They don't have that sort of distributed access control without consent.

Makes sense, it would be a security vulnerability in battle. I suppose I just based that on them all being volunteers, conflated the two things.

Anyway, the Shiplords were probably primed to think of species as 'individuals' by the nature of the Uninvolved. The knowledge that a species can join together into one, the way the Hjivin (while still in some sense plural) weren't made up of a multitude of individuals as a normal species would be, those bogeymen gave them biases.

'Funny' that they go out of their way to actually murder any species that really does fit that paradigm by being 'of one mind'. Too much like their bogeymen, same as the Zlathbu building stellar converters.
 
I think people are misunderstanding my "moral calculus" comment.

I meant that's how they perceive themselves right now. They're doing their best to isolate their emotional trauma in order to do things that they find revolting, because when they try to look at the greater good instead of what would make them feel better they decide they have to do what they're doing now.
Yeah, but their idea of how to do moral calculus involves, in effect, assigning a value of infinity to one specific bad outcome and then doing everything else around "minimize the likelihood of that bad outcome."

Which is how you 'do' moral calculus if you're not actually doing moral calculus, but instead just dressing up your own reaction to your own biases and trauma in a math-flavored outer envelope.

Of course, this doesn't excuse it from a human perspective, and from a Humanity 2.0 perspective where they can still think of billions of people as individuals it's even worse. But even from a human perspective, I don't think it's accurate to say that what they're doing is worse than being omnicidal.
What the Shiplords actually do and have done is worse than what any actual group, omnicidal or otherwise, has concretely done in reality in the setting.

You can advance a reasonable argument that the Shiplords actions are not worse than the actions of a successful omnicidal group that destroyed all galactic civilization and subsumed it into themselves, sure! But by nature, this means that we're talking about a thing that has never actually happened....

At which point questions arise like "is this actually the best way to avoid the problem?" And many of the answers why someone might say 'yes, actually' become invalid because if you're operating on a scale where nothing smaller than a whole species even has a morally relevant existence, as you suggest that Shiplords do, and where tens of millennia are a relative historical eyeblink...

Maybe, in the aftermath of the War of the Hijvin Sphere, it would have been better for the Shiplords to stop, calm the fuck down, and if necessary reshape their whole civilization for ten thousand years to BE better at some other path to solution that they were less well equipped to pursue in the immediate day after the war ended.

Everything about the way the Shiplords behave carries the stink of someone who never seriously reconsidered their choices or all the possible paths to those choices, and who instead kept short-term optimizing in pursuit of an increasingly inflexible and trauma-informed goal until they blundered their way into a local maximum at the bottom of a very, very deep pit.
 
And yet if the tyrant zookeeper continues to torture the animals in the menagerie, every single one of them, for a million years, assaulting and killing the majority if not the totality of every sapient species they encounter, to the point where the very ascended coalesced SOULS of those species are traumatized after the fact...

At some point, one has done more evil than any actual omnicidal maniac, in the sense that you can do a lot more harm to someone by keeping them alive to torture them for fifty years than by killing them up front.

The Shiplords' justification is that they have done worse and wilder than any actual omnicidal maniac, in an attempt to forestall the rise of any hypothetical, future, successful omnicidal maniac.

...

This is, essentially, the natural product of defining one thing that is so bad that it has infinity weight in the balance of judgment, such that literally anything can be justified in its name.

Which, again, is the product of Shiplord trauma, not Shiplord calculation, except in the sense that if you let your trauma do your math for you you can justify a lot of bad things in the name of coping with your trauma.
I don't think you're being careful enough to separate your own ethics from your assessment of the Shiplords' ethics when you make the assertion that the Shiplords cannot possibly be actually doing moral calculus and instead must be dressing up cultural trauma as moral calculus. Or maybe instead you've forgotten about civilizations not yet confronted with the Tribute system (or are assigning them no moral weight) because the fact of the matter is that believing that ensuring life can continue to evolve and develop into (pre-spaceflight/First Secret/whatever other trigger for the Shiplords coming around) civilizations is of greater importance than the incredible degree of suffering said civilizations go through once subjected to the Tribute system is entirely plausible without assigning infinite weight to a given factor because of cultural trauma as you purport.

