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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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DarkVeracity said:
There is no quantity of grief it is possible for Sabrina to provide which would convince Kyubey to stop trying to recruit Madoka and therefore acting in direct contradiction to our goals. Her contract is more valuable to him than the entire future output of earth. It's possible he can be bought off on certain other matters but even if he sounds like he's agreed to something it's very difficult to trust that he won't interpret his promise creatively and go against us anyway
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The entire expected future output of Earth, based on models predating Homura and Sabrina's involvement. Grief control plus time stop lets the two of them provide seemingly arbitrarily large quantities of grief in arbitrarily short intervals, sustainably. However, doing so is at least mildly inconvenient, so from the Incubator's perspective it makes perfect sense that Sabrina would withhold those resources from them unless they do something provable to advance her interests in return.
If they don't know exactly how much she knows, and she's clearly not already being maximally hostile to Incubator interests, she's also got leverage from the "stick" side of carrot-and-stick. Even the most ruthless predators will often peacefully withdraw when they know they've lost the element of surprise. Any "creative interpretation" which still involves emotionally kneecapping Homura right before the big fight means forfeiting the second half of that payment.

Over the longer term, yeah, Madoka might end up contracting while Constellation is otherwise successful - this deal can't completely solve that and isn't really meant to. it's a stalling tactic, trying to convince Kyuubey to pass up a relatively immediate opportunity in exchange for slower but less risky payoffs. If it did rule out Madoka contracting, that would make it near impossible for Kyuubey to accept in good faith... but while Constellation remains functional, she's very unlikely to die of natural causes, so the opportunity cost is "delay, gather more intel" rather than "we shall never see her like again." After tens of thousands of years, what's a few more?
The more Sabrina knows, and even more so the greater uncertainty around that epistemological threat assessment, The Codeless Code: Case 225 The Three Most Terrifying Words the scarier the risks involved in hasty action against her. Incubators don't experience fear as such, but they've been winning this game for a long, long time, so something must motivate them to avoid gambles where the odds are bad.

Then we use that extra time to sort out the whole Feathers / Law of Cycles situation, after which the goddesses are most likely friendly to Sabrina / Constellation, and in a position to dictate terms of the incubators' surrender. Certainly the finale of Rebellion seemed to be going poorly for Kyuubey, and that was effectively Homucifer working alone.
 
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BethofDeath said:
I tried figuring out how to pronounce þe gh sound and now I can't talk ri-g-ha-t at all. Þanks for þat.
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Think about how the word "loch" is pronounced, it'll get you closer into the region you should be looking at. Remember, English phonemic space has changed around since Middle English, so what would have been written phonetically with a "g" for a given related-sounding set of phonemes and allophones won't necessarily be obviously the same, merely discernable.
 
strange_person said:
The entire expected future output of Earth, based on models predating Homura and Sabrina's involvement. Grief control plus time stop lets the two of them provide seemingly arbitrarily large quantities of grief in arbitrarily short intervals, sustainably. However, doing so is at least mildly inconvenient, so from the Incubator's perspective it makes perfect sense that Sabrina would withhold those resources from them unless they do something provable to advance her interests in return.
If they don't know exactly how much she knows, and she's clearly not already being maximally hostile to Incubator interests, she's also got leverage from the "stick" side of carrot-and-stick. Even the most ruthless predators will often peacefully withdraw when they know they've lost the element of surprise. Any "creative interpretation" which still involves emotionally kneecapping Homura right before the big fight means forfeiting the second half of that payment.

Over the longer term, yeah, Madoka might end up contracting while Constellation is otherwise successful - this deal can't completely solve that and isn't really meant to. it's a stalling tactic, trying to convince Kyuubey to pass up a relatively immediate opportunity in exchange for slower but less risky payoffs. If it did rule out Madoka contracting, that would make it near impossible for Kyuubey to accept in good faith... but while Constellation remains functional, she's very unlikely to die of natural causes, so the opportunity cost is "delay, gather more intel" rather than "we shall never see her like again." After tens of thousands of years, what's a few more?
The more Sabrina knows, and even more so the greater uncertainty around that epistemological threat assessment, The Codeless Code: Case 225 The Three Most Terrifying Words the scarier the risks involved in hasty action against her. Incubators don't experience fear as such, but they've been winning this game for a long, long time, so something must motivate them to avoid gambles where the odds are bad.

