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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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[X] Action plan: a slave to solar orbits
  • Celebrate Noburi's birthday
    • Make a big deal about how awesome the trench coat is
    • later go out on a triple date
      • Noburi/Yuno Keiko/TenTen and Hazou/Akane
        • Make sure it's a romantic evening for everyone
      • If anyone makes a deal about the girls make there evening interesting
      • Tease each other about everyone relationships
        • Make sure to mention to Yuno that she can marry both Neji and Noburi
        • Hazou has seen how they flirt so it won't be a problem
        • Real talk though being friends with Neji is real important for making sure Minami joins trade network
        • so be just the right amount of mean to him
      • Share our dreams about the future
        • All of us are the people who will shape the world
        • so we should work together to figure out how
      • Share a kiss underneath the stars before going home
  • Seal research
    • After the party keep working on casino seal variants till they are finished
 
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Roomba said:
To put things plainly, this is all speculation. Some of it more likely than other, but all far from confirmed. Shall I remind you how our last attempt at modelling Oro as a purely rational agent went?

Look, I get the benefits, and I do think Oro can be dealt with productively. But he is very scary. Not because he's powerful and seemingly amoral, but precisely because our model of him is incomplete in ways that can hurt us severely. We know Jiraiya never gave up on Oro, and ended up bringing him back into the fold, which coloured our impression of him for a while. We also know about the skinfarm, about the potential futures Hazou saw, and how Oro treated us when reclaiming his house. There's a contradiction of sorts in there, and until it's resolved I'm not comfortable predicting his behaviour.

The reason his unpredictability is doubly scary is that he's disconnected from society and therefore lacking in boundaries. Ami, for all her unpredictability, is bound to Keiko, which heavily limits her freedom. Mori Ryuugamine, another really powerful and unpredictable person, may be scary, but he's also bound by his social context, and we can be fairly confident that he won't, for example, murder Hazou during a casual meeting. I don't know what Orochimaru is bound by, and I have a suspicion that it's not much.

The main argument against working with him, though, is that he scares the fuck out of our family, and they reacted very poorly to the idea of working with him last time we brought it up. That is the deal breaker for me; our clan is way more valuable to us than any collaboration with Oro, so if that's a choice, it's a really easy one.

With all that said, I can vote in favour of doing some preliminary research on Oro himself. Knowing more is unlikely to hurt us.
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Orochimaru doesn't need to be socially constrained to be predictable. Trust that he will act in ways congruent with his desires and established mode of thinking. Our last attempt failed, not because we treated him as a rational agent, but because we insisted on moralising at him and acting all self-important. Up until then he was being reasonable.

If you want to know more about him, then great! I'm in support of that. But we do already know enough to predict him very well, imo.

Sentient Tree said:
Note that Orochimaru also has clan head level resources, and can get more resources from Asuma. We may be able to bring some different resources in, but he might think he could get those anyway with enough intimidation.
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This isn't a negotiation, where Hazou is bringing resources to the table in the hopes of Orochimaru allowing him to be involved. Resources, recruiting others, and gaining external research is objectively the most useful thing Hazou can personally do for the project.

If you don't think these are useful enough, then the conclusion isn't "and therefore we shouldn't talk to Oro" or "and therefore Hazou should try in futility to research this on his own", it's "and therefore Hazou didn't contribute very much to the project".
 
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MadScientist said:
This isn't a negotiation, where Hazou is bringing resources to the table in the hopes of Orochimaru allowing him to be involved. Resources, recruiting others, and gaining external research is objectively the most useful thing Hazou can personally do for the project.

If you don't think these are useful enough, then the conclusion isn't "and therefore we shouldn't talk to Oro" or "and therefore Hazou should try in futility to research this on his own", it's "and therefore Hazou didn't contribute very much to the project".
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My problem is that "and therefore Hazou didn't contribute very much to the project" leads to "Fortunately, he did contribute a very interesting bloodline for me to dissect" when it's Orochimaru doing the talking.

Orochimaru quickly gets frustrated dealing with things that don't advance his interests fast enough. It's why he uses intimidation so much; trying to understand others and persuade them normally is too much effort and takes too long for an activity that isn't research. If he believes that we aren't contributing enough to his research to be worth his time, he will get frustrated with us wasting his time and will probably use us as an interesting test subject to make up for the time he wasted listening to us.
 
Ok, time to Lailoken on the subject.

I feel as if a lot of this "Orochimaru is going to dissect us" talk is based on narrative reasoning.

Like, just because we are the only ones who have interacted with him and have this cool bloodline, he's going to immediately decide that the best thing to do is to cut us into many pieces for the lulz.

He has the capabilities and infrastructure (twenty snake themed organizations, etc) to order missions and capture any team of cool bloodline endowed Genin/Chunin on the continent. Almost certainly without anyone ever finding out, too. Why not just do that?

