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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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TheEyes said:
I'd be really hesitant on attempting to plan a raid on what's at least a Kardashev type III, likely a type IV bucking for type V civilization. The Incubators could call themselves gods and I wouldn't be sure they're wrong: if @Firnagzen's idle chat about them manipulating the Boltzmann constant as part of their entropy-fighting campaign is right then by necessity they've been doing it for as long as carbon-based life has existed, which means roughly 3.9 billion years.

Perhaps the only thing worse than failure, and inevitable Incubator retaliation that kills everyone Sabrina is even casually associated with, would be success: even a single blip in the Boltzmann Constant, for even a few milliseconds, would be enough to instantly destroy all carbon-based life on Earth, and anywhere else in the cosmos, as changes in activation energies cause every protein in the universe to denature simultaneously.

I... I just don't think you guys have thought this plan through.
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It's been said many times, the Incubators lost because of plot; they're not an enemy one can beat without Doka level Hax.
 
TheEyes said:
I'd be really hesitant on attempting to plan a raid on what's at least a Kardashev type III, likely a type IV bucking for type V civilization. The Incubators could call themselves gods and I wouldn't be sure they're wrong: if Firnagzen's idle chat about them manipulating the Boltzmann constant as part of their entropy-fighting campaign is right then by necessity they've been doing it for as long as carbon-based life has existed, which means roughly 3.9 billion years.
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W-what? Don't take this the wrong way, but that's just too bullshit powerful for me to believe. They aren't the freakin' Xeelee-



Oh.

...I'm scared.​
 
Yep, the QB are impossibly powerful.

Either we don't fight them at all (and given the scale of atrocity they commit, and difficulty in negotiating with them, this sits poorly with me), or we have to become Mom-tier powerful to succeed. (The Sereg approach, so to speak, which I advocate.)
 
Redshirt Army said:
Yep, the QB are impossibly powerful.

Either we don't fight them at all (and given the scale of atrocity they commit, and difficulty in negotiating with them, this sits poorly with me), or we have to become Mom-tier powerful to succeed. (The Sereg approach, so to speak, which I advocate.)
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Is it possible that we could kill them with cooperation? If they're telling the truth about their motivations, and if we can find a more efficient system than Witch farming, then they're going to drop Witch farming without any need for coercion on our part.

That's two tenuous 'ifs', though.
 
Subrosian_Smithy said:
Is it possible that we could kill them with cooperation? If they're telling the truth about their motivations, and if we can find a more efficient system than Witch farming, then they're going to drop Witch farming without any need for coercion on our part.

That's two tenuous 'ifs', though.
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In the long run, for "everything to be fixed", which is my goal to strive towards in this quest, then the Incubators need to change what they are doing.

We can either negotiate a change, which I see as unlikely in the extreme given what the Incubator's utility function seems to be, or we can try to change their operations by force - which is, of course, impossible without deific power.

There are those who both believe that ascension is impossible and that the Incubators can't be negotiated with. I don't understand their position, though, since in addition to being narratively unsatisfactory (since Madoka wishing after she and Homura get some group therapy would be essentially a strictly superior result), it means that Madoka's wish won't be fulfilled, which goes against one of the setting's core conceits.
 
Caught up!

I just pictured Mami, Homura and Sabrina explaining the above shit to Sayaka.

Sayaka:... ..... holy shit we are doomed... or fighting gods- I'm going to go hug Kyoko for a couple hours now, kthnxbai.
 
Since Sayaka using all her new shiny powers on her next spar with Kyouko's came up in Discord a couple of times:

MENTAL NOTE: TELL SAYAKA TO NOT USE CLONE POWERS WHILE SPARRING WITH KOKO.

Let's make sure to not trigger the Koko.

And by then, we're gonna have told both Kyouko and Sayaka how to not trigger each other!

We're such a good shipper friend, helping ship sail smoothly looking after our friends' happiness.
 
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DB_Explorer said:
Caught up!

I just pictured Mami, Homura and Sabrina explaining the above shit to Sayaka.

Sayaka:... ..... holy shit we are doomed... or fighting gods- I'm going to go hug Kyoko for a couple hours now, kthnxbai.
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There's our plan for starting the Kyousaya ship!


But more seriously, I bet if we asked Kyuubey we'd get some useful information, even if that useful information is "they don't want to discuss it." Somehow, though, that seems OOC for Kyuubey - Is there a recorded instance in canon or PMAS where he flatly refused to answer a question?
 
Honestly, it's probably possible to negotiate with Kyubey if only because the only other alternative is escalating to stupid biggatons. I can see Sabrina, hypothetically, creating Artificial Clear Seeds and having them be so easy to fill up and generate that it's much more profitable than Grief Seeds could ever be due to being a renewable resource, with the caveat of "Stop creating Witches or you don't get any of these."
 
I think that describing the alternative as "biggatons" is a bit disingenuous; bullshit conceptual hax is more important than any amount of physics-bound energy. But I suspect that the solution is actually going to be somewhere in the middle - we figure out some conceptual hax that gives us a constructive outcome that's better for all involved parties, and we don't even have to "negotiate" with Kyubey so much as watch it flip over to fully supporting us the instant our proposal is more stable than witch-outs.
 
Vebyast said:
I think that describing the alternative as "biggatons" is a bit disingenuous; bullshit conceptual hax is more important than any amount of physics-bound energy. But I suspect that the solution is actually going to be somewhere in the middle - we figure out some conceptual hax that gives us a constructive outcome that's better for all involved parties, and we don't even have to "negotiate" with Kyubey so much as watch it flip over to fully supporting us the instant our proposal is more stable than witch-outs.
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I'm defining "Biggatons" as "fighting Kyubey with brute force." Either we make Kyubey stop being a shit or we need to strongarm him. Letting him continue as he does isn't acceptable.