Secondly, we have no reason to believe that the Shiplords haven't asked themselves "is there a better way to solve the problem". In fact between the existence of this simulation and the Shiplord who asked Amanda to find a better way we have every reason to think that they have asked and continue to ask that question of themselves. They haven't been able to answer yes because apparently Shiplords cannot into diplomacy (or ask that question of others rather than themselves), but that blindspot isn't (or at least isn't guaranteed to be, we don't know for sure if it is) because of cultural trauma.

When you say the Shiplords should have calmed the fuck down and reshaped themselves into a civilization capable of being better at something they weren't equipped for immediately after the Hjivin, you're starting from the position of knowing there is a better way and that the Shiplords just couldn't see it. Without that knowledge (i.e. from the Shiplords' perspective) your request becomes "turn your civilization into one that can conceive of doing something your civilization can't conceive of in order to solve this problem", which is downright tautological. Worse yet, the bitter irony is that from all accounts the Shiplords did in fact do just that - only it turned out the thing they couldn't conceive of at the time was the infinite genocide that they ended coming up with.

The tragedy and horror of the Shiplords isn't that they failed to use logic/rational thinking, moral calculus, or rethink their actions/look at the broader picture - it's that they did do those things, and then those tools failed them because of something that was apparently outside of their context.
 
You know these revelations rather change the context. Before I was thinking of the Hijvin Sphere as showcasing one of the main issues of the Tribute Cycle, that is it teaches species that any line is worth crossing so long as it allows them to defeat the Shiplords because otherwise they will perpetuate horrors forever. Then either someone eventually goes far enough they succeed, or the Shiplords just keep adjusting things to be worse and worse with every attempt and near-success.

That it is instead the last trigger that made the Shiplords switch into the Tribute Cycle... I guess it is ironic on how they missed the entire point so very badly. I wonder what trauma it was that managed to cause such omnipresent blindspot so long afterwards.

Still I do think this works to our advantage. Before it seemed like they have been doing this for ages and only steadily improving on their capability to enforce it, but seems more like they made the decision and just kept to it unchallenged because nothing had the ability to make them stop for a moment until now.
Of course, this doesn't excuse it from a human perspective, and from a Humanity 2.0 perspective where they can still think of billions of people as individuals it's even worse. But even from a human perspective, I don't think it's accurate to say that what they're doing is worse than being omnicidal.
I completely disagree. Endless torture is far far worse than murder, scaling that up for bigger numbers so the latter becomes omnicide doesn't change that base fact. I would argue this further, but I am not sure there is much meaningful discussion that can be had on the relative evils of prolonged torture and murder.

If the Shiplords truly believed things going to shit once a species found the Secrets was inevitable then they should have scoured the galaxy for all life-bearing planets and dealt with them so no intelligent species would ever evolve, then just do a check every so often for life emerging. There problem solved without constant atrocities and corrupting their entire civilization into a factory of horrors. Even possible eventually things are figured out and they can stop doing this.

If it isn't inevitable then work with other species, like say all the ones that fought alongside them against the Hijvin Sphere to start with, in order to find a solution. Maybe it would work or maybe would eventually arrive at the conclusion it can't so previous plan it is, but with the surety they tried their best.

Humanity here got something that apparently never happened before and has been consistently absurdly luck on top of that, yet the Shiplords quashing them is very much on the table. How many times it is that possibilities for better have been annihilated under the Tribute Cycle over millions of years I wonder?

What I am curious about now is that if they did start working with others and only carefully watched over others initially, then kept doubling down in response to each problem until the Tribute Cycle resulted. Or started with the idea of the Tribute Cycle as calculated trials and atrocities then refined the details.
 
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This is a...difficult one to answer, honestly. The process of races inevitably going Uninvolved appears to be one that the Shiplord pioneered - you're not sure if they encouraged it before it became a method of oppression. I'm not sure it would ever be fair to say that going Uninvolved is the 'right' choice. It's just a choice, and one the Shiplords have never made. You have the data to work out part of that reasoning now, but I doubt you'd be able to work out the entirety for a while yet.
Hm, if the SL didn't become Uninvolved because then they would abandon the galaxy and it would surely get eaten, the Uninvolved solving the Sphere problem would have caused a crisis in faith.
Everything about the way the Shiplords behave carries the stink of someone who never seriously reconsidered their choices or all the possible paths to those choices, and who instead kept short-term optimizing in pursuit of an increasingly inflexible and trauma-informed goal until they blundered their way into a local maximum at the bottom of a very, very deep pit.
But - they have the historic proof that their method works. Why reevaluate?
 
