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
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
What's with this talk of lightcones? This is a world with chakra magic and teleportation of various varieties, is FTL really beyond the pale?
Not just our light cone, all is Ami.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That makes sense from an economic viewpoint where it is assumed that people are rational actors looking to maximize their overall material wealth without regard to other factors. Through that lens, the behavior of the Kurosawa seems irrational...but those axioms do not apply. The Kurosawa are a rich clan, so the marginal value of money is low for them. They are extremely proud of their culture and traditions as front-line combatants, so becoming primarily sealmasters is an actively offensive concept.
To put it in perspective, imagine Bill goes to a real-world family that has owned and worked their own farm for ten generations and says to them "Hey, your land isn't that productive. You'd be a lot richer if you sold all this to a real estate developer. Everyone would win; you could move to New York City, invest the money in index funds and earn more off the interest than you're earning now, all without doing a lick of work. The developer would get rich by bulldozing your house and everything else, then building a strip mall with a Walmart. People around here would be able to buy super cheap beer, so they would win. You're irrational if you don't take this deal."
How likely would that farm family be to take Bill up on it?
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- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
And further, it's not like the Kurosawa ignore these advantages completely. We've heard that the Kurosawa have approximately one sealmaster per generation, which stands out to other people as remarkably above average. So they are leveraging their unique talents towards sealmastery, but only to the extent that it doesn't interfere with their more central ideals and goals.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
Getting rid of the index funds part, and replacing developer with Condensed Animal Feeding Operation Owner, isn't that more or less what happened? Most farms in America aren't small family owned farms anymore, they're huge corporation-owned things.
On the other hand, families being driven bankrupt may have played a bigger role in that than logical arguments...
- Location
- NY
Oh jeez I just woke up...
- Location
- America
[x] Action Plan: A Copy of the Previous Plan So That We Can Re-Vote It In Explicitly, Avoiding the Ambiguity of the"Continue the Previous Plan" Votes
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Pretty crappy. +1 XP if someone else figures this out for us. Take historical precedent and make it worse.player quinoa said:
No. We have a suggested version in the QM docs that has not been sufficiently discussed and signed off yet. We'll get through that after the economics is dealt with, post it for player review, then finalize it.player quinoa said:
Hazō has no information on how much money there is from those, how to get hold of it, or whether it will keep coming in. It's possible that's the income stream that you saw in the clan accounts…player quinoa said:
- Location
- USA
Roughly how many ninja are promoted to chuunin/jounin yearly? That should be enough to figure out attrition rates at all levels. Actually, we'd also need to know how many ninja that leave the hierarchy are injured instead of killed.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
We can probably figure out how many leave from injury based on how many ninja there are in the Tower's bureaucracy.
Ami is the AntiXeelee. Incomprehensible due to her retrocausal perspective, and yet matron saint and savior of all baryonic life.
Odd. Am I allowed to hate both the family and Bill?
Outer civilization: rare settlements with rare advantages can sustain a birthrate slightly better than mortality over the long term without shinobi help. Very occasional caravan contact and shinobi help improves matters a great deal. Nobody is surprised when whole settlements disappear overnight. People keep trying, because human nature is for teenagers to keep getting their friends and girlfriends together and storming off to the next valley over to make their own settlement with blackjack and hookers, dad.
We need to get Kagome to take over writing the series. The next installment can be titled, "Henge." It will just be a hundred pages of, "henge henge sour watermelons IwillhavevengeanceforMia henge."
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Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
He had some of his agents run the goods to other towns in Fire, and sometimes even abroad, and sold them to civilian merchants."player QUINOA" said:
Sure. My point is that material wealth is not the sole driving factor in people's choices, and refusing to do something that will give you money is not irrational if it violates other values. It's why abortion is such a hot-button issue in the real world -- it entirely depends on what factors you value and how you weight them, and the fact that (a) the issue clearly has a major impact on human lives no matter which side you're on and (b) typical-mind fallacy is a thing means that everyone who does not agree with you looks like they are either literally crazy or horribly immoral...when, in fact, they are not. They simply disagree on the moral weights of the various factors.
