It's a reference to a different quest where, apocryphally, the PCs holed up in a (literal) lighthouse to research/train and never actually did anything until the quest died from being too boring for all involved.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard open voting
It's a reference to a different quest where, apocryphally, the PCs holed up in a (literal) lighthouse to research/train and never actually did anything until the quest died from being too boring for all involved.
Here's the barebone plan.
[X] Action Plan: Mitigating Problems Caused by Adult Drama
Kagome:
[X] Action Plan: Mitigating Problems Caused by Adult Drama
Kagome:
- Apologize to Kagome.
- For not involving Kagome in the decision making process.
- For Hana being overly harsh. Hazō did not know that she would do this.
- Promise Kagome that Hazō will...
- Involve Kagome in the decision making process.
- Make sure she do something with the kids; keep her busy.
- Help Mari coordinates Kagome's birthday; send invitation to Akane?
- Work on chakra intensity detection for seal according to Keiko
- Make explosive seals to sell to the tower, then to weapon shops/lazy sealmasters/ninja/etc; capital for tournament betting in Mist
- Make sure that pangolin tower seals are squared away.
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TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
Huh, that's an interesting failure state I wouldn't have expected. I guess it was paralyzed by people being too cautious?
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
Apology to Kagome should attempt toto include concessions from Hana, at some point invoking Open Mouth Insert Foot, ideally invoking "willing to go pretty damn far" to ensure team/familial stability, and continuing to lean on the "I have agency fuck you" argument to neutralize what is otherwise a combination of parental dismissal and massively high social spec outrolling us.
We also know out of character how you respond to stress levels of physical damage; is it theoretically possible that such recovery timelines for social stress tracks follow a similar pattern? (Specifically, remembering that cut heels were unable to be healed, even with healing jutsu, more than x times as fast as normal because all it did was streamline the body's natural recovery rate. In this case, the best we can do for Mari is provide a recovery environment, which likely doesn't include a ground littered with social caltrops in the form of Hana)
For not involving Kagome in the decision making process.
- Location
- Under a Rock
I have an interesting idea, apologies if it has been brought up before.
One of several things reinforcing Mari's problems is that she is afraid that she has manipulated us into loving her, and that she will continue to manipulate us against our best interests in the future. She, perhaps correctly, thinks that none of us are capable of stopping her.
However, Hana is. In the counter-factual universe where she is manipulating us maliciously, one thing that would reliably stop that is frequent contact with a better manipulator who hates her guts.
This emphatically won't help right now. It is akin to talking about building with flame retardant materials while the building is currently exploding. But it is still a thing to think about.
One of several things reinforcing Mari's problems is that she is afraid that she has manipulated us into loving her, and that she will continue to manipulate us against our best interests in the future. She, perhaps correctly, thinks that none of us are capable of stopping her.
However, Hana is. In the counter-factual universe where she is manipulating us maliciously, one thing that would reliably stop that is frequent contact with a better manipulator who hates her guts.
This emphatically won't help right now. It is akin to talking about building with flame retardant materials while the building is currently exploding. But it is still a thing to think about.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Yeah. Every time a plot hook of tantalizing exciting adventure was offered, the right option was always to stay in the lighthouse and get stronger.
The term was used a lot more in this thread previously, back when we were missing-nin. It was a little distressing since the term had the quality of being 'always bad don't do it' but was also sufficiently flexible in definition that it could be applied to a lot of things. As a result, every so often someone or another would call any amount of research lighthousing, even when it had good reasons behind it, and the proponents of said research had to justify that no really they do intend to go do interesting stuff soon, but the research's actually important.
In time we largely stopped using the term, which I'm glad for because it led to the uncomfortable kind of arguments where you kind of feel like someone's not playing fair, but it remains well-known enough that people can use it as a quick reference.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
We also kind of need to apologize to Mari for putting her through this. Regardless of how good the reasoning for it, it is kind of putting her through hell.
So, something I don't think has been brought up:
So what if she manipulated Hazou and the rest of the team into loving her? I'm sure Keiko would make the argument that that's what parents do to their children too, and Hazou would stutter about how nuh-uh it's different because reasons that he can't articulate.
So, something I don't think has been brought up:
So what if she manipulated Hazou and the rest of the team into loving her? I'm sure Keiko would make the argument that that's what parents do to their children too, and Hazou would stutter about how nuh-uh it's different because reasons that he can't articulate.
- Location
- Yes.
Side note: Maybe Mari hasn't apologized to us because she doesn't feel capable of it? As in, she feels that any such apology is a lie because her twisted mental state says that she isn't capable of feeling real remorse, and any apology made would be insincere, thus keeping her from apologizing because from her POV it's just another proof of how manipulative she is.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
This was basically my assumption as to why she hasn't.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
She sort of did though? Just in the normal way that the average person wouldnt describe as manipulating.
