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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Paperclipped said:
Nezala seemed to draw strength from the physical connection. "Pacifism is the final conclusion of starting from certain principles, but it's a little hard to explain. Here's one way of looking at it: war is costly and destroys resources. There's almost always a way to divide resources so that everyone is better off without the costs of a war."
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Ohh, that's why @Shrooms invited me to contribute. The Rats are very passionate about decision theory. I was about to express confusion about why the Rats being "rationalist-adjacent" is supposed to be "up Noumero's alley", but, uh...
Noumero said:
re:Necromancy Planning

It's a ground truth that we would prefer this rift destroyed, rather than letting it fall into Akatsuki's hands, right? That's essentially a global loss condition for us, since they may retrieve Pain and then usher in the apocalypse they'd planned. Our position would be unrecoverable. And we don't necessarily think this specific rift is necessary for us: with enough sealing, we'd be able to make a new one from scratch.

Conversely, for them, our having control is not a global loss. They would still be more powerful, able to dictate some conditions for us, or maneuver in the new world order we'll create for their advantage. Uplift is not incompatible with what they want. And they have much fewer reasons to believe that the rift is realistically replicable.

This asymmetry is exploitable.

So what I'm thinking is that we take the rift hostage. I'd outlined it before. Figure out how to open the rift, then rig it to permanently close if we stop maintaining it in some complicated way. Concretely, I'm thinking something like a two-seal system of a timer and a rift-destroyer. The timer needs to be rewound every N days by a combination of complicated, only-known-to-us chakra manipulations + our chakra signature. If it ticks to zero, it activates the rift-destroyer.

(Edit: And I'm reasonably sure we can make those seals. Closing the rift should be much easier than opening it; I may be misremembering, but I think we even had an explicit in-universe confirmation of that from Kagome? So we make a seal like this, and then the second component is just a lock seal with a TN higher than Hazou can roll.)

It's not perfect, no. They may try to reverse-engineer and peel apart this setup, or try to counter-extort us. But the former wouldn't be trivial given how skilled Hazou is, and we can set up some precommitment structure for the latter, where we'd rather kill ourselves and take our chances on the other side, than bend to their will. (Giving in to threats is a losing strategy anyway; all we need to do is to convince them that we really believe this. And note that our taking the rift hostage is not a "threat" in this sense. Decision-theoretically, a "threat" is something that is only for your advantage to carry our if your enemy cooperates with it; and if they don't, it's a loss/loss compared to the status quo in which you didn't make the threat. As such, them trying to torture us into opening the rift is a threat: if we don't cooperate, and e. g. let ourselves die, the Akatsuki lose compared to the world in which they didn't act against us, and instead negotiated with us. Conversely, our taking the rift hostage doesn't have this decision structure: if they don't cooperate, and keep trying to open it, and fuck it up and close the rift, that's better for us compared to the status quo in which they gained unrestricted access.)

And it's not meant to be the full solution, anyway. What this actually does is massively improving our negotiating position. After that, after we have a deathgrip on something they care about, we can talk and arrive at some compromise. Like, for example, making finding Pain the first priority, and possibly retrieving him if he's being cooperative.

This is all going to be shaky, but it's IMO a strict improvement on the A-Day, and offers us a lot of maneuverability. Also it's just the first draft, I'm sure Ami can improve on it.
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... I resemble this remark.

Okay, yeah, I think this might be very salvagable. The principled counterargument to the Rats would be to make this the central point:
FaintlySorcerous said:
The deal was not made in good faith.
  • The Pangolins offered you jutsu, contracts, and money. They received utter military dominance.
  • Bargaining is inherently competitive but the Pangolins took advantage of Kei's inexperience and your lack of context to a degree incompatible with cooperation.
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Absolute adherence to never being the first to renege on a contract can be implemented two ways.

The first is semantical, the language of deals with the devil. The contract's word is binding. As long as either party is doing something that an unbiased observer would consider to be technically within the terms of the contract, the contract is valid. Within these constraints, however, either party is free to exert as much optimization as they want to violate the other party's expectations of what they agreed on; and indeed, either party is free to optimize prior to the contract to shape the negotiations such that the counterparty technically agrees to something they didn't expect. It's adversarial.