Why can't everybody just sociopath it up for a few minutes a day? It would make everything so much simpler.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I mean..."disagree with you on moral weights of factors" and "horribly immoral (from your perspective)" are pretty much just two different ways of saying the same thing, at least when the former is taken to a sufficient extreme.
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
Well thank goodness your soul found its way back to your body from the Out! Praise RNJashin-sama!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Very similar, certainly. It gets a bit hair-splitting when you start debating the difference between "does not consider something to be a moral factor" versus "puts negligible weight on it." As an example, (essentially) everyone involved in the abortion question agrees that human life is a moral factor, as is bodily autonomy, happiness, personal responsibility, and the general weal of society. They place different moral weights on those things, but everyone agrees that they are all moral factors.
Opposed to that is the (potential moral) nature of a fertilized egg:
- Is it a human being?
- If it is not a human being, does it have non-zero moral weight because it might become a human being, or does it have zero moral weight (i.e. it is not a moral factor at all) because it's not fundamentally different than the skin cells that come off on a DNA swab?
- If it does have moral weight, how much? Depending on their belief in the source of that moral weight (e.g. God's word, protection of future humanity, belief in personal responsibility, etc etc) people will ascribe different moral weight to it.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Money they could also get via social-fu bullshit as well--something their bloodline also allows them to do and is much safer than trying to haggle with the Warp on the terms of your continued existence every few months or so.
Let's deify Jiraiya in-story so that we can meme about praising RNJiraiya and smiting RNJashin-heretics.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Isn't ancestor worship a thing?
Probably is. Hazo swore on his ancestors on things.
- Location
- Yes.
So assuming this still applies, ninja would graduate at ages 12-13 and on average would live to 20-21. Or something like that.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I can do a little bit of math for ninja life expectancies that hopefully you can plug numbers into and get other numbers out.
In a 'stable state' (i.e. before the major battles of the quest) Konoha had about 1200 Genin, 250 Chuunin, and 50 Jounin, with the input to this equilibrium being academy graduates.
We know from previous WoG's that Genin typically become Chuunin by 18 or not at all. The 'not at all' originally meant death but presumably also includes career Genin who won't make the cut for Chuunin no matter how long they grind. This doesn't exactly map to the XP system, since in theory all it would take is more time to gather the XP you need to hit chuunin-level stats, but in reality people have limits and it's perfectly reasonable for some ninja to just hit their limits at Genin levels of proficiency.
We can make a similar set of assumptions regarding Chuunin and Jounin. Some Chuunin just aren't capable of reaching Jounin heights of competence and spend their entire lives as Chuunin. Other Chuunin are on track to hit Jounin, and will in all likelihood take no longer than <some number> of years to get there. Let's say that somewhere between 25-30 is the cut-off. If you hit that age and you're still a Chuunin, you're probably never going to hit Jounin because of power limits modeled for realism apart from the XP system.
Instead of using the maximum age someone arrives at a power tier in, though, we want the average age. Since we know the maximum and (roughly) the minimums, I'll make the following ballparks:
- The average career Chuunin spends about 4 years as a Genin (and is promoted at 16).
- The average Jounin spends about 2-3 years as a Genin and about 7-8 years as a Chuunin (promoted at 14-15 and 21-23 respectively).
- Let's say that in a given year 75% of deaths are Genin, 20% are Chuunin, and 5% are Jounin, and that the graduating class size of the academy is 60.
- This would mean that, for the system to be in equilibrium, the numerical deaths are 45 Genin, 12 Chuunin, and 3 Jounin.
- Furthermore, in that year 12 Genin got promoted to Chuunin and 3 Chuunin got promoted to Jounin, and of the 60 academy graduates 12 of them will eventually reach Chuunin and 3 of them will reach Jounin.
