretty reminiscent of depression), but they won't be ecstatic either that you've decided to number crunch something that's very personal to them and top it off by saying 'well, this would be easy to solve, a sixteen year old girl could manage it after reading things up on the internet for a few months'.
Like... you can do something else with it if you want to go down that route, it doesn't need to be dressed up in psych tools.
It's one of the Meguca's jobs to be the dorm's "Secret Fairy Godmother" and they go around doing nice things all month. The floors someone complained about are suddenly sparkling clean, the toilet paper has been restocked on time, there are pancakes for breakfast, and the dishes have been washed. Someone who's having trouble with their homework gets a little note directing them to a helpful website, someone else having trouble in general gets a note directing them to a tutoring service. Someone with money trouble gets a little extra, and someone with trouble fitting in finds themselves surrounded by friends.
And you can send messages to that Secret Fairy Godmother. Like: 'thank you!' or 'I think Ohta is having boy troubles,' or 'the new girls r griefing, plz help', and so on, and maybe that Secret Fairy Godmother will give you tasks every now and then, and if she's helped you before you will feel well disposed to help her back.
Anyway, something like that.
I... think it'd be easier for everyone if we did not try to equate grief spirals with actual mental disorders. No matter how you try to model that sort of thing, someone is going to wind up offended as it either being 'too easy' or 'too difficult.'
Like, grief spirals are clearly a magic mental disorder, it's cool if you can solve that sort of thing magically, but it gets a lot less cool if you try to bring in tools from RL because then it starts getting a wee bit personal.
Off the top of my head we could research, magically:
1. How to 'transfer' grief from one puella to another
2. How to numb emotions, or put someone in a protective 'emotion coma'
2.5 This could probably help protect against telepathic intrusions, actually.
3. How to replicate Kaoru's song through magitech
4. etc. etc. etc.
To take a relatively benign example, exposure therapy is really easy in theory. Someone who is scared of spiders should try and walk into a spiderweb whenever they see one. They see it, they walk into it, and slowly they will get over their fear of spiders. That's sort of how you train astronauts to do well under pressure, and ditto with surgeons. You bombard them with every conceivable scenario and they slowly become these people who can do amazing things no matter what the situation because they're used to pressure, instead of us mere mortals who tend to fumble around and do somewhat worse.
If you suggest to someone who is phobic of spiders to do this a bunch of them will start will crawling up the walls to get away from your crazy-ass notion no matter how reliable it has proven to be. Depressed people probably won't (grief spirals are pretty reminiscent of depression), but they won't be ecstatic either that you've decided to number crunch something that's very personal to them and top it off by saying 'well, this would be easy to solve, a sixteen year old girl could manage it after reading things up on the internet for a few months'.
Like... you can do something else with it if you want to go down that route, it doesn't need to be dressed up in psych tools.
It's one of the Meguca's jobs to be the dorm's "Secret Fairy Godmother" and they go around doing nice things all month. The floors someone complained about are suddenly sparkling clean, the toilet paper has been restocked on time, there are pancakes for breakfast, and the dishes have been washed. Someone who's having trouble with their homework gets a little note directing them to a helpful website, someone else having trouble in general gets a note directing them to a tutoring service. Someone with money trouble gets a little extra, and someone with trouble fitting in finds themselves surrounded by friends.
And you can send messages to that Secret Fairy Godmother. Like: 'thank you!' or 'I think Ohta is having boy troubles,' or 'the new girls r griefing, plz help', and so on, and maybe that Secret Fairy Godmother will give you tasks every now and then, and if she's helped you before you will feel well disposed to help her back.
Anyway, something like that.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
All hypnotism is self-hypnotism. For a bunch of pre-pubescent girls with emotional problems only made worse by contracting, this is a bad thing. Generally, it's easier to hypnotize someone who has a certain mindset, and it's really just a series of affirmations that only the person being hypnotized can make themselves repeat, over and over again.
For a practical example, look at grief spirals, a series of self-affirmations that have negative connotations rather than positive ones. They amount to the girl in question mentally repeating the same thoughts over and over again. 'It's my fault' 'they died because of me' 'I ruined my friend's life' 'I ruined my parents' lives' 'I ruined my life', run on mental repeat until they believe it.
Experimenting with the mechanic behind the cause of grief spirals seems like an incredibly dangerous move.