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Okay, but what's the problem with them having done so?
Okay so the technocracy has lost battles against things we find totally unsympathetic?
Tell me, why does the Technocracy support the scientific consensus on global warming?
White Wolf's World of Darkness
Okay, but what's the problem with them having done so?
Okay so the technocracy has lost battles against things we find totally unsympathetic?
Tell me, why does the Technocracy support the scientific consensus on global warming?
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
"I want to disarm my subjects while I maintain a monopoly on real weapons so I am the only one who can use force to pursue my goals and nobody else can" is not exactly a good/enlightened/transcendent position. Even adding "We will protect you and make sure you won't be hurt neither by yourselves nor anybody else" doesn't improve it one bit (see the nuclear weapon club and any population-disarming dictatorship ever for examples why).
'Vaccines cause Autism' is not a case of an 'everything is achievable' paradigm-direction. On the contrary, it's a case of a 'There ain't no such thing as a free lunch' paradigm-direction - the same sort of thinking that gives us conservation of energy and other TANSTAAFLish restrictions. It's an example of making more stuff Vulgar, not of making stuff Coincidental.
Perhaps. But by that logic, if G gets changed, all sorts of stuff should change too.
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To be honest I'm sure a lot of traditionalists are anti-vax.
Like, I want to play an alternative medicine verbena if I can ever find the game.
Like, I want to play an alternative medicine verbena if I can ever find the game.
Mine can be summarised up with mockinglaughter.jpg
They're Brucato's pet babby - and, worse, they pass over a good chance to rework the Traditions into a group that isn't just hammered into the "Nine Traditions to cover all non-Westernised non-neoliberal viewpoints". Rather than make his snowflakes a group that has literally no real distinguishing features from the Traditions - just look at how many of those Crafts were Tradition members in Revised - they could have actually restructured the Traditions so they weren't just limited to 9 Traditions but could instead be the UN of the non-Technocracy. Without things being forced into 9 big Traditions, they could actually have got over forcing all the monotheists to share the Celestial Chorus and rather than cramming everyone into the Dreamspeakers, that can instead effectively become a block that tends to vote together in the (incredibly raucous) grand meetings of the Council of the Traditions.
But barring that, the Revised solution - ie, "You know, there really is no good reason that these African ritualised ceremonial magicians and these Chinese ritualised ceremonial magicians aren't with the other ritualised ceromonial magicians in the Hermetics" - is a much better solution.
Well, it's possible with the spheres. It might not be possible within one's personal paradigm.
But if I had to spew out some Technobabble, presumably they're contorting the Weyl tensor of local spacetime into different metrics via applied high energy physics as to simulate the gravitational curvature of a different universe where G is different.
(This likely requires very expensive specialised equipment, and thus VE crews get rather pissy when they see SoEs do it by bouncing a graviton beam off the main deflector dish)
Because - and this has come up several times and you keep on ignoring it - people believe their own paradigm. You can't just choose to change your paradigm easily, unless you're Arete 6+ - which most of the Technocracy is not.
Human-made climate change is an unfortunate byproduct of several things already established in the Technocratic paradigm:
- Combustion produces carbon dioxide.
- Hydrocarbons are an excellent source of portable, safe energy.
- Industrial civilisation needs a lot of energy.
- Carbon dioxide absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation in the infrared wavelength
(Also, note that that global warming starts becoming a big deal post 1999, which suggests that once the Arete 6+ people were out the way their efforts to stop people making a big fuss about it so they could quietly deal with it stopped having an effect. Which meant that the junior Technocrats who saw a major problem and didn't know about Consensus were the ones running the show, and that meant that the Technocracy's response was being determined by people who believed in their paradigm fully)
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Because AGW falls out consequentially from "carbon dioxide absorbs certain wavelengths of infrared, corresponding to the peak of black-body radiation in the general temperature range of the earth, really really well", which falls out consequentially from "carbon and oxygen atoms have these sets of properties and interact with each other in these sets of ways".