- With 3 Jounin dying every year and 50 Jounin, that gives about a 3/50 (or ~1/17) chance each year for a given Jounin to die. Due to the nature of repeated exponential chances like this, this means a given Jounin is 50% likely to have died within 11 or so years of being promoted and about 66% likely to have died after 17 years.
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The exact methodology I'm using goes like this:
- When you're testing the same unlikely chance a bunch of times for at least one hit, what you do is take the odds you fail and model the odds of that chance chaining together a lot.
- (When you die you obviously stop doing missions and rolling the odds, just as when you find the shiny Pokemon you've completed your shiny hunt.)
- In this case it's a 47/50 chance per year that you survive, so how likely are you to hit those odds every time?
- For a given n years you can calculate the odds that you survived all of them with the following formula: odds = (47/50)n
- This is then converted to the odds you died by just subtracting it from 1. (Also multiply by 100 if you want percentages)
- This format gives you odds of death for a given number of years, but often it's more useful to ask how many years for a given odds of death (how long until a 50% chance a Jounin dies?). To do this you'd want to convert the exponential formula to a logarithmic formula, but there's a quick guess-and-test shortcut for a couple simple cases:
- Model your event as a 1/x chance. You hit even odds of the unlikely event happening at about two thirds of x.
- In our case that was 2/3 of 1/17, which gave me 11, which in the exponential formula gives us 49.4% chance of a hit.
- Under the same 1/x model, if you try x times you get about 2/3 odds of the event happening.
- In our case that was 17 iterations, which the exponential formula says is 65.1% chance of a hit.
- 2/3 may seem arbitrary, but it's actually 1 - 1/e which for colloquial use is basically 2/3.
- Model your event as a 1/x chance. You hit even odds of the unlikely event happening at about two thirds of x.
- When you're testing the same unlikely chance a bunch of times for at least one hit, what you do is take the odds you fail and model the odds of that chance chaining together a lot.
- Either way, somewhere between 11 and 17 years is our number for how old Jounin tend to get before dying. If we assume that the average Jounin hits the rank at 21-23 then Jounin tend to live somewhere up to 32-40.
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- If we repeat this with Chuunin, we get 12/250 or 1/21 per year, which gives us about 14-21 years of Chuunin service before death. Starting at 16, that maths out to 30-37 for life expectancy of a Chuunin.
- And for Genin, 45/1200 is 1/27 for 18-27 years of max Genin service. Starting at 12, this means life expectancy for a career genin is somewhere around 30-39.
If we double Academy class sizes then with twice as many ninja entering the pool the turnover rate must be much higher for the equilibrium populations we see (more specifically, the career lengths upon reaching their rank would halve, giving us 21-26 for Genin, 23-27 for Chuunin, and 27-32 for Jounin).
If we instead skew the ratios further towards Genin (let's say 90/9/1) then Jounin live longer and Genin live shorter (for example, that ratioset would mean 27-34/46-62/76-106 Genin/Chuunin/Jounin max ages).
If we do both, then we get 19-23/31-39/49-65 for max Genin/Chuunin/Jounin ages.
And honestly, nothing's stopping you from doubling Academy size again and tanking the lifespans even further, or bumping up the Jounin death rate a little, or doubling down on the genin death rate. The general algorithm is:
- Decide the Academy class size and ratio of deaths.
- Multiply the ratios by the class size to get the numerical replacement rate per rank (120 academy graduates x 90% of deaths are genin = 108)
- Divide the population of each power tier with the replacement rate for 66% chance-of-death year (1200 genin / 108 genin per year = 11.1)
- Take 2/3 of that number for the 50% chance-of-death year (11.1 x 2/3 = 7.4)
- Add to both numbers the age the ninja reaches that rank for the power (12 + 7.4 = 19.4| 12 + 11.1 = 23.1)