You can make an argument that its convenient from a time/resources standpoint to just yoink Hazou. I can make one against it from a social/convenience standpoint (How many people came to this boy's defense after he was being convicted of literal treason? Will these people be problematic or disruptive to me in a way that I can easily avoid by getting what I want another way?).

AFAICT, the entire argument against even speaking Orochimaru's name in hushed whispers is built on this unreasonable Strawman Oro and some paranoia because of that one post EJ made that one time that basically said "Newsflash: The unkillable god ninjas can pretty much do as they like with zero repercussions from their military command structure at this point." , which is not really something that should be news to anyone.

/shrug
 
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Inferno Vulpix said:
[ ] Subsection: Biting the Bullet
  • Send a letter to Orochimaru.
    • We would like to collaborate on learning more about the Iron Nerve, and believe that this is within Orochimaru's fields of expertise and interest.
    • If Orochimaru agrees, then we can establish a time at his leisure to perform whatever tests he wants.
      • The only limitations that we request are that our bloodline secrets are not revealed to Konoha at large, and that we do not sustain permanent damage in the process.
    • (Rationale to the clan) If we give him what he wants on our terms, he won't have any reason to try and take it on his terms. It'll be unpleasant, but it's the best way to stop worrying that we'll one day wake up under the knife.

I'm not quite confident enough in this to put it in a real plan, but this is my current best rendition of how I would want to go about it.
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OROCHIMARU, sitting in his lair and twirling his fingers evilly: "Nyeh heh heh, soon I shall kidknap all the dreaded GOKETSU and add their pelts to my wall!"
KABUTO: "Master, you have a letter from the GOKETSU"
OROCHIMARU: "What? What do they want?"
KABUTO: "Hazou wants you to dissect him"
OROCHIMARU:
KABUTO:
OROCHIMARU: "Dude, what the fuck"
 
Sentient Tree said:
My problem is that "and therefore Hazou didn't contribute very much to the project" leads to "Fortunately, he did contribute a very interesting bloodline for me to dissect" when it's Orochimaru doing the talking.

Orochimaru quickly gets frustrated dealing with things that don't advance his interests fast enough. It's why he uses intimidation so much; trying to understand others and persuade them normally is too much effort and takes too long for an activity that isn't research. If he believes that we aren't contributing enough to his research to be worth his time, he will get frustrated with us wasting his time and will probably use us as an interesting test subject to make up for the time he wasted listening to us.
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If that were the case, he would have already threatened Hazou/Mari/etc into giving him the Pangolin jutsu. But he didn't. It's perfectly possible to work with him, so long as you don't press his buttons.
 
MadScientist said:
If that were the case, he would have already threatened Hazou/Mari/etc into giving him the Pangolin jutsu. But he didn't. It's perfectly possible to work with him, so long as you don't press his buttons.
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I will grant that the fact that we are thinking on his terms rather than on our own would probably be refreshing for him, since he seems to be of the "exhausted by 'stupid' people" type. Still think you're overestimating our understanding of him though. I would like to look into him more before we approach with anything
 
MadScientist said:
Orochimaru doesn't need to be socially constrained to be predictable. Trust that he will act in ways congruent with his desires and established mode of thinking. Our last attempt failed, not because we treated him as a rational agent, but because we insisted on moralising at him and acting all self-important. Up until then he was being reasonable.

If you want to know more about him, then great! I'm in support of that. But we do already know enough to predict him very well, imo.
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How do you make sense of his behaviour on the night of his reappearance? He arrives in an ostentatiously dramatic fashion, goes out of his way to address Hazou as his "nephew", but then refuses any compromise and throws us out without any regard for our circumstances. I can make sense of this behaviour in several ways, most of which include Oro being at least somewhat socially adroit and intentionally bullying us to see what we do under pressure. It'd be one thing if he just showed up, curtly told us to get out and ignored us from that point on - that I could easily explain with the "perfect rational agent" theory. But that's not what he did. Instead, I got the impression that he had some kind of expectation or interest in Hazou, and that we got thrown out because we failed to meet it.

Point being, there's a pre-existing relationship between Hazou and Oro that we're ignorant of. There's a very good chance he knows about us from Jiraiya, or at least in relation to Jiraiya. How he feels about this, and us as a consequence, is critically important to interacting with him effectively. Could be anything from idle curiosity about people who roped Jiraiya into becoming a family, to a genuine hope that Hazou is a kindred spirit - assuming Oro cares about that kind of thing, which is something we really just don't know.
 
MadScientist said:
If that were the case, he would have already threatened Hazou/Mari/etc into giving him the Pangolin jutsu. But he didn't. It's perfectly possible to work with him, so long as you don't press his buttons.
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That's a good point that he hasn't yet actively tried to get these resources. I think we should definitely find out a lot more about him before doing anything that involves contacting or directly interacting with him though. The case being made that we don't have a fully accurate model of him is pretty compelling.
 