Then we use that extra time to sort out the whole Feathers / Law of Cycles situation, after which the goddesses are most likely friendly to Sabrina / Constellation, and in a position to dictate terms of the incubators' surrender. Certainly the finale of Rebellion seemed to be going poorly for Kyuubey, and that was effectively Homucifer working alone.
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Kyubey will simply accept the deal, accept the pay-off, and then do it anyway.

The entire point of their bullshit with blatantly manipulative and deceptive phrasings that can be argued to be technically true isn't because they're honest, it isn't because they're prohibited from stating directly false things, it's because when a magical girl finds out about soul gems or witches, they've primed the situation for outright victim-blaming. It's a ploy to go "You never asked" to make the girl blame herself and witch-out before she can start trying to warn anyone else about it, before any sort of countermeasures can be taken.

That it does so making use of a "calm, rational, big-picture thinker, why are you so selfish and irrational" mien is entirely because that's what society already uses to exploit people. Because it gets people to burn themselves and those around them because surely the leopard won't eat your face, not when you've paid it!
 
strange_person said:
The entire expected future output of Earth, based on models predating Homura and Sabrina's involvement. Grief control plus time stop lets the two of them provide seemingly arbitrarily large quantities of grief in arbitrarily short intervals, sustainably.
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... just going to weigh in as GM to say that you're not going to weigh the Incubator's decisions on that score because-
Torgamous said:
Do you actually intend to spend the next twenty billion years IRL voting for "sit in timestop producing grief" every week?
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-yeah, that.

I'll also say that for PMAS, the Incubators have in fact chosen a strategy, and... well, you don't know what it is. Sabrina is also incredibly unlikely to sway them from it.
 
Torgamous said:
Do you actually intend to spend the next twenty billion years IRL voting for "sit in timestop producing grief" every week?
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And to be clear that this is not only not an overstatement, it is, if anything, a dire understatement:

One Grief Seed is about fifty million marbles of Grief. Power use tends to be single to double-digit marble count, and a soul-gem tends to be around 200 marbles before instant witch-out.

One Grief Seed worth of Grief, not cleansing, Grief that the Incubators get out of it, would take years of time-stop effort.

So even if this idea of "let's give a fat payout with no enforcement mechanism to stop them from just taking what they want for twice as much gain" was somehow viable, it'd be billions of years in-quest.
 
Torgamous said:
Do you actually intend to spend the next twenty billion years IRL voting for "sit in timestop producing grief" every week?
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Jonen C said:
Every minute you don't crank the lever the gdp per capita drops by multiple percentage points, so keep going superman!
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Its especially hilarious given that even Incubators themselves, who are basically emotionless automatons, dont want to crank the lever either. With their social fu and wishes it would be trivial to run humanity indefinitely farming us for grief forever. And even then the moment they realized they can cash out big on Madoka they decided to screw it, all in.

Lopezelpesado said:
This is very concerning and now I am in panic mode trying to figure out their game.

Didnt want to sleep anyways.
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Well, Madoka is their ultimate goal as per usual. Everything else just steps on the way to that. So we can try working backwards from that?
 
ExploerTM said:
With their social fu and wishes it would be trivial to run humanity indefinitely farming us for grief forever. And even then the moment they realized they can cash out big on Madoka they decided to screw it, all in.
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"Forever" is only a limited human perspective rounding an unknown big number to infinity. The Incubators have an idea of how long Earth can continue being exploited on average before it stops being productive, and how much energy they can expect to extract from it before then. This concept is called expected value, but for the sake of specificity I'm going to call the expected value of humanity our Gross Despair Product.

If Madoka's witch eating Earth is projected to be better for the GDP than Earth not getting eaten by Madoka's witch, then the smart investment is to burn Earth to get that witch. With Madoka being karmically bound to a lot of Earths, each with their own GDP, she's almost certainly got a larger GDP than a mere single Earth.

It's also possible that the Incubators judge profits by the quarter, and thus their incentive structure favors immediate payouts over the long term. It wouldn't be smart of them given their alleged goals, but we all know how far we can trust Kyubey when it alleges something.

Either way, humanity's long term survival is only good for the GDP until something that'll drive us extinct ends up being more profitable. The only way to ensure that driving humans extinct never looks like a good idea is to build a system that directly prioritizes people thriving, instead of an imperfect substitute like GDP.
 
