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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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bird_poison said:
If one assumes kb is a terminal of a hundreds of thousands years old massive alien intelligence, then even speaking with him is a dumb idea (see ai box problem, for an example)
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The thing is: Given the evidence shown, Kyubey is not, actually, particularly clever. Kyubey has a lot of experience and presumably doesn't suffer from the cognitive biases built in to humans and obviously doesn't have emotions clouding his judgment... but he's not clever. Look at how much he flounders trying to persuade Madoka to contract in direct conversation, vs. how easily he manipulates Kyouko to her death. Madoka is unprecedented, but I'm sure he's pulled similar tricks to get rid of someone inconvenient before and therefore has had time to perfect his technique.

I tend to think that Kyubey is basically a Chinese Room Machiavelli, using trial and error and brute force rather than actual understanding. Take away his playbook or go too far off script and he falls back to using arguments and approaches that would work on an incubator, and are hilariously ineffective on a teenage girl.
 
So we teach an incubator emotions under the premise of helping them make contracts better then watch them implode from emotions.
 
How can we teach what they cannot feel? They have to be able to perceive emotions first.
 
UbeOne said:
How can we teach what they cannot feel? They have to be able to perceive emotions first.
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They're presumably capable of it to some extent, if emotions are considered a psychological disorder among their species. Kyubey also emphasizes individual emotional experience as important when he's talking to Madoka. My theory is that the incubators are a partial hive mind that have species-wide emotions of some sort (if nothing else, emotions like "the happiness one experiences from reducing entropy") but no individual emotions.
 
DB_Explorer said:
So we teach an incubator emotions under the premise of helping them make contracts better then watch them implode from emotions.
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Outside of being impossible, that just seems cruel and purposeless. Like, not only is it a terrible thing to do, it also isn't efficient if your goal is <remove incubators>.
Redshirt Army said:


You can't teach emotions.
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I mean, you, or we probably can't, but hypothetically there should be a series of words+actions we could make that would give them emotions :V
 
Hannz said:
We can hardly keep Homura from killing O&K. Just one misstep from the pair is all it takes and bam, Time Stop One Shot. A BS social power would basically be brainwashing.
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Homu must never learn we would ultimately forgive her and keep working with her if she murdered O&K.

Because if she does realize it, we might be down a Best Buddy.

Redshirt Army said:
[LIKE MOTHER LIKE DAUGHTER INTENSIFIES]
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Somebody just brought this up to me and I think it's very fitting. :V
 
Echo said:
The thing is: Given the evidence shown, Kyubey is not, actually, particularly clever. Kyubey has a lot of experience and presumably doesn't suffer from the cognitive biases built in to humans and obviously doesn't have emotions clouding his judgment... but he's not clever. Look at how much he flounders trying to persuade Madoka to contract in direct conversation, vs. how easily he manipulates Kyouko to her death. Madoka is unprecedented, but I'm sure he's pulled similar tricks to get rid of someone inconvenient before and therefore has had time to perfect his technique.

I tend to think that Kyubey is basically a Chinese Room Machiavelli, using trial and error and brute force rather than actual understanding. Take away his playbook or go too far off script and he falls back to using arguments and approaches that would work on an incubator, and are hilariously ineffective on a teenage girl.
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Uh

He would have gotten madoka to contract several times if it wasn't for Homura Interrupt. She was literally in the middle of making a wish when Homers filled him full of lead.
 
thagguy said:
He would have gotten madoka to contract several times if it wasn't for Homura Interrupt. She was literally in the middle of making a wish when Homers filled him full of lead.
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Yeah, using the "you can still save Sayaka!" angle. After Oktavia gets destroyed via yurisplosion he shows up to chat about entropy and basically feed Madoka information that makes her less likely to play along. It's not until Big W shows up and starts wrecking Homu's shit that Kyubey gets anywhere with Madoka.

Basically, he seems to be terrible at persuading girls to contract outside of a handful of scenarios that are likely to have come up many, many times over the years. Which is why I think Kyubey's working from a script, not actual understanding.
 
Echo said:
Yeah, using the "you can still save Sayaka!" angle. After Oktavia gets destroyed via yurisplosion he shows up to chat about entropy and basically feed Madoka information that makes her less likely to play along. It's not until Big W shows up and starts wrecking Homu's shit that Kyubey gets anywhere with Madoka.
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Actually, it does make sense. Looks foolproof too at a cursory glance. Kyubey's tactic I mean.

Here we have a girl with a martyr complex who wants to be relevant, who wants to help as many people as she can no matter the cost to herself. So, what better offer to give her than say that she could save countless lives and civilizations if she just contracts?

It's less that Kyubey doesn't understand Madoka and more that he just doesn't get what it means to be individual. He works off pure numbers with no attachments at all. So what if a handful die for the sake of countless lives? It's all worth it to him, and probably to the majority of thinking beings so long as those handful aren't people they know.
 
Hannz said:
It's less that Kyubey doesn't understand Madoka and more that he just doesn't get what it means to be individual. He works off pure numbers with no attachments at all. So what if a handful die for the sake of countless lives? It's all worth it to him, and probably to the majority of thinking beings so long as those handful aren't people they know.
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In other words, he makes an argument that would work perfectly on someone with Madoka's values but an incubator-like mindset. Stuff like that is why I don't think Kyubey really understands humans in any meaningful way at all.
 
So, I had a thought. We're all pretty convinced that Sabrina was created by Madoka's wish in the previous loop, right? Given Madoka's potential and the way wishes tend to if anything give you more than you strictly asked for, it would be a bit of a rip-off if Sabrina was a once-only thing.

So let's assume, for sake of argument, that Sabrina is now a permanent fixture of the timeline and if Homu loops again Sabrina will still be there.

Now, what if Madoka makes that same wish again this loop?

Clearly, the only reasonable conclusion is that when Homu loops, next time there will be two Sabrinas.

From there, we just need to persuade Madoka and Homura to play along for enough loops to obtain UNLIMITED SABRINA WORKS and solve all the problems in all the places forever.

It's a flawless plan.
 
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