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Tally before I sleep. Really nice to see the the conversations happening here. Remember, if you have any specific questions about the War of the Sphere that weren't answered in the infoposts, I can answer them from the rush-run the Unisonbound did for you.

May work on your next "Back At Home" interlude tomorrow.
Adhoc vote count started by Snowfire on Jul 28, 2021 at 6:38 PM, finished with 61 posts and 14 votes.

  • [X] Who are you, really?
    [X] How did your people go from using Contact Fleets for the First Contact, to using Tribute Fleets? We have witnessed the Hjivin and the Zlathbu, but we see no answer just yet.
    [X] What do you mean, help us?
    [X] Write-in: Why did you decide there was no better alternative?
    [X] Why are you doing this?
    [X] Explain. (yes, that's open. But I think there's a lot to learn of how Kicha is understanding that offer/question.)
    [X] Write-in: Explain (our side of things)
 
I don't think you're being careful enough to separate your own ethics from your assessment of the Shiplords' ethics when you make the assertion that the Shiplords cannot possibly be actually doing moral calculus and instead must be dressing up cultural trauma as moral calculus. Or maybe instead you've forgotten about civilizations not yet confronted with the Tribute system (or are assigning them no moral weight) because the fact of the matter is that believing that ensuring life can continue to evolve and develop into (pre-spaceflight/First Secret/whatever other trigger for the Shiplords coming around) civilizations is of greater importance than the incredible degree of suffering said civilizations go through once subjected to the Tribute system is entirely plausible without assigning infinite weight to a given factor because of cultural trauma as you purport.
Suppose for brevity's sake suppose it is discovery of any Secret that brings the Shiplords down upon a species.

Suppose that the galaxy is a functionally static system (one that goes on forever, or for a length of time that may be approximated as 'forever' for calculation purposes). Suppose the Shiplord regime over the galaxy continues indefinitely. Many intelligent species will emerge. Every intelligent species will either:

1) Reach a cap of technological progress (say, because it requires some very specific biome to survive, and never reaches the critical mass of population and territorial extent for technological takeoff)
2) Exterminate itself using technologies lesser than the Secrets (e.g. climate change or global thermonuclear war)
3) Eventually discover one or more Secrets.

Any species in Group 3 will swiftly be pounced upon by the Shiplords and either exterminated or, in effect, tortured for millennia. For this viewpoint it matters not whether we view each species as a discrete greater racial whole that is being forced to collectively suffer, or as a vast number of individuals many of whom are being killed or afflicted. Every species in Group 3 is eventually tortured for millennia- or exterminated. Every future species that will occupy Group 3 will be thus exterminated, because this is a steady-state process. The Shiplords do not plan to ever stop doing this, after all.

This is significant. It is important to note the every future species part. If the Shiplords only intended to do this for a fixed span of time (say, ten million years) and then it would all be over, then the moral calculus would be less unfavorable to their choices. They could point out that for every species that suffers their torture, hundreds or thousands of future species will exist without the torture, and that their ability to exist will be secured by the torture. A short spasm of pain, in exchange for a vastly longer time of peace and well-being.

But this is not, so far as we can tell, the case. Their plan shows every sign of being to go on doing exactly as they are doing until the last star burns out, so all future species will be faced with the same situation as all present species!

You cannot weigh the future existence and survival of galactic life for billions of years to come in one pan of the balance, unless you also weigh the future torture of that same life for billions of years in the other pan of the balance. Because the plan is to go on doing this forever.

...

For the Shiplords to have 'calculated' that this is acceptable, one of the following explanations must be true:

A) The suffering of Group 3 is justified by the opportunity of Groups 1 and 2 to exist and flourish.
B) The suffering of Group 3 is justified by the opportunity of Groups 1, 2, and 3 to exist and flourish.

(B) is greatly undermined by the fact that species part of Group 3 don't really get to "exist and flourish," and indeed many of them don't even get the "exist" part. They just get straight-up murdered by the Shiplords. We don't know the exact ratio of species killed by the Shiplords during First Contact, to those killed by the Shiplords later for violating the Directives, to those permitted to go on living in their respective boxes until they give up in dismay and become Uninvolved... But we know all three scenarios happen.