Torgamous said:
snip
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I mean in context of just us being confined to Earth choosing Madoka is obvious, easier and more profitable option though keeping specifically Earth going through wishes is more than possible, but I wont believe in a thousand years they dont have tech or cant nudge some girls' wishes to spread humanity to other planets and just keep harvest going. One of your "farms" was suddenly wiped by random, I dunno, GRB? Good thing you have like a few dozen more.

Torgamous said:
Either way, humanity's long term survival is only good for the GDP until something that'll drive us extinct ends up being more profitable. The only way to ensure that driving humans extinct never looks like a good idea is to build a system that directly prioritizes people thriving, instead of an imperfect substitute like GDP.
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I do believe they judge by quarters or something similar and cant be bothered to look in extremely long perspective (which is why I think their entire spiel about heat death is bullshit; if they were thinking in infinities they would be bending over themselves to make sure as many Wish capable species are kept alive and thriving as possible) so basically we would NEVER be able to cut a deal that will ensure Madoka's safety.
 
ExploerTM said:
I mean in context of just us being confined to Earth choosing Madoka is obvious, easier and more profitable option though keep specifically Earth going through wishes is more than possible, but I wont believe in a thousand years they dont have tech or cant nudge some girls' wishes to spread humanity to other planets and just keep harvest going. One of your "farms" was suddenly wiped by random, I dunno, GRB? Good thing you have like a few dozen more.
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Doesn't change the math. You're just valuing the loss of one farm among many instead of The Only Farm.
 
Torgamous said:
Do you actually intend to spend the next twenty billion years IRL voting for "sit in timestop producing grief" every week?
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Godwinson said:
And to be clear that this is not only not an overstatement, it is, if anything, a dire understatement:

One Grief Seed is about fifty million marbles of Grief. Power use tends to be single to double-digit marble count, and a soul-gem tends to be around 200 marbles before instant witch-out.

One Grief Seed worth of Grief, not cleansing, Grief that the Incubators get out of it, would take years of time-stop effort.

So even if this idea of "let's give a fat payout with no enforcement mechanism to stop them from just taking what they want for twice as much gain" was somehow viable, it'd be billions of years in-quest.
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If we needed a vast quantity of grief on short notice, having Homura try to produce it all from scratch by just sitting and meditating would be silly. Start with spiral-pattern searches of major cities, find every cache of grief seeds and convert them to clear seeds. Stripmine the whole witch ecosystem as part of the same pass: every kiss, every familiar. Dissoluzione Bianca, grab seed (if any), move on. Anything significant to such a sweep can be spotted from hundreds of meters away, through walls, so none of that room-by-room decision paralysis which bogged down the hunt for Oriko. Once the vicinities of big cities are tapped out, follow coastlines, railways, major roads. Earth's got an intimidating total surface area, but skipping places with less than one person per square mile cuts it way back down.
 
Torgamous said:
Doesn't change the math. You're just valuing the loss of one farm among many instead of The Only Farm.
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Thats where "They blatantly bullshitting" kicks in. If you fighting endless process such as Entropy itself one no matter how big payout over sustained production makes no sense. Unless Incubators can use energy Madoka produced to later outright terraform planets, create life and/or accelerate evolution so they can invest into increasing profits instead of just sitting on all that energy, wiping out any Wish capable species seems to me like shooting yourself in the foot in the long run.
 
ExploerTM said:
Thats where "They blatantly bullshitting" kicks in. If you fighting endless process such as Entropy itself one no matter how big payout over sustained production makes no sense. Unless Incubators can use energy Madoka produced to later outright terraform planets, create life and/or accelerate evolution so they can invest into increasing profits instead of just sitting on all that energy, wiping out any Wish capable species seems to me like shooting yourself in the foot in the long run.
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I mean, why couldn't they do that? That seems to be their entire project for harvesting energy from other worlds, and they certainly must have used energy from somewhere to do the whole observation set up they had in rebellion.
 
strange_person said:
If we needed a vast quantity of grief on short notice, having Homura try to produce it all from scratch by just sitting and meditating would be silly. Start with spiral-pattern searches of major cities, find every cache of grief seeds and convert them to clear seeds. Stripmine the whole witch ecosystem as part of the same pass: every kiss, every familiar. Dissoluzione Bianca, grab seed (if any), move on. Anything significant to such a sweep can be spotted from hundreds of meters away, through walls, so none of that room-by-room decision paralysis which bogged down the hunt for Oriko. Once the vicinities of big cities are tapped out, follow coastlines, railways, major roads. Earth's got an intimidating total surface area, but skipping places with less than one person per square mile cuts it way back down.
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Only works if Madoka is worth less than the grief seeds currently on Earth. Also, if the Incubators give us credit for collecting already-existing grief instead of generating new grief, but let's just focus on Madoka's value here.

