No, it implies that they lost an ideological battle. The etherites, or the virtual adepts as you like, managed to introduce a bunch of things into the consensus and the sleepers accepted it, altering the consensus in a way that made the outcome the technocracy wanted less likely, and the technocracy weren't able to reverse this.
No, it implies that the Etherites have basically completely infiltrated the Technocracy, as to force them to believe things that the Etherites want. If chaos theory was an Etherite plant in consensus that the Technocracy hates, what the oWoD would
actually look like is a gigantic mass of scientists refuting chaos theory by saying it doesn't exist, it's an exaggeration, people who bring it up are just like the new-agey people who stick 'quantum' in front of some crystal name and claim it's supported by science.
This is kind of what I was talking about way earlier. You want to have yoru cake in terms of revised "The technocracy lost too" and eat it in that the technocracy still defines almost everything in the consensus.
The Technocracy defines everything in
the mainstream scientific consensus. Find me a large mass of people who actually unironically, legitimately just accepts 100% of what scientific consensus says and
nothing more. Your argument suggests the only consensus that matters is the scientific one, when everything says the scientific consensus
isn't all the consensus is-and that's
why there's an Ascension War. The Traditions can win because the scientific consensus
isn't the only one which matters. You keep bringing up the Etherites, which is amusing because the Etherites are a
fantastic example of what 'something is introduced into consensus that a technomagical faction dislikes and heavily impacts its paradigm' looks like. They utterly reject it and try to remove it from the paradigm, at the cost of a fairly significant amount of paradox. They don't just gamely decide 'sure, this is a thing we like.' Because that would make them stupid. The Technocracy are
even more inflexible than the Etherites, or should be. Why does the Technocracy suddenly gamely accept their contribution to consensus instead of fighting tooth and nail against it?
@Aaron Peori explains the point quite well-there's a difference between
consensus and
paradigm. The Technocratic
paradigm is rooted inextricably in the current scientific consensus, because that's what they use to introduce elements of their paradigm into the world. The
consensus is not Technocratic-the Technocracy may be more favored but there's tons of shit in consensus which the Technocracy doesn't like because it doesn't have full control over that. What you want is to say the Technocracy doesn't have control over its paradigm, which is all kinds of wut. "The Technocracy doesn't control what the Technocracy believes" is a silly statement.
Like, we actually see what it looks like when the technocratic (and therefore Technocratic) consensus fights against mainstream thinking. There's a shit-ton of that stuff in the social sciences. The background of chaos theory and quantum physics doesn't look even close to that. In fact, it looks a lot more like the Etherites' clinging to ether theory than the scientific community's reaction-or the
Technocracy's reaction-to quantum theory, given that the Technocrats had quantum computers in the early 20th century.
The technocratic paradigm isn't mainstream science. Is the postulate of objectivity.
No, that's the core
axiom of the Technocracy, which informs what their paradigm should
look like. It's not actually the
paradigm. There are, in fact, three layers to factional belief in oMage. First is the axiomatic layer, which is what the faction believes the world is like, in the simplest form. Second is
paradigm-how the faction expresses their view of the world and explains it, which justifies their ability to make the world conform to their belief. Finally is
consensus-how the faction explains things to everyone else.
The postulate that there is such a thing as knowledge about the world, and defining the world and understanding it betters the human condition is the Technocratic
axiom, which it expresses through the
paradigm of scientific theory, which is affected by
consensus because people believe some things about science more than other things even if they sort of believe in science
in general. The Technocracy could certainly have a different paradigm which expresses the same axioms-but it doesn't, and because paradigm is basically "what these people actually believe" what FBH is talking about is the idea that the Etherites could literally force the Technocracy, as a whole, to believe a thing.
Yeah! It'd be like having the Celestial Chorus book feature biblical magic influenced by doctrine that was introduced as a result of political pressure from secular forces. Or holidays that compromised with earlier, discredited religious traditions. Or rites introduced by foreign mystics into the scripture.
That sure would be absurd, wouldn't it?
The thing is, the Celestial Chorus isn't actually 'Christian.' It's a pan-religious movement. So having foreign mysticism in the Chorus isn't incompatible with the core ideals of the Celestial Chorus-and even the Cabal of Pure Thought existed long after Christianity assimilated a lot of earlier religion-and nowhere was it said that both of them decided that these were things they hate, but were forced onto them anyways because of external foes rather than messy internal compromise. That isn't contradictory to the point that
paradigm shouldn't be something which can be fucked with as easily as FBH wants it to be, especially strong self-consistent paradigms like the Hermetic and Technocratic ones.
Paradigm is, again, what the faction believes, and the Technocratic paradigm is built on modern science. Modern mainstream science, you're right, isn't the whole of the Technocratic paradigm. However, the reverse should be true-the Technocratic paradigm encompasses the whole of modern mainstream science. It's how they explain to
themselves why their magic works and how they convince all the scientists and engineers who they recruit (and become Enlightened Technocrats) that their magic works.
The problem with FBH is that his argument requires that the vast majority of the Technocracy
not actually believe their paradigm. The Etherites can stick chaos theory and quantum mechanics into science and all it does is make the Technocracy's ability to predict the future somewhat more vulgar, because the Technocracy doesn't actually
believe in their paradigm. They just use woo-words to bamboozle the sleepers. They wouldn't, for example, build electronics based on the idea that there's no quantum effects and suddenly have all their computers stop working because they didn't take those into account, or design their vehicles using modeling equations which are now 'proven' to be fundamentally flawed and thus no longer have faith in their fighter jets' ability to not fall out of the sky, because they
don't believe their paradigm, it's just a bunch of bullshit.
Whereas if the Etherites
don't introduce quantum physics to the scientific consensus, but rather the Traditions at some later date exploit the unintuitiveness of the Technocratic paradigm to make people think 'quantum' means 'magic' and thus sneak a lot of their shit in because the Traditions say this involves ~quantum~ (which they don't have to believe because the Traditions can explicitly lie to sleepers) it
doesn't require us to assume the Technocracy doesn't believe its own paradigm.
. Unless you're real excited by solipsism, the main inter-splat reason to play a mage is to be able to turn vampires into lawn chairs at the jump. Mage, especially Ascension, is a fast talking munchkin's wet dream.