Now, maybe the Shiplords have the numbers here, but I have this vision of them saying: "Look, half the intelligent species in the galaxy are Stone Age aquatic races living indefinitely in the very specific brackish-water conditions of a major river delta until a climate shift wipes them out or something like that, and another 20% just straight-up die without our intervention anyway, and of the other 30% we only actually murder 3% of them and torture the remaining 27% for, like, a few millennia, so it's worth it for the sake of all those poor permanent Stone Age fuckers who never even find out of about us."

And you have to ask... Is it? Is it really? I dunno. And even that was me trying to pick numbers that would be charitable to the Shiplords.

...

It seems far more likely that the Shiplords simply took "ensure that no evil overlord race devours the galaxy" and assigned the moral value of doing this to "positive infinity" or some number as close to it as makes no difference, then just back-justified everything else with reference to that: "We can never be truly in the wrong, because this is what we are fighting."

Utilitarian systems inherently break when you give a term a moral weight of "infinity" or a number so large that it might as well be infinity.

Secondly, we have no reason to believe that the Shiplords haven't asked themselves "is there a better way to solve the problem".
I didn't say the Shiplords haven't asked themselves the question. I said that the Shiplords have asked themselves the question in such a way that they were never going to find a useful answer, even if one exists.

That is, indeed, wrapped up in the nature of my accusation against them- that they permitted their biases and preconceptions to close off vast arenas of possibility, including the possibility of simply waiting and finding some other way to process their trauma so that their immediate successors a little farther down the line could approach the problem in a healthier manner.

It's entirely possible for a person to deeply fuck up because of their own emotional damage, and spend the rest of their life wondering "how could I have fucked up so much," and still never actually introspect deeply enough to recognize the nature of the problem or resolve it so that it doesn't happen again.

The Shiplords seem like poster children for this phenomenon.

In fact between the existence of this simulation and the Shiplord who asked Amanda to find a better way we have every reason to think that they have asked and continue to ask that question of themselves. They haven't been able to answer yes because apparently Shiplords cannot into diplomacy (or ask that question of others rather than themselves), but that blindspot isn't (or at least isn't guaranteed to be, we don't know for sure if it is) because of cultural trauma.
Shiplords certainly cannot into diplomacy NOW... which may well be precisely the nature of the very deep pit they've short-term optimized themselves into. By modifying their culture and polices to be steadily more extreme and vicious to other races, one step at a time, they've lost something about themselves, some potential they might have had to be more like Humanity 2.0, in terms of their outlook if not in terms of having anything like Practice.

I don't think Humanity 2.0 would have fucked this up, which is in one sense a Practiced Miracle on the part of the Elder First, but in another sense is just a sign of how badly the Shiplords reacted to the situation. Because given their clear command of the Secrets, if they wanted to be that enlightened they could probably have bootstrapped themselves to that level.

When you say the Shiplords should have calmed the fuck down and reshaped themselves into a civilization capable of being better at something they weren't equipped for immediately after the Hjivin, you're starting from the position of knowing there is a better way and that the Shiplords just couldn't see it. Without that knowledge (i.e. from the Shiplords' perspective) your request becomes "turn your civilization into one that can conceive of doing something your civilization can't conceive of in order to solve this problem", which is downright tautological. Worse yet, the bitter irony is that from all accounts the Shiplords did in fact do just that - only it turned out the thing they couldn't conceive of at the time was the infinite genocide that they ended coming up with.

The tragedy and horror of the Shiplords isn't that they failed to use logic/rational thinking, moral calculus, or rethink their actions/look at the broader picture - it's that they did do those things, and then those tools failed them because of something that was apparently outside of their context.
My own view is that the limitations of their context are themselves an artifact of something they failed to do. Maybe they should have asked other species for viewpoints different than their own? Maybe they should have just paused and implemented no radical new changes in strategy for a few more millennia, just in case some radical thinker came up with something different?

I find it very hard to believe that they truly exhausted all possibilities, as opposed to exhausting all possibilities they were prepared to accept given the premises they refused to reconsider, premises that the Shiplords as a whole would rather torture a galaxy forever than re-evaluate.