Thus, to make fossil fuel combustion not act as a source of radiative forcing for the atmosphere, you have to somehow rewrite large chunks of chemistry and physics without breaking anything else.
"Scientific consensus" is what scientists agree the rules are. Scientists are not average Sleepers; they are massively influenced, by and large, by Technocratic teachings.
Consensus Reality is what the Sleepers en masse believe the rules are.
- Location
- Spain
Wait, didn't we already agreed that global warming is a paradox effect? If carbon dioxide absorbs heat, that is due to global warming existing, not the other way around.
IE:
1: The syndicate promotes industrialization.
2: People doesn't believe that such a thing can't have side effects, causing paradox.
3: CO2 starts absorbing heat.
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Which neatly brings us around to why the technocracy can't just eliminate those aspects of new physics that they like. New technocratic recruits are bought up in the scientific profession so that they believe in Chaos, Quantum and Relativity. Once things have been properly introduced to the scientific consensus, it's extremely difficult to then eliminate them.
The placebo effect is one of the single best tools the Technocracy has invented for keeping small, "in the wild" positive effects out of the scientific consensus. A positive effect gets found, scientists go "but what if it's just the placebo effect?", it gets taken into a scientist dominated area - and look, it turns out to be no better than a placebo. And studies carried out by non scientists can be dismissed because they're not scientists and thus their methodology is terrible and they don't even use double blind trials - and if a few positive results still get through, why, that's just statistical variation when examined in a meta study.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Because they believe their own paradigm. They can't just get rid of aspects of physics, because they believe in physics.
This thread doesn't need to turn into a gun control debate. But no one said that the Technocracy wasn't dictatorial and sinister. They're the fucking black helicopter people.
That being said, the Order of Reason almost certainly supported widespread gun ownership in the 17th and 18th centuries and Technocracy almost certainly support strong gun controls now.
Vaccines cause Autism is more a 'modern medicine is evil' paradigm direction. It's heavily tied into all-natural woo and presupposes that the medical establishment is actively and knowingly trying to poison children. It's tied heavily into the 'corporations are evil' meme and directly relies on it. The ultimate position of the anti-vaxxers it isn't just that vaccines may have side effects. It's that vaccines have dangerous side effects, and they don't actually do anything useful, and the government, the medical establishment, and big pharma all know this, and they're intentionally injecting poison into your children because they're greedy.
This is, in fact, extremely harmful to the technocracy, not the least because the meme that corporations and governments are evil actually makes the Technocracy, which is both a corporation and a shadow government, more evil. It's also what allows corporations like Pentex to exist without their middle management immediately revolting. The idea that merely existing in a corporate structure is inheriently corrupting is really fucking bad for everyone, really. It's like a subtle planet-scale mind effect. Because, unfortunately, human (and inhuman) psychology and sociology are a part of the Consensus as much as anything else.
The adage that power corrupts is, perhaps, the worst and most dangerous thing in the Consensus. Since it directly leads to self-reinforcing corruption death spirals and ensures that benevolent rulers are extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible.
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That's what I just said.
AkatsukiL13
An Enlightened Mind
- Location
- New Copernicus Station
Mixed bag. I like the concept of the larger Crafts, led by the two former Traditions, coming together after all the centuries of being stuck in between the Traditions and the Technocracy. But I don't like that they hand-waved all the Crafts presented in M20 together. They should have just settled with the five founding Crafts, the Solificati, the Batini, Ngoma, the Bata'a and the Hollow Ones, with them beginning to reach out to some of the other major Crafts like the Taftani, the Templars and the Wu Lung, leaving it up to the individual groups to decide what Crafts have joined the Alliance or even fleshing it out more in a later Disparate book.
The other thing I'm mixed about is them and the fight against the Nephandi. While I do like the idea that the Traditions and Technocracy have been at each others' throats for so long they're partially missing the greater threat of the Nephandi, at the same time it kind of feels like a case of 'White Man stupid, Minorities smart'. The idea of these Crafts coming together, especially in a post-Avatar Storm world, to pool their resources and influence, and to better protect themselves from the more powerful Mage groups and other threats makes sense. We don't need them to be the only ones that 'see the real threat'.