The other is faithful. This sort of contract is written in functions over world-states. The contract's language is merely the vehicle by which the parties arrive at a shared understanding of what they're agreeing on. This contract is considered void if it turns out that the parties' understanding of what it means differed, or, indeed, if either party purposefully optimized to make their counterparty misunderstand what they were agreeing on. Throughout the process, it's in both parties' interest to improve each other's understanding of the world (so as to ensure the contract isn't voided), and good faith is assumed (i. e., that neither will later lie that they misunderstood what they agreed on and use that as a justification to renege).

Under the second interpretation, the Pangolin contract wasn't even "voided"; it was never valid to begin with. The Pangolins operated in bad faith from the get-go, and deliberately conspired to get us to agree to something whose full consequences we didn't understand. We didn't sign up for ushering in the first full-scale war on the Seventh Path in a while, nor for the Condors' genocide.

A valid and symmetrical response on our end would have been to pick actions that minimize the Pangolins' utility subject to the contract's language. We could've played games with the definition of a "skytower", shipped off compromised or malfunctioning goods, picked the worst moment to cut off trade with no forewarning, etc.

Instead? We were upfront about what we were doing, and supplied an advance warning. We've shown more adherence to our words than the Pangolins.

We now see that the Seventh Path's understanding of honour and "keeping one's word" differs from ours, but we also have a consistent system, and we can be relied on not to violate it. If we strike a deal with someone negotiating with us in good faith, we'll never break it.


Or so we can say. If this works, this might actually be big; not just impressing the Rats, but (with the Rats' help) somewhat restoring our reputation across the entire Seventh Path.

(Though, ha, note that this speech itself may be adversarial, or a straight-up lie. I'm not sure we'd actually live up to this standard. The Human Path, after all, is indeed a hellhole: nobody down there except maybe Ami can be relied on to even technically keep their word. And we're its creature.)
 
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Noumero said:
Or so we can say. If this works, this might actually be big; not just impressing the Rats, but (with the Rats' help) somewhat restoring our reputation across the entire Seventh Path.

(Though, ha, note that this speech itself may be adversarial, or a straight-up lie. I'm not sure we'd actually live up to this standard. The Human Path, after all, is indeed a hellhole: nobody down there except maybe Ami can be relied on to even technically keep their word. And we're its creature.)
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Beyond the part where Hazou has to genuinely believe this (when we know pretty well that all values are ultimately subserviant to Uplift), he'd probably have to figure out how to articulate it well enough that it doesn't come across as post-facto motivated reasoning after observing the fact that being seen as an Oathbreaker is inconvenient. "But you see, I can't be an Oathbreaker because, uh, the deal was never valid in the first place!" No matter how true the statement is, we lose credibility by having to say it after the fact, and worse, after specifically encountering difficulties related to that fallout.

Not that there's nothing to work with here, of course. But we'll need to take our present situation into account, and the need to properly disambiguate ourselves from a hypothetical Hazou who just wants to wriggle his way out of justly-earned consequences. The Rats have shown a willingness to update upon observing costly signals, treating them as strong evidence in favour of the actor's sincerity, so maybe we could do something in that vein to fully convince them?
 
