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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Roomba said:
Actually, after this event is over, I want to let Hazou just relax and do whatever he feels like for an update or two. Just do things he actually wants to do rather than what is useful or productive. Hang out with people whose company he enjoys. Spend some time with Hana without any expectation of getting anything out of it.

Enjoy life for a bit outside of the treadmill of our goals and expectations.
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Fiiiiiine. Decompress for a bit. But then character development!

And Sealing, training, and starting a SC-farm, but that all goes without saying.​
 
MadScientist said:
What science would you like to do? I can't think of anything especially shiny that we could do in a month. Maaaaaybe making microscopes (e: :ninja:)?
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something something flashbangs

Honestly, we already have the "bang" part (Banshees); all we need now is the "flash" part. And we've already studied light-producing seals (Party Trick) and have a prototype for combining them (casino seals).
 
Jello_Raptor said:
Oooh this discussion is giving me an idea.

We should become friends with Kurosawa Shin, and then murder him in cold blood so we can implant his nervous system.

Eternal Mangekyo Iron Nerve, here we come!
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THIS SOUNDS AMAZEBALLS -- but also probably impossible until we have tech that would make it inconsequential as a matter of course.

Roomba said:
Human relationships are not just entirely and correctly modeled as (albeit immensely complex) exchanges of value, but we have to pretend otherwise when discussing the topic because forcing people to even obliquely confront the discrepancy between the value of human experience versus its cost makes them uneasy and upset, and furthermore is a surefire way to invoke the "protect sacred values" response so as to preserve this dissonance, as a means to maintain the illusion of tractability/simplicity and prevent decision paralysis when confronted with difficult tradeoffs, thus heuristically privledging the correct response in the majority of cases but at the expense of optimality.
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ftfy
 
Personally I'm hoping we can actually get Hazou to go through character development in the opposite direction @MadScientist. Have him realize that people are a resource. Something to be cultivated. Basically I want Dark! Hazou to become more present
 
I wouldn't enjoy the story as much if Hazou were like that. I like that Hazou's an idealist in a world that stomps on that, and is making it work through his own hard effort.
 
Vecht said:
ftfy
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This might be correct (or at least closer to the truth than the common consensus on the matter), but there's got to be better way to phrase thi--

Oneiros said:
Personally I'm hoping we can actually get Hazou to go through character development in the opposite direction @MadScientist. Have him realize that people are a resource. Something to be cultivated. Basically I want Dark! Hazou to become more present
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Jashin Christ Oneiros!
 
Vecht said:
ftfy
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That's great, but has little to do with my original point that you took upon yourself to "fix". I was arguing that people don't think about their relationships in terms of pure value exchange, and so reimbursing them materially for poor treatment won't necessarily prevent resentment. I'm talking about the psychology of relationships, not how they can be externally modelled.

Tangentially, if you want to convince people that you're right about this, you may want to try to be less passive-aggressive about it. I happen to agree with the gist of your point, but found the delivery rather off-putting.
 
Going back into the Swamp Of Death could provide us a large number of specimens to commit SCIENCE! to, and could be useful for training (being a life and death situation, I imagine we could get plenty of XP), and would have plenty of stuff for Noburi to drain for chakra.

Here is my proposal:
-We go to the Swamp Of Death during the 1 month break.
-We inform the current inhabitants that we are the freaking Goketsu (in the usual way the Goketsu do things).
-Anything that is left moderately intact, we drain into oblivion, and take back with us as samples for Noburi to analyze for interesting chemicals.
We use the extra chakra to make shadow clones, train, etc.
-We take a look around. Go to where the village once was, have some emotional scenes where we sit around reminiscing about how horrible everything was (something for Velorien to do), and follow up on any plot hooks that we didn't get to at the start of the quest (what was the weird shelter-looking-thing in chapter 2c? Why are there SO MANY alpha predators? What do they eat?).
-Maybe find some less-difficult-to-handle chakra beasts to start our SC farm?
-Go back to Leaf and train even more, along with sealing research. Noburi maybe researches anything that seems particularly promising with respect to the exams.
-Exams come. We do as Goketsu do (kick butt).
-We go back to Leaf, and start doing research on our swamp samples along with our backlog of seals. (We'll figure out exactly what we're researching based on exactly what we have as samples)
-Revolutionize warfare until Shikaku gives us telescopes and promises to make us a microscope just to keep us busy.