She's not. We know she's not. She's worth more than the entire future of Earth, along with any other planets that would've drawn their populations from Earth for however long they have to lay fallow instead. In all likelihood she's worth closer to (the entire future of every Earthling who will ever exist)*(number of times Homura's looped).

So, we cover all of Earth and clear every grief seed here. And then, just for fun, we fly to every other inhabitable planet in the universe and clear any seeds we find on them. And it's still not enough. All that's left is to sit and generate grief.

We would all die of old age before the actual story resumes. Earth Itself, the actual real life one, might die of old age in less time than it'd take for the story to resume.
ExploerTM said:
Thats where "They blatantly bullshitting" kicks in. If you fighting endless process such as Entropy itself one no matter how big payout over sustained production makes no sense. Unless Incubators can use energy Madoka produced to later outright terraform planets, create life and/or accelerate evolution so they can invest into increasing profits instead of just sitting on all that energy, wiping out any Wish capable species seems to me like shooting yourself in the foot in the long run.
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Time wipes out all in the end, Madoka is just doing it sooner. Treating an asset as if it will never need to be replaced is just asking to be surprised when it needs to be replaced. That's bad accounting.

But no, I mean, what makes you so sure they didn't already do that? Not that it matters, because, again, it doesn't change the math.
 
Torgamous said:
Time wipes out all in the end, Madoka is just doing it sooner. Treating an asset as if it will never need to be replaced is just asking to be surprised when it needs to be replaced. That's bad accounting.
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If Incubators believed that time wipes all in the end they wouldnt even started their project. They specifically disagree with that notion and go against it. Wishes defy logic. In this context, your blanket statement "Well humanity will die anyway" has no foundation whatsoever and I refuse it.

Torgamous said:
But no, I mean, what makes you so sure they didn't already do that? Not that it matters, because, again, it doesn't change the math.
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Aside from not being canonically mentioned somewhere - Doylist in me says that Incubators would've mentioned basically playing gods instead of "just" guiding already existing Wish capable species for more cosmic horror and despair because of course we need more - honestly? Nothing. They just might. If thats what they actually do then their decision to cash out on Madoka makes perfect logical sense. But I have zero evidence "For" that theory and I have at least shaky Doylist explanation in "Against" column.
 
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ExploerTM said:
If Incubators believed that time wipes all in the end they wouldnt even started their project. They specifically disagree with that notion and go against it. Wishes defy logic. In this context, your blanket statement "Well humanity will die anyway" has no foundation whatsoever and I refuse it.
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They clearly do not disagree with disposing of an asset once maintaining it starts costing more than it produces. That's, like, the whole plot of the entire franchise.

In less financial terms, Gretchen is to Earth as a witch is to a soul gem. You just think they're different because you're distracted by the scale.
 
Torgamous said:
They clearly do not disagree with disposing of an asset once maintaining it starts costing more than it produces. That's, like, the whole plot of the entire franchise.
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No? They not disposing of Earth because it no longer profitable for them. They disposing of it because they see big win right now vs sustainable profit over time (like seemingly a lot of IRL businesses). If they deemed Earth no longer profitable, Rebellion would've never happened because Incubators would've packed up and left in new timeline. Yet, they still there. More so, they still there even with Wraiths instead of Witches.
 
DataSnake said:
So could Oriko's Soul Gem, so I'm not seeing how this would go any better.
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Much of the notorious timestop was spent fruitlessly ransacking a house we already knew she wasn't in for hypothetical clues with no griefdar signature. Hunting for random witches is usually much more straightforward.
Torgamous said:
Only works if Madoka is worth less than the grief seeds currently on Earth.
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If we were asking the incubators to go from a 100% chance of collecting a Madowish payout straight to 0% chance, that would be true. That is not what I am aiming for.
First, knowing that Sabrina knows about their plans - and, by implication, is preparing countermeasures in case this deal falls through - means disrupting Constellation right before Walpurgisnacht might simply not work. Let's suppose the incubators are fairly confident regardless, and figure they've got a 99% chance of forcing a Madowish if they go maximum backstab.
Second, the proposed deal is very short-term. Once the second check clears, nothing at all is stopping them from resuming business as usual, or figuring out ways to work around whatever new social structures emerge. Madoka might conceivably seek them out to make a wish even without nefarious prompting! Or, if Constellation is successful, she might avail herself of ubiquitous supernatural healing, and thereby personally live to be a thousand years old as a mere mortal political advisor. Even a tiny chance per year of some scheme getting her to contract adds up quick over those scales. Still, that's clearly not the incubators' preferred scenario. Maybe they only rate it as 98% likely to work.