As for favorite Craft, the Solificati.
Violation of Rule Three
As you can probably tell from Earthscorpion's...Earthscorpion, if it doesn't suck the Technocracy's cock then most people on this forum hate it.
To be entirely fair, I wouldn't put it past the Technocracy(or Pentex) to actually put nasty shit in vaccines that specifically react to supernaturals while ignoring Sleepers.
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notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Missed a word.
If Chaos Theory and Quantum Mechanics had been inserted by the traditions, we would have seen massive pushback against them. We didn't see that, so we can conclude that they aren't.
Or maybe it's hated because it's a dumb idea from Brucato?
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I'm pretty sure you kinda did actually.
It could have been implemented better(much better, fuck Brucato), but people here would have hated them anyway because they wouldn't politely bend down and allow themselves to get skullfucked by the cyberdick.
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notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Kinda did what? There wasn't a massive pushback against Chaos theory the way there was against, say, cold fusion or those guys who had things moving faster than the speed of light.
No they wouldn't have. If they hadn't been implemented horribly they would have been accepted, but they were so they weren't. After all, it's not like even the most pro-technocracy people here hate the traditions.
Right, of course.
Which is why people have gone out of their way to vilify the Traditions and say the Technocracy is better whenever they get brought up.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
People haven't been vilifying the Traditions all that much though?
Right, of course.
Which is why people have gone out of their way to vilify the Traditions and say the Technocracy is better whenever they get brought up.
Oh, wonderful. No, go ahead, tell me how you really feel.
...
It's amazing, isn't it? In literally the same post, I proposed a way to liberate the Traditions away from the ideological straightjacket of "Nine Traditions, one for each sphere" which means we could actually avoid cramming all the monotheists into the same group and get rid of the artificial Tradition/Craft divide and get the Traditions so they're not literally more static in their make-up than the Technocracy - and apparently that's sucking the Technocracy's cock. Wow.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm not sure how "the design of the Traditions sucks, here let me explain how to completely change them into something different that I would prefer" isn't supposed to come across as dissing the faction you dislike at the expense of the one you're cool with.
I was talking about the beginning of your post.
Remember?
The part where you can't make a single damn post without jeering at anyone that disagrees with you.
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The traditions lost some battles and won others. Chaos theory definitely surprised people, because at the time it was proposed, people were trying to do a lot of prediction which it killed the possibility of. I have no idea whether there was a lot of critical papers written about it at the time, but its results were a lot more replicable than cold fusion etc.
I guess the traditions just did a better job with that on? Maybe some factions in the Union decided it was convenient because it let them kill the ItX efforts to do central economic planning in the Soviet Union or something.
This doesn't change the main reason chaos theory should be tradition, which is that it's a lot better a story if it is. If it's a tradition artifact (or a sleeper one) then we have a story of the technocracy's overwhelming hubris allowing something vital to sleep through their fingers. If we don't then we have a story of the technocracy patching their paradigm in order to make big labs necessary for science.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
But it doesn't make it a better story. It chumps the Technocracy, and makes them looks stupid. Chaos theory should be an in paradigm explanation for the limitations of Time 2.
Like, we don't talk about how the Technocracy made people think that psychic powers cause brain hemorrhages in order to damage Etherites, why should we do it the other way around?
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It totally makes a better story, and it doesn't chump the technocracy. Like, what does it chump about them? It makes them have lost a battle. They still have all their resources, control over the political system and so on. All it does is show that in no area is that control absolute (which is more interesting).
"The technocracy discover a limitation and make a theory to patch it" offers no story.
"The technocracy, at the height of its power is frustrated by sleepers/traditionalists in a way that subtly dooms its project" offers many.
Having psychic powers cause brain hemorrhages would require the technocracy to admit that psychic powers exist.