Remove ads

Jace911 "Reviews" Puella Magi Madoka Magica

TheLastOne said:
Again, you're projecting things on him. In a society of perfect selfish rational actors, his behavior would be perfectly normal. He doesn't have that concept because you don't surrender information for no reason when it would hurt your position. That's not trickery, that's simply being rational. If the girls were rational actors they would keep questioning him until they fully hammered out all the details.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I am not convinced that he can know that the information he did volunteer helps his position and that the information he did not volunteer would hurt his position without an understanding of trickery. His strategy here relies on the girls having a specific impression of the meaning of his words other than what they actually mean. If he understands what he has led them to believe, then he understands trickery.

The goal of causing someone to believe something that is not true (which is distinct from merely keeping secrets) is not generally compatible with not being capable of either lying or trickery. Any strategy to attain that goal is either a lie or a trick. Any strategy to cause someone to act against what you understand to be their own interests is a trick. And if he did not have a reasonably accurate model of what is or is not against their interests then he has nothing to guide him in what information to volunteer and what information to withhold, so your argument fails there too.

Also, perfect selfish rational actors are capable of both lying and trickery. If Kyubey is not capable of one or both of those, he is not a perfect rational actor.

EDIT: I decided to post about this to the Madoka general thread.
 
Last edited:
linkhyrule5 said:
Er.

I would... disagree entirely? A lifespan of mere billions of years is tiny to any civilization that wants to actually use energy on a galactic scale; there are generally accepted arguments against the existence of FTL by the fact that stars still exist and have not been stockpiled as fusion sources.

Like "the universe will eventually die" is totally a priority whether or not you have art and love and whatnot.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

If our understanding of the universe is at all accurate, they actually have trillions of years.
 
Xexilf said:
Our understanding of the universe, however, may already incorporate what incubators are doing. For all we know without them it would already look much worse.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Or, in PMMM universe, which isn't our universe, Entropy is a bigger problem than it is here.

Simple answer, really.
 
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS COMPLETE FANON

On the subject of Kyubey and lying, and him claiming not to understand trickery, this is how I explain it:

Kyubey fully understands how to trick people. What he doesn't understand is why people resent being tricked. To his mind, the only sane possible response to someone with more information than you tricking you by using that information isn't to dislike that person, it's going "Haha, good one! I'll be sure not to let you catch me that way a second time!"

This is because Incubators both understand humanity perfectly, and not at all. See, to them, emotions are a kind of Chinese Room deal. They have tables of human behavior where billions of lives and decisions are broken down into numbers, and they have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA why any of the numbers are the way they are.

And they don't care. All they care about is knowing that if you say a certain sentance in a certain way, it increases your chances of getting a contract by 24%. Why? Who the fuck cares!
 
Axiomatic said:
Kyubey fully understands how to trick people. What he doesn't understand is why people resent being tricked. To his mind, the only sane possible response to someone with more information than you tricking you by using that information isn't to dislike that person, it's going "Haha, good one! I'll be sure not to let you catch me that way a second time!"
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That would be an irrational response. Someone willing to trick you one way can be expected to be willing to trick you all kinds of different ways, so you shouldn't trust them at all, rather than merely avoiding being tricked "that way".
 
Random832 said:
That would be an irrational response. Someone willing to trick you one way can be expected to be willing to trick you all kinds of different ways, so you shouldn't trust them at all, rather than merely avoiding being tricked "that way".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The point is that they've taught you a new trick which you can then employ to your own benefit. That's useful, so resentment that you were tricked just doesn't make sense.
 
Random832 said:
That would be an irrational response. Someone willing to trick you one way can be expected to be willing to trick you all kinds of different ways, so you shouldn't trust them at all, rather than merely avoiding being tricked "that way".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

As I said before, they feel the onus is on the 'victim.' They were perfectly honest, told no lies. It's the contractee's fault because they didn't ask enough questions and made faulty assumptions. That isn't them 'tricking' someone, that the other party being a poor negotiator.