- Location
- Yes.
Alright, but we need Hazou to make the realization and to articulate it to his teammates.
Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
- Location
- Left of Center
Rule 3: Do not threaten with incivility
Actually yes. If we want Hazou's neuroplasticity to turn it into a new sense.
Having both the cone and the spheres required Hazou's brain to do more work to integrate the new signals into a coherent sense that he does not have to pay attention to.
This is the same reason why a good control scheme for a videogame stops being a thing you have to conciously think about. It's simple enough that you're subconscious can just learn to do the work.
On the other hand, a bad control scheme, is much harder to learn, because there more steps involved to turning your intention into a sequence of button presses. Many of these steps requiring concious intervention.
The same process works for input, to allow you to integrate a new sense. This is why most modern shooters make the edges of the screen more red, or darker, or a different color when your health runs low. It's simpler than a health bar for your subconscious to decode. Which means you don't have to take a step back and look at your health bar in the middle of the action, you just sorta know when you're running low.
This is not to say that a health bar is impossible for your mind to incorporate, it's just harder. This is the big problem with cones.
In particular, cones are unstable. As you move, simply because fleah is jiggly, the direction the cones are pointing will wobble around. A tiny wobble (change in angle) will make the cone cover a wildly different area. This means that Hazou, and his subconscious have to know both the exact angle each seal is pointing at all times, and the feeling from each seal to know what's happening where.
On the other hand, fully spherical sensors don't really change very much with those tiny movements, meaning that deoiding the vibrations involves comparing the difference between signals that are already very close together (in both physical and cortical terms).
I know this isn't immediately intuitive, but @OliWhail is a literal neuroscientist. Despite the result being counterintuitive, just throwing more information at a brain doesn't help.
Make it 4*pi steridians, and I'm with you.
See the remarks on stability above to understand why even a wide cone is a bad idea.
For a partial 'cone' to work well, you'd probably want to have significantly wider than 180 degrees, to the point the area the sensor can't detect in is a smallish cone. Instead of having 2-3 cones overlapping enough to cover every single point, you'd want to make it so only one or two cones don't cover any particular point in Hazou's range.
Given that, where we are, we have developed neither an amplitude sensitive version of a seal, nor a conical version. I'm saying that trying to develop the conic version first (if before the exams) is not a good idea.
After the finals, then I don't really care about the order, both are useful, the latter is much more useful as a tool for medicine and science than as a combat aid however.
You ears work don't they?
They are two basically omnidirectional sensors a few inches apart, and you can tell which way sound is coming from.
On top that, human minds (in fact pretty much every mind made with neurons) tends to run on a log scale, it is much more sensitive to changes near the zero point than it is to changes that happen at higher amplitudes.
Seriously, I designed the sensory seals to work on similar principles to hearing and vision, explicitly so that it's easy for people to learn and make use of. I've yet to see a simpler (read. Likely easier to develop) solution that accomplishes half those things.
I'm fighting back here, because the conic seal is an actively bad idea in the immediate term. It's harder to learn, likely harder to develop, and much less useful in a fight.
Before you give me any bullshit about how I don't know how hard it is.
I don't know how hard it is, but have very good reasons for my belief that this way is probably easier than the others.
In particular:
@everyone: And don't you dare try to make an argument about how "But those assumptions are individually unlikely meaning that the whole thing is extremely unlikely" means that I'm wrong and your bullshit unsupported model is better.
(Non-bullshit, even minimally supported models are encouraged though)
The stuff about distance affecting amplitude and spheres being emergent objects is closer to a fundamental law of math (in any context where distance is a thing) than it is specific to our world.
If I need to go into a rant about how Occam's Razor, Solomonoff Induction, Baysean Rationality, and Complexity Priors (all fundamentally the same thing), still don't let you make shit up, and how imperfect arguments are still useful approximations for an underlying reality I will want to punch you.
I won't punch you, but I will want to. And also probably be frustrated enough to be unkind/mildly mean.
I don't know how hard it is, but have very good reasons for my belief that this way is probably easier than the others.
In particular:
- Chakra sensing probably follows an inverse power law or something similar.
- This doesn't have to specifically be an inverse power law, as long as a chakra source that is weaker and closer looks similar to a chakra source that is stronger but farther away.
- Pretty much like: light, sound, gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, radio waves, heat (at any scale where convection can be approximated as diffusion), access to goods (in markets with a low information/commodity transfer speeds, like ones without radio, internet, or phone access).