On second thought, maybe try a little to not blow up EVERYTHING in the swamp. Anything that is actually delicate yet still survives there is probably packing some OBSCENE poisons.
 
I think Goodhart's Law is relevant to this discussion about friendship modeling: it is a repeating failure mode for an initially good measure to become a target, and from there to become a bad measure. Lossy estimates and proxy values drift away from the true target much faster when you start to optimize for the proxy value.

There's an urban legend about a Soviet Union nail factory which was rewarded for total number of nails produced, so when it hit a brief iron shortage, it produced only the smallest, lightest grade of nail, which was useless for industrial purposes. So the central planners told the factory to optimize for weight of nails produced instead, and then when it hit a brief labor shortage, it switched to producing only the largest, heaviest grade of nail.

The "protect sacred values" response against trying to model friendships in terms of human resources and exchanges of value is quite possibly a defense against Goodharting and taking one's own (inevitably simplified) model at face value. It's easy to say "immensely complex" in front of your model, rather harder to actually do a satisfactory model.
 
MadScientist said:
Jashin Christ Oneiros!
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What!? He's much cooler and more effective as Dark! Hazou. He still is forging a team out of the misfit toys that were given to us. Who we can turn into life long allies.
Cariyaga said:
I wouldn't enjoy the story as much if Hazou were like that. I like that Hazou's an idealist in a world that stomps on that, and is making it work through his own hard effort.
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I don't see how these things are mutually exclusive. It is very possible to be idealistic and believe that people are basically good. Hazou just has to realize that to achieve his goals he will have to go all in. He can still have morales and lines. Just being willing to go all out short of those. Everything that is not forbidden is allowed
 
Roomba said:
That's great, but has little to do with my original point that you took upon yourself to "fix". I was arguing that people don't think about their relationships in terms of pure value exchange, and so reimbursing them materially for poor treatment won't necessarily prevent resentment. I'm talking about the psychology of relationships, not how they can be externally modelled.

Tangentially, if you want to convince people that you're right about this, you may want to try to be less passive-aggressive about it. I happen to agree with the gist of your point, but found the delivery rather off-putting.
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I'm fairly sure the delivery being off-putting was part of the point.
 
Oneiros said:
What!? He's much cooler and more effective as Dark! Hazou. He still is forging a team out of the misfit toys that were given to us. Who we can turn into life long allies.
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Dark Hazou is an effective tool to cut past preconceptions about us being young and therefore innocent and naive, but it's garbage at things like building positive relationships with people like the other Leaf clan heirs or the promising genin of other villages.

Them knowing that we can cut loose and be serious is useful in its own right, but we need Light Hazou when we're actually interacting with people or they'll just see us as a creepy moody sociopath instead of an idealistic, inspiring, and ambitious leader, and in the long-term games of politics we'll accumulate much more support and power as an inspiring leader figure than as a dangerous barely-restrained monster.
 
Oneiros said:
Personally I'm hoping we can actually get Hazou to go through character development in the opposite direction @MadScientist. Have him realize that people are a resource. Something to be cultivated. Basically I want Dark! Hazou to become more present
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Oneiros said:
What!? He's much cooler and more effective as Dark! Hazou. He still is forging a team out of the misfit toys that were given to us. Who we can turn into life long allies.

I don't see how these things are mutually exclusive. It is very possible to be idealistic and believe that people are basically good. Hazou just has to realize that to achieve his goals he will have to go all in. He can still have morales and lines. Just being willing to go all out short of those. Everything that is not forbidden is allowed
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I apologise if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like you want him to turn into a sociopath. And while I do enjoy stories with sociopath/psychopath protagonists because of the novelty of reading unusual viewpoint-perspectives, that is very much not what I come to MfD for. I'd rather Hazou become more loving/personable/compassionate than less so.
 
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