Rationally - in the most literal possible sense of working with ratios - a 99% chance of a $100 payout is worth exactly the same, in expectation, as a guaranteed $1 plus a 98% chance of $100. Thus, exactly how much of a bribe the incubators would theoretically require, in order to pass up a given opportunity and feel like they still came out ahead, depends on how much they think doing so will hurt their overall odds of success.
If a Madowish fueled by a hundred worlds is worth a hundred times more than we can readily pay out of the resources of one world, shifting the (incubator-assessed) odds by 1% might still be affordable.
Firnagzen said:
... just going to weigh in as GM to say that you're not going to weigh the Incubator's decisions on that score because-

-yeah, that.

I'll also say that for PMAS, the Incubators have in fact chosen a strategy, and... well, you don't know what it is. Sabrina is also incredibly unlikely to sway them from it.
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So we have unlimited resources and everything can be solved by honest communication... right up until Kyuubey really wants something, at which point openness is suicidal and we have no meaningful resources to offer. Got it.
 
ExploerTM said:
No? They not disposing of Earth because it no longer profitable for them. They disposing of it because they see big win right now vs sustainable profit over time (like seemingly a lot of IRL businesses). If they deemed Earth no longer profitable, Rebellion would've never happened because Incubators would've packed up and left in new timeline. Yet, they still there. More so, they still there even with Wraiths instead of Witches.
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Maintaining Earth in Rebellion doesn't cost them Madoka, just like maintaining magical girls in Rebellion doesn't cost them witches.

Until they find a magical girl whose maintenance does cost them witches, and they crack her open immediately. Homura didn't stop providing them grief cubes, grief cubes just stopped being enough to outweigh the benefit of breaking her.

Your talk of "refusing" to accept that human extinction gets more expensive to avoid over longer periods makes me think that you think I'm asking you to agree with Kyubey. I'm not. I'm saying the problem with Kyubey is more fundamental than it being bad at managing humans as financial assets. The problem with Kyubey is that it treats humans like financial assets at all. The whole point of Madoka is that the answer to "can killing this child really be more profitable than..." is always "yes." Removing all possible number wiggling from the scenario, and turning the question back into a straightforward "okay, so what do we do with that information."

Sabrina's answer is "fuck profit, you're not killing her." Kyubey's is "obviously we kill her, as is most profitable."

"Save the world, save one girl - what's the difference?" vs "Sacrifice the world, sacrifice one girl - what's the difference?"
 
strange_person said:
So we have unlimited resources and everything can be solved by honest communication... right up until Kyuubey really wants something, at which point openness is suicidal and we have no meaningful resources to offer. Got it.
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I mean, he's an amoral alien whose only goal is to subject Sabrina and all of her friends to fates worse than death. There's not exactly a lot of common ground to be found there.
 
Torgamous said:
Maintaining Earth in Rebellion doesn't cost them Madoka, just like maintaining magical girls in Rebellion doesn't cost them witches.

Until they find a magical girl whose maintenance does cost them witches, and they crack her open immediately. Homura didn't stop providing them grief cubes, grief cubes just stopped being enough to outweigh the benefit of breaking her.
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Thats different from what I said exactly how?.. Before, you said its no longer profitable, I said they just found a bigger profit.

Torgamous said:
The whole point of Madoka is that the answer to "can killing this child really be more profitable than..." is always "yes."
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Aaaaand we literally just circled back to where we started. I'll just go ahead and file it as another agree to disagree before it spiraled into another 3 page argument. I mean, I'd be down for that normally but its weekend.

Torgamous said:
I'm saying the problem with Kyubey is more fundamental than it being bad at managing humans as financial assets. The problem with Kyubey is that it treats humans like financial assets at all.
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Tbh, thats about the most grounded part of Kyubey to me that moves him "My goals beyond your comprehension" to "Ok, he's just a dick with too much influence".
 
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