- "Things that are farther away need to be bigger to have the same impact on you." Is such an absurdly fundamental pattern in the real world that it's a solid default expectation for the MfD-verse.
- The way that the Byakugan seems to work (insofar as it's like vision) implies that it's detection mechanism is probably similar to light. In the absence of other evidence I'm going to assume that the casino seal likely uses the same detection mechanism. (Byakugan range is much better explained as a version of near-sightedness than with some other more complex mechanism)
- I expect changing the space from a sphere (or more accurately surfaces equidistant to a single point in a metric space) to be rather difficult.
- We know that sealing incredibly strongly incentivizes simple designs.
- Most simple sensory mechanisms, have (approximately) spherical detection zones.
- This is because, so many different possible processes/rules/systems result in spheres emerging naturally.
- On the other hand other shapes tend to require more work of one sort or another to produce.
- Take early evolutionary light sensors, those were just patches of light sensitive cells that would eventually detect the presence of light in a sphere. (This is an approximation, explaining the actual thing is more than I'm willing to do on my phone)
- It's only because of how easy light is to occlude, and lens that we ever evolved the (much more complex) eyes.
- Basically spheres are a shape that pops up naturally in any world where there is a concept of distance.
- Cones, and other more complex shapes require significantly more complexity to use.
- It is likely that the casino seals wrap a basic "chakra light" detector with a threshold amplifier, and changing that to produce a scaled output is a simple task.
- We know that sealing incredibly strongly incentivizes simple designs.
- We know that electronics is a decent model for how sealing, and sealing difficulty work. Even if it's more composable/functionally modular than sealing. (I suspect genetic engineering is a much better metaphor than even EE, but everyone that follows still applies there)
- A basic 'chakra light' sensor (like an temperature or sound sensor) is a likely component of the casino seals.
- It is much simpler to build something that goes "oh, do x if y goes above threshold" in electronics (and genetic engineering) than try to build a true on/off exists/does-not-exist detector. Given how dangerous complexity is, there is a huge boss against arbitrary seals being complex.
- Such a detector, would look like it has a spherical range unless you decide to measure things very carefully.
- As with all things sealing, this gets significant probability mass because complexity kills.
- In practice, thresholding (in both EE and Genetics) tends to be a form of very high gain amplifier, with a maximum and minimum output level.
- Tweaking the gain, or tweaking the bias of such a thresholder, to make it back into a normal amplifier, is probably a simpler operation than trying to define a cone.
@everyone: And don't you dare try to make an argument about how "But those assumptions are individually unlikely meaning that the whole thing is extremely unlikely" means that I'm wrong and your bullshit unsupported model is better.
(Non-bullshit, even minimally supported models are encouraged though)
The stuff about distance affecting amplitude and spheres being emergent objects is closer to a fundamental law of math (in any context where distance is a thing) than it is specific to our world.
If I need to go into a rant about how Occam's Razor, Solomonoff Induction, Baysean Rationality, and Complexity Priors (all fundamentally the same thing), still don't let you make shit up, and how imperfect arguments are still useful approximations for an underlying reality I will want to punch you.
I won't punch you, but I will want to. And also probably be frustrated enough to be unkind/mildly mean.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I do expect spheres to be an easier construct in general than cones, for the simple reason that a cone is, by its nature, a subset of a sphere, meaning that in the context of sealing as I understand it, where a sphere would require X, a cone would require X, and an operation done on X to strip away the stuff that isn't Y, the cone.
Yes. But my point is that even if she was being oh-so-terrible in her manipulations and doing it consciously in a way that the average person would describe manipulative... like. I don't actually mind being manipulated to like someone?
Maybe I'm a weirdo. I like to like people. People are cool. Thinking people are cool is also cool. If someone feels the need to manipulate me to like them it's indicative of lack of confidence on their part but I'm still willing to give them the chance, regardless of whether I'm aware of the manipulations or not.
Yes. But my point is that even if she was being oh-so-terrible in her manipulations and doing it consciously in a way that the average person would describe manipulative... like. I don't actually mind being manipulated to like someone?
Maybe I'm a weirdo. I like to like people. People are cool. Thinking people are cool is also cool. If someone feels the need to manipulate me to like them it's indicative of lack of confidence on their part but I'm still willing to give them the chance, regardless of whether I'm aware of the manipulations or not.
- Location
- Yes.
It's a good thing Hazou has a similar mindset. Just look at how he's been acting towards Neji.
- Location
- Under a Rock
Thats not how we do things around here! Any mechanism whatsoever that could plausibly be leveraged or used as a framework, and the difficulty gets set to "Should be easy!"