Redshirt Army said:
Well, the source material escalated to "stupid biggatons" by that definition, so it's not like it's off theme...
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Well, first off, no it didn't, because Madoka didn't exert force over Kyubey and did nothing about his behavior, and Homucifer isn't acceptable.

Secondly, 'doing as the source material' is off-theme for PMAS.
 
AuraTwilight said:
Madoka didn't exert force over Kyubey
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She forcibly prevented them from gaining energy from witchouts by making witching out impossible. Ergo, she forcibly prevented the Incubators from taking certain actions, to the degree that the Incubators attempted to retaliate and capture her once made aware of her actions.

AuraTwilight said:
Either we convince Kyubey to stop being a shit or we need to strongarm him. Letting him continue as he does isn't acceptable.
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With this, I agree totally. Funnily enough, I suspect the latter option to be easier than the former, but both are reasonable outcomes.

If the plan does end up being to negotiate with QB, though, we should probably have begun discussing the situation with him as early as possible. I can't think of the scenario where not speaking with QB and not planning to eventually gain the ability to forcibly impose our desires on him has a satisfactory conclusion.
 
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We can't change Kyubey's utility function, but if he's not lying about not understanding humans, I think that we could successfully change his expected value calculations by presenting arguments he didn't think of or estimated incorrectly. For example, I think we could argue to Kyubey that Wishes are too dangerous for him to fuck with and he should let us find a better solution; the shittier he makes meguca lives - the more power he accumulates - the more likely it becomes is that someone will fuck him up. Which lowers the expected value of his current approach and makes it easier for us to come up with a proposal that beats it and flips him to our side. It's correct that talking alone likely won't work, but I suspect that brute force alone will be comparable in difficulty and what we really need to do is let the two build off each other.
 
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What if we told Kyubey, using our Metaknowledge, that eventually a Magical Girl WILL be strong enough to throw off the shackles of the Soul Gem, become omnipotent, conquer the entire universe, and subject his race to eternal suffering in vengeance? We don't tell him who, only tell him that we know it WILL happen if we don't change the course of history; that it's partly why we do what we do.

I am not proposing we actually do this, but for hypothetical's sake, what do you guys think will go down? Assume Kyubey believes us because Truth Field griefhax or something.
 
AuraTwilight said:
What if we told Kyubey, using our Metaknowledge, that eventually a Magical Girl WILL be strong enough to throw off the shackles of the Soul Gem, become omnipotent, conquer the entire universe, and subject his race to eternal suffering in vengeance? We don't tell him who, only tell him that we know it WILL happen if we don't change the course of history; that it's partly why we do what we do.
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Before Sabrina? They leave, let the existing magical girls burn themselves out, and spend another few million years refining a system with more safeguards on some other planet. (If humans really are speshul, they can take a seed population with permission in a few hundred years when things start getting really bad.)

Now... not sure. They'd still probably recuse themselves for a while and thus force us to go global real fast before absolutely everything turns to shit with the QBdrones no longer collecting filled seeds though.
 
Guys, we don't have to fight the incubators. We don't have to kill them. They can be reasoned with. We reason with them all the time when magical girls ask questions about wishes. The problem we have is they don't understand emotions. This isn't as big a handicap as you might think. Kyubey in canon said that while he did think of us as livestock, he was also trying to be fair with us. He doesn't understand the concept of informed consent, just regular consent. His answer to why he didn't tell us is we didn't ask. We can work with that. We can just ask. We can explain why things are considered unfair to our species. Incubators have a mission, but they aren't shy or stupid, and they lack the capacity to be deliberately cruel. We just need to lay out a reasonable set of terms that ends in them getting more exergy than the current plan, and they'll be on board with it. He literally can't have an emotional attachment or sadism towards the suffering of humanity, it's just the best tool for the job as far as he can see. And a justified one since we keep agreeing to it when we make wishes.
 
rkyeun said:
Guys, we don't have to fight the incubators. We don't have to kill them. They can be reasoned with. We reason with them all the time when magical girls ask questions about wishes. The problem we have is they don't understand emotions. This isn't as big a handicap as you might think. Kyubey in canon said that while he did think of us as livestock, he was also trying to be fair with us. He doesn't understand the concept of informed consent, just regular consent. His answer to why he didn't tell us is we didn't ask. We can work with that. We can just ask. We can explain why things are considered unfair to our species. Incubators have a mission, but they aren't shy or stupid, and they lack the capacity to be deliberately cruel. We just need to lay out a reasonable set of terms that ends in them getting more exergy than the current plan, and they'll be on board with it. He literally can't have an emotional attachment or sadism towards the suffering of humanity, it's just the best tool for the job as far as he can see. And a justified one since we keep agreeing to it when we make wishes.
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We can explain the ideas of informed consent and fairness all we like, and it will be under no obligation to follow them. Indeed, such ideas will be in no way unfamiliar to it. QB is not unknowing of such ideas, rather his moral paradigm has led him to reject them.

Only by providing a system that both has greater yields and is mutually exclusive with the current system can we "convince" it to alter its behaviour.
 
Redshirt Army said:
both has greater yields
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Nitpick: Not yields, greater expected value of yields. I believe that Kyubey would happily switch to a solution that produces less grief but is also less likely to result in universal catastrophe, and I in fact believe that that's the route we have to take, simply because power appears to be Grief and Grief is suffering and we're trying to reduce suffering.

....Huh. I wonder if there's something in Canon about about Grief being a necessary cost of prolonging a universe because a universe contains hope. Good thing we have a Fix Everything wish.
 
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