[x] [Conclave] Action Plan: Malign Superintelligences Would Love Trading With You
Word count: <400
  • Sanity-check with Mari/Kei.
  • Meet the Rats again.
    • Does "honour", to them, mean adhering to the contract's word, or spirit?
      • In the first case, signatories are free to exploit loopholes in the contract's language to violate their counterparty's expectations, and even misrepresent reality to get the counterparty to agree to something unintended.
      • In the second, the contract is considered void if parties' understanding of what it physically meant diverge, and good faith and cooperativeness are assumed throughout the negotiations.
    • Both versions have pros and cons, but you adhere to the second one. Under it, the Pangolin contract wasn't even "voided". It was never valid: the Pangolins willfully exploited our ignorance and misrepresented the situation. You didn't expect the Condors to be innocent, rather than as militant as the Pangolins; for it to be a war of unilateral subjugation and genocide. (Our priors were informed by the Human Path.)
      • A fair symmetrical response would be to minimize the Pangolins' utility while staying within the contract's word. Provide skytowers that'd malfunction at the worst moment, cut the deal off with no advance warning, whatever innumerable loopholes were doubtlessly present.
      • Instead, you'd discontinued trade openly and cleanly, showing more good faith than was shown to you.
    • You can't be trusted to "be honourable" in the sense the Seventh Path understands it. But there's a consistent honour system you can be trusted not to violate: you won't renege on a deal made in good faith by both parties.
      • What would they consider strong evidence that those statements of yours are, themselves, made in good faith?
      • You're hopeful that you can productively cooperate with the Rats under these conditions, and perhaps with other Clans as well. Especially as it pertains to existential threats.
      • If this is convincing, try securing the Rats' assistance in spreading this message across the Clans.
    • Explain our hope for the Condors: You can set the stage for Conjura to demand the freedom of her people for her contributions. Backed by the other bosses, the Condors can find a new homeland in Archeopteryx territory.
    • If they're interested, offer a copy of Nara writings on game theory.
  • Debrief with Enma, Ma and Pa. What should we spend our efforts on next?
  • What the hell happened to Convei? Get her to the Conclave immediately.
  • (Background/offscreen) Ask Kabuto/Asuma about borrowing Dragon parts for Conclave purposes.


Feel free to steal all that, @FaintlySorcerous. I think it mostly covers all the same bases your plan does.
Inferno Vulpix said:
Beyond the part where Hazou has to genuinely believe this (when we know pretty well that all values are ultimately subserviant to Uplift), he'd probably have to figure out how to articulate it well enough that it doesn't come across as post-facto motivated reasoning after observing the fact that being seen as an Oathbreaker is inconvenient. "But you see, I can't be an Oathbreaker because, uh, the deal was never valid in the first place!" No matter how true the statement is, we lose credibility by having to say it after the fact, and worse, after specifically encountering difficulties related to that fallout.

Not that there's nothing to work with here, of course. But we'll need to take our present situation into account, and the need to properly disambiguate ourselves from a hypothetical Hazou who just wants to wriggle his way out of justly-earned consequences. The Rats have shown a willingness to update upon observing costly signals, treating them as strong evidence in favour of the actor's sincerity, so maybe we could do something in that vein to fully convince them?
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Good point; added a line directly asking about that. Would be happy with concrete suggestions.
 
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I do not believe that conclave plans are being solicited right now but I am eager to vote for any (every!) plan that includes the argument that the Skytower contract was never valid because of private information deliberately hidden by the Pangolins.

If it is within the norms of the quest, please tag me if any such plan is proposed during a voting window. I'm also on the Discord server now.


Meanwhile, the Isan vote seems like a chance to let Hazo side with the conspiracy that killed Akane, hopefully reducing the probability of his own assassination. Maybe Hazo needs to allow the destruction of Isan without significant grandstanding here, to gain some stability in Shikamaru's (murderous and conspiratorial?) eyes. Above all else, Hazo must not be seen as a containment risk w/r/t EM secrecy.
 
Oh perfect
[x] Noumero

Thanks for the clarification!
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
It's not a dealbreaker for me, but I have a preference for including a line about extracting and preserving Isan's lore if we go through with this. Beyond the simple fact that I do, in fact, want Isan's lore to survive so we can get our hands on it, it also signals that Hazou is thinking about the problem beyond just "coming up with reasons to not do this". If Hazou is demonstrably thinking through how he would want such an operation to go, that helps better convey the opening lines about him not being stubborn about it.
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I second this, especially - as others have pointed out - since it may well be relevant to our little dragon issue.

[X] [Isan] Free(z)ing the Jungle
 
Orisha91 said:
@Velorien @eaglejarl @Paperclipped

Ive got three questions.

First, I'd like to know if Hazou is aware of any further research Kagome did on the Isan sealing theory notes he got from Yoshida?