[X] Action Plan: Ami's Armaments

While I'm sort of for Hazo having a sort-of romantic relationship with Ami, I don't think now's a good time to attempt to tease/hint at/I can't think of a good word for the tone in Ready Player Two. With Ami being uncomfortable being tied to Hazo through Keiko as well as Hazo not having talked to Akane about their expectations for their relationship, and knowing how comfortable she'd be with us flirting? with Ami, I don't think it's the best time for what that plans attempting. That said, I'm vaguely in support of a similar plan, just think that it's more important for us to make sure Ami is comfortable with being attached to us long term.

For Oro I think I'm too afraid of things going wrong to trust myself to contribute to that discussion in a meaningful way.
 
RandomOTP said:
Drat. You got me thinking about what such a scene would look like, and I pictured Hazou asking Ami to be his "platonic partner in the quest for world Uplift" while on bended knee, offering up a stack of papers containing various plans of Uplift...
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Omake gods, lend up your pens! (I may take a crack at that tomorrow, but I have almost no faith in my ability to write this out with due justice. Anyone else is welcome to it.)
 
Random Omake Ideas Currently up for Adoption:

  • Bioshock-styled MfD, since Hazou seems like he'd say "no gods or kings, only man"
  • A House M.D styled Omake, "Why Tsunade Banned Orochimaru from helping out at the Hospital"
  • Hazou asks Ami to be his "platonic partner in the quest for world Uplift" on bended knee
    • Claimed by Halberdier, will link to it once it's posted
  • Keiko Pranks Noburi and Things Escalate
  • Haru Meets Ami
  • Hazou proposes marriage to Lee
  • Goketsu Bowling Day
  • Student Exchange where other ninja react to Goketsu Insanity
 
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Update thoughts - there's a lot going on that's more pressing and much more promising than the iron mine. When you're playing a simulationist open world story, you have to accept that sometime things aren't going to lead to big adventures - I think this is one of those things. Unless we have a specific reason for wanting to spend large amounts of money and manpower for a secret base/mine, I think we should avoid a sunk-cost fallacy here.

Roomba said:
To put things plainly, this is all speculation. Some of it more likely than other, but all far from confirmed. Shall I remind you how our last attempt at modelling Oro as a purely rational agent went?

Look, I get the benefits, and I do think Oro can be dealt with productively. But he is very scary. Not because he's powerful and seemingly amoral, but precisely because our model of him is incomplete in ways that can hurt us severely. We know Jiraiya never gave up on Oro, and ended up bringing him back into the fold, which coloured our impression of him for a while. We also know about the skinfarm, about the potential futures Hazou saw, and how Oro treated us when reclaiming his house. There's a contradiction of sorts in there, and until it's resolved I'm not comfortable predicting his behaviour.

The reason his unpredictability is doubly scary is that he's disconnected from society and therefore lacking in boundaries. Ami, for all her unpredictability, is bound to Keiko, which heavily limits her freedom. Mori Ryuugamine, another really powerful and unpredictable person, may be scary, but he's also bound by his social context, and we can be fairly confident that he won't, for example, murder Hazou during a casual meeting. I don't know what Orochimaru is bound by, and I have a suspicion that it's not much.

The main argument against working with him, though, is that he scares the fuck out of our family, and they reacted very poorly to the idea of working with him last time we brought it up. That is the deal breaker for me; our clan is way more valuable to us than any collaboration with Oro, so if that's a choice, it's a really easy one.

With all that said, I can vote in favour of doing some preliminary research on Oro himself. Knowing more is unlikely to hurt us.
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This is essentially my mindset (and that of the anti-Oro gang). The issue is that we don't have a super strong model of Orochimaru, and, as was pointed out, we tend to take Strawman Orochimaru and heavily extrapolate off of one or two incidents. My main problem is that once we interact with Orochimaru, we all of the sudden have no control. We go from ninja, clan head, skywalker inventor, Iron Nerve holder, sealmaster, etc to whatever-Orochimaru-wants-from-us.

I do want to acknowledge that this does seem to be very important to a couple people here. We could talk with Ami about Oro, analogously talk with Akane about Tsunade and try and apply that to Oro, ask the Toads, wait for Kagome to finish decrypting Jiraiya's notes, or talk to Asuma - both about our plan and if we should include Orochimaru. Talking to Kabuto isn't something I'm super comfortable with, since his loyalty's clearly to Orochimaru, but that could be a middle step.

MadScientist, I realize that Hazou is just a mid-level researcher, but I'd like to at least show some progress because I'm worried about us either a) coming off as crazy, or b) trying to dump the hard work off on other people. Leaf is still short on jonin and not fully recovered from the consecutive manpower losses - I'm not sure spearheading an initiative to establish resurrection would be widely popular, and making it widely known would have the same downsides of sharing FOOM. Look at Edo Tensei in canon, and how once the antagonists got their hands on it, it became a rather large problem.

Finally, as an overview, it feels like we've been in a holding pattern for a while. Maybe it's because we've taken the low hanging research fruit, but we haven't made any large strides forward recently (maybe summoning contract, but still). I'd be down for beginning a quest with more of a clear objective than what we have now.
 
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