As I said, their moral assumptions work as long as everyone is a perfectly rational psychopath. Saying they tricked you is as meaningful to Kyubey as saying you're an altruist to a true ideological libertarian. It's a made up concept design to justify something silly.
 
Here' the thing,QB knows they won't ask enough questions that is why he phrased it that way. The only other explanation is it thought the girls would behave in a way he knows they won't,which is silly. it does not make sense to assume that a rational being would treat beings tit Knows does not always behave in rational manner,
 
Teen Spirit said:
Here' the thing,QB knows they won't ask enough questions that is why he phrased it that way. The only other explanation is it thought the girls would behave in a way he knows they won't,which is silly. it does not make sense to assume that a rational being would treat beings tit Knows does not always behave in rational manner,
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is giving me a bizarre mental image right here.
 
Axiomatic said:
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS COMPLETE FANON

On the subject of Kyubey and lying, and him claiming not to understand trickery, this is how I explain it:

Kyubey fully understands how to trick people. What he doesn't understand is why people resent being tricked. To his mind, the only sane possible response to someone with more information than you tricking you by using that information isn't to dislike that person, it's going "Haha, good one! I'll be sure not to let you catch me that way a second time!"

This is because Incubators both understand humanity perfectly, and not at all. See, to them, emotions are a kind of Chinese Room deal. They have tables of human behavior where billions of lives and decisions are broken down into numbers, and they have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA why any of the numbers are the way they are.

And they don't care. All they care about is knowing that if you say a certain sentance in a certain way, it increases your chances of getting a contract by 24%. Why? Who the fuck cares!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
So, the Incubators are the genuine alien race, which is not a banal stereotype and not a recolor of humans?

Cool.
 
Teen Spirit said:
Here' the thing,QB knows they won't ask enough questions that is why he phrased it that way. The only other explanation is it thought the girls would behave in a way he knows they won't,which is silly. it does not make sense to assume that a rational being would treat beings tit Knows does not always behave in rational manner,
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Sure he does, but that's not his fault. The onus IS ON THEM. That's Kuybey's position. Just like with extreme Libertarian's, there is no responsibility beyond the letter of the word, and your liability ends at the exact letter of what the contract says you're liable for. There is no spirit of the law, there is just what the law says.

You keep trying to look at 'tricked' as a technical question; a manipulation. To Kuybey, that's simply not giving something up for no reason.

The onus IS ON THE CONTRACTEE. They don't lie, so any problems you have is YOUR FAULT.

Hence, no concept of 'tricked.' It's not a idea that means anything. You entered into a contract. All the information was available. No falsehood was used.

You know another reading of 'Soul Gem' in Japanese with the specific words they use? Manifest Soul. He literally tells the girls that that gem is their Manifest Soul.

If he was going to lie, there are tones of places he could and would have done so. He doesn't.
 
All this Incubator talk makes me feel really, really happy about what happened to them in Rebellion.
 
Teen Spirit said:
What does a purely rational being stand to gain from never ever lying?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You lose less when caught deceiving someone through misleading truth than through outright lie. If you only mislead while speaking the literal truth, even the people you just burned will very likely come back to have another go, because they'll think that they now know how to expect. You wouldn't ask questions of a liar, because you couldn't do anything with the information you got - but asking questions of a deceitful truth-speaker is merely DANGEROUS. You will get the truth, you just have to be very careful with it.

This gets you return customers, whom you can continue to mislead for personal gain.

In essence, to return to the Kyubey-looks-up-all-his-human-interactions-on-a-chart theory, he knows that being caught on a lie means he loses 90% of potential marks, but being caught misleading while actually not having said anything untrue only loses you 60%.
 
Teen Spirit said:
What does a purely rational being stand to gain from never ever lying?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Being trusted not to lie. A society of beings completely without empathy would HAVE to have something like that; you need some kind of moral code for a society to fiction. It just doesn't have to be OUR morality.

The society of perfectly rational honest psychopaths can work; the society or perfectly rational lying psychopaths can't.
 
Absence of emotion =/= purely logical or rational. The Incubators, as far as we know, are not computers. They just don't have the same brain chemistry as we do and don't think the same.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top