I'd also like to know if there has been any recent messages from Yoshida Tsukiko to Kagome and if he is still interested in responding to her.

Thanks.
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Kagome has treated his letter exchange with Yoshida with the utmost secrecy, down to the very fact of its existence. Since he is Kagome, this means Hazō is fully aware of the frequency and general content of their letters. They mainly consist of obscure points of sealing theory and specialist one-upmanship, as Kagome doesn't care about Isan and Yoshida apparently shows little interest in Leaf. Like any communication with foreign ninja, the letters are closely scrutinised by the Diplomatic Corps, which Kagome is fine with since Yoshida is almost certainly plotting against him anyway (he says almost affectionately).

If Kagome's been using any Isanese insights in his research, he hasn't mentioned it to Hazō.
 
[X] [Isan] Free(z)ing the Jungle

[X] [Conclave] Action Plan: Malign Superintelligences Would Love Trading With You
 
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[x] [Conclave] Action Plan: Malign Superintelligences Would Love Trading With You
Inferno Vulpix said:
It's not a dealbreaker for me, but I have a preference for including a line about extracting and preserving Isan's lore if we go through with this. Beyond the simple fact that I do, in fact, want Isan's lore to survive so we can get our hands on it, it also signals that Hazou is thinking about the problem beyond just "coming up with reasons to not do this". If Hazou is demonstrably thinking through how he would want such an operation to go, that helps better convey the opening lines about him not being stubborn about it.

For this angle, like, I don't think we need to drag Shikamaru's incentives into it. We should just bring up the fact that Isan's lore quite possibly includes the only surviving records of information that dates back hundreds of years, which is priceless and irreplaceable. If Shikamaru objects that some of it can be dangerous, we can afford to defer to him about it. Better the lore survives in the Nara archives than be lost forever to the cold fire.
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I'm not fully convinced that Isan's lore is important but can add a line.
_The_Bomb said:
Can you expand on this. Something like:
HAZŌ: If you use the EM nuke now, you can't use it on the dragons without Akatsuki razing Leaf for violating AMITY.@RandomX2 and I think this is the strongest argument we could make, so it's defiantly worth expanding on in the plan, especially since we have the word count.
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I can do this.
 
I proposed this seal idea a while ago. If Hazou thinks it's within his abilities, it may be a contributing factor to the debate.

Summer Seal: Many stationary seal elements define a polyon. While the seal is active, the area inside the seal has very hot and bright sunny weather. This seal is designed to protect large areas of land against the effects of an EM Nuke.
 
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Changes made.
faflec said:
[X] [Isan] Free(z)ing the Jungle
Word Count: 242
  • Hazou will set aside the ethical and moral implications of visiting death upon a village of people whose crime they are not even aware of, and look upon the situation rationally.
  • Even so, Hazou is generally opposed to destroying Isan with Elemental Mastery based on his current awareness of the situation.
    • Hazou is not stubborn and is willing to change his viewpoint, but is not convinced that destroying Isan is necessary at this point in time.
  • The facts as Hazou knows them:
    • Isan has agreed to trade Fire ninjutsu exclusively with Leaf, and there is a replacement for Elemental Mastery, which presumably is being traded with Isan. Both these things indicate that spread of Elemental Mastery is controlled.
    • Isan-nin with knowledge of Elemental Mastery may not be present in Isan during its destruction. These survivors represent a risk of EM proliferation.
    • Isan-nin may have undiscovered technique caches containing Elemental Mastery, and destroying Isan would make it impossible to locate them save by pure chance. These caches represent a risk of EM proliferation.
    • Other concerns not strictly related to Elemental Mastery-related Armageddon:
      • Using EM Nuke now will implicate us if we reuse it in the Dragonwar.
      • Isan is in possession of lore dating back hundreds of years, and which may be relevant to the Dragonwar.
      • AMITY destroying Leaf in retaliation.
      • Loss of a close ally with ties to Leaf.
  • Things Hazou doesn't know about:
    • Capturing and interrogation of Isan patrols, and its missing-nin.
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MadScientist said:
I proposed this seal idea a while ago. If Hazou thinks it's within his abilities, it may be a contributing factor to the debate.