That being said, I see two main difficulties. I haven't seen anything which mandates that chakra follow inverse square laws. If it doesn't follow inverse square laws, this should still be investigated, as it could grant you a direction and a magnitude, which is still extremely useful.
I don't think the Byakugan works as evidence for chakra working like light, because the Byakugan doesn't work like an eyeball. It doesn't let you see through things, or let you detect chakra stuff radiating outward from things emitting chakra stuff. It gives you a full 3d awareness of everything in range. If it just let you see through things, you wouldn't have to place the anti Byakugan seals all throughout the volume of an area you want warded.
The sheer simplicity and omnipresence of inverse power laws still counts as evidence though.
Second problem, we don't know what the speed of chakra is. My biology is terrible, but I think that ears detect subtle timing differences. But chakra has no reason to limit itself to mach 1, mach 10, or even c. I don't think our eyes can detect timing differences.
Also, holy shit, we need to determine what the speed of chakra is! I bet we can a unit measure named after us! The Gouketsu, equal to the amount of energy released from a thousand explosive tags.
If we can using timing differences, we need to exploit it like there is no tomorrow. Do you think the Yamanaka could help us abuse our neurons until they accepted the chakra seals as a sense?
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Quick san check: The chakra dispersion problem would seem to be an effective-equivalent of the inverse square laws, would it not?
Vecht
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- Snarksville, Snarkland
Vision? Proprioception?
Your eyes work, don't they?
I am with you on cones likely being harder to implement from a sealing perspective, and also being more difficult to learn/incorporate into senses, but I think(?) you might be overselling it a bit. Maybe not, and we're closer to agreement than I'd get from reading your arguments, but:
- We have known examples of directionally sensing seals to work from (e.g. LBF), so the upper bound here would be figuring out a seal Hazou could learn with this element, then porting it over to detector seals.
- I am fairly certain that so long as it's locked to a given angle with respect to a part of your body, you'd be able to process the signal just fine(1) after learning it's correlated with proprioceptive sense. It'd be harder, sure, but I am pretty damn confident if I had a buzzer hooked up to weak active sonar attached to the side of my arm, I'd pretty quickly learn that I could move my arm around (2) and get a feel for the surroundings. More than one at once would be overload (to say nothing of several), but there is no way this isn't well within human-trainability, to the point that I'm confused why you're seemingly so adamant on using more correct models here when it isn't apparent the QMs are modeling this mechanic with much more fidelity than RAW.
- Yes, it's still computationally easier to compute the difference between two mostly static signals.
- One thing your model neglects is temporal processing -- one of my favorite proposals for cylopean 3d vision works via this principle.
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- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
I don't think it's spoilers to say I'd be on your side of this bet
E: at least, to the extent that 'what the QMs have on chakra physics' is things OTHER than chakra holding up its middle fingers and shouting "IT'S MAGIC MOTHERFUCKERS, I AIN'T GOTTA EXPLAIN SHIT"
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- Location
- Freiburg
Real-world evidence suggests that no Yamanaka help is needed; brains are pretty good at integrating (the right kind of) sensory input as a new, synthetic sense. Examples include various kinds of sensory prostheses mainly for blind or deaf people, good video game UIs, and the handful of experimenters that have e.g. implanted magnets into their fingers.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not any kind of neuroscientist. It's also late and I can't be bothered to find references for the above, so take it with a massive grain of salt.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
So that's how chakra originally propagated.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
You have an absolutely excellent point on the wobble.
I don't think ear's are a particularly good example here but I get the gist of what you're saying.
Ah. Yes. Okay, that's all you really had to say. Regardless of what Chakra Physics is going on (or isn't being modeled at all) I would expect basic topological stuff to hold constant since I don't think the QM's actually want to go through the hassle of it not, if nothing else. Likewise, Kagome got into a tizzy when we wanted to "Make a MEW Seal" about how well defined things need to be, and I think "Balls in R^N" to be about as simple as you can possibly get there, so that argument persuades me.
Unfortunately, we know jack shit about sealing, but I would be interested in knowing if decreasing the volume of the detection area would increase the range (say, a sector of a sphere) more easily, but this certainly competes with the "easily defined" aspect a bit. I would be interested in running tests to figure out what the universe says.
- Location
- Under a Rock
That is evidence of an inverse power law, but you forget that chakra is allowed to be bullshit. Suppose that a chakra effect was detectable at a constant strength up to a range that scaled with the inverse cube of how much chakra was used. Thats a range limiting factor, but there isn't a gradient you can look at to tell how far away the center is. Like a drop of oil spreading across the surface of a pond, the patch will get bigger the more oil you use, but it won't get any thicker at any point.
I do agree that it would be unnatural to call such a thing "dispersion" though. Some kind of inverse square law seems very promising at this point.