Summer Seal: Many stationary seal elements define a polyon. While the seal is active, the area inside the seal has very hot and bright sunny weather. This seal is designed to protect large areas of land against the effects of an EM Nuke.
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Honestly kinda this. Fits the Land of Fire too, if we could make it truly large-scale. And no one would think its strange to create something like that since it'd improve agricultural output and such, and heat is probably conductive to Fire ninjutsu in general, which the majority of Leaf ninja use.
 
eaglejarl said:
The aforementioned destruction will come in a variety of forms. In the immediate area of the zone you get Mach 1 winds, meaning around 400 mph given the cold air. (For reference, the strongest hurricane ever recorded had winds of 185 mph and the strongest category-5 tornados are up to 318 mph.) Then you've got the cryogenic liquids freezing everything. If the 'anything' has water inside it (or sap, or blood, or...) then it will freeze and expand, destroying whatever it was inside. The liquid nitrogen (LN2) and liquid oxygen flow outward as a flood being driven by those hyperhurricane winds. They freeze everything they run into and also batter it with tons of kinetic energy.

Everything within a 0.75 mile radius is completely obliterated and a crater is dug into the ground, ranging from 'massive' in sand or loam to 'modest' on stone.

Everything within a 1.5 mile radius is destroyed. Concrete buildings are leveled, trees are demolished, etc.

Every living thing within a 12 mile radius is killed through a combination of wind, cryogenic flood, breathing cold air causing the water in your lungs to freeze into lots of tiny sharp ice crystals that will shred your alveoli like grapes on a grater, etc.
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The threat created by Elemental Mastery isn't just the freezing cold, but the hurricane-speed winds and nearby debris that are being flung about by said winds. If we want an anti-EM seal, we need not only an anti-freezing seal but also an anti-kinetic bombardment seal. Something that reduces kinetic energy within the radius of the seal to non-catastrophe levels.

...which would be a really good seal to make in order to counter Skywalker bombardment, come to think of it.
 
Crunbum said:
Honestly kinda this. Fits the Land of Fire too, if we could make it truly large-scale. And no one would think its strange to create something like that since it'd improve agricultural output and such, and heat is probably conductive to Fire ninjutsu in general, which the majority of Leaf ninja use.
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RANDOM NINJA: oh ffs he's doing non-combat stuff again. seriously? Agriculture sealing?
SHIKAKU'S GHOST: Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
 
[x] [Conclave] Action Plan: Malign Superintelligences Would Love Trading With You

This is a very good plan and I'm pleased to vote for it.
 
Noumero said:
(Our priors were informed by the Human Path.)
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I think that this is going to be the pressure point that the Rats go after. Kei's priors were informed by the Human Path, but the Rats may reasonably ask what kind of evidence was used to update those priors. As far as I know, the Goketsu made no effort to verify the Pangolins' claims, even within the framework of what the Pangolins were willing to provide. There was no tour of damaged infrastructure, no visit to hospitals filled with wounded, etc.

The Rats may then insist that ignorance is not a valid escape clause to a contract, particularly willful ignorance. But Jiraya was the Toad Summoner and did not raise any red-flags about the idea of war between equals on the Seventh Path. So it is not merely Human-path priors, but the priors of a Sanin that were spoofed by the Pangolins.

The plan starts from the premise that "the Pangolins deceived Goketsu with lies of omission, and maybe also direct lies." I want it on record that, at the time of the contract's negotiation, "Goketsu" included Jiraya Himself. Hazo might need to argue that object-level question of whether the Goketsu were deceived (instead of willfully blind) separately from the real issue of whether reneging on a deal is permissible after learning of deceit.



(I don't know that this requires a change in the wording of the plan, but if it does, "Our priors" -> "Goketsu leader Jiraya's priors" would be my first attempt at a succinct change. (That phrasing has the risk of appearing to shirk responsibility, which is why I'm not a plan-maker!) Adding a sub-bullet about is probably too big a change considering the # of existing voters and the remaining voting window. So discussing it quietly amongst the hive-mind is the best I can do.)
 
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