Because part of the package of actually being logical and rational is, y'know, not turning into some kind of demented inflexible robot monster that twists everything around until it can ignore the most obviously bad consequences of its own actions because of some largely hypothetical threat.

But - they have the historic proof that their method works. Why reevaluate?
My point is that they should have evaluated a larger possibility space before trying this method. Because a larger possibility space certainly existed. Either they tried a LOT of stuff we haven't heard about (possible but pure speculation), or the Tribute Cycle is very much the process of a long series of short-term optimizations by people who would rather torture a galaxy forever than revisit their basic assumptions about the proper order of that galaxy.
 
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So here is a bit of what I think about the memorials we have visited up till now.



Zlathbu, namedropped as they were at the end of the Practice War, are most likely the "where Shiplords are now", the latest of their monuments.

The "Remember" option which Vega has checked out, is probably something we missed out on, and was important to contextualize the Witness option we have taken. As is, it gives me a favorable impression for the possible future when viewed from a certain prism.

Witnessing Zlathbu told us that Shiplords struggled with finding an amicable solution in their own way for fifty years, stonewalled as they were by the understandably traumatized Zlathbu. Right until Zlathbu went over the line of what Shiplords would tolerate and attempted to construct a solar extractor.

We haven't descended down the planet either, IIRC, but from all indications we have seen in Hjivin case, it would have provided us with Zlathbu prespective like it gave us the front row seats to the Involvement.

While we have not Remembered Zlathbu, the existence of the memorial itself is indicative enough - the Shiplords do consider this outcome to be a mistake. They do want to find a better way.

But at that point they already were the Shiplords we know and hate - with Tribute Fleets, with periodic cullings, probably with the "if you cannot destroy even one of our Tribute Fleet vessels you will be exterminated" attitude, with War Fleets and Lumen-class vessels used as the option to decisively eliminate the enemy.

This is not the end of the slippery slope but it's pretty damn close.



Now contrast them with Shiplords who fought the Hjivin Sphere. You will find a very different picture.

Protectors and teachers of young species, not tyrants. I will go so far as to say that there is nothing they have done during the war with the Hjivin Sphere, their last peer opponent, that I wouldn't have done.

I am, of course, referring to the creation of Regular Fleets, to the reluctant deployment of solar distruptors to tank the Hjivin Sphere war economy, and even to the post-war development of anti-Uninolved weaponry in case another Deviant Uninvolved appears. And to returning the dead of the young species to their homeworlds.

If Zlathbu was the latest monument to the Shiplords' mistake, their sins. Then Hjivin memorial is a monument to the duty they carry. It is not the start of the slippery slope, not unless we learn they shifted to Tribute Fleet model right after and in reaction to Hjivin. It is merely a well-paved cliffside road leading up to the Hjivin cliffs, complete with safety rails.

It is the starting position of the Shiplords of yore, before they slipped. It is, most likely, the chronologically first monument, and I think the best common ground for their ex-Tributaries, to see where the Shiplords are coming from.

If the Zlathbu memorial shows us how Shiplords still feel about their actions as failures, even if they continue... Then Hjivin memorial is all about demonstrating us that "something must be done" is entirely a reasonable position to take.

It is after all the position we are taking in regards to Shiplords and their own intolerable actions.



What we still need to know is how they arrived from Hjivin to Zlathbu.

How they came to send war parties against the young species, instead of contact fleets.

How they came to see the taking of Tribute, the cullings, as necessary. Because it is a step further than merely sending a war party to wreck the young species and tell them to "behave, or else".

How they came to see exterminating of the species who failed to deal damage to their Tribute Fleets, as the accepted norm.

How they arrived at this specific overly atrocious methodology, and why. And in knowing so, perhaps convince them to stop.



P. S. As someone who's read Proximal Flame's The Last Angel I have a keen appreciation of Shiplords as rulers of a vast star-spanning tyranny who don't think themselves as infallible and correct, like Compact does.
 
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If Zlathbu was the latest monument to the Shiplords' mistake, their sins. Then Hjivin memorial is a monument to the duty they carry. It is not the start of the slippery slope, not unless we learn they shifted to Tribute Fleet model right after and in reaction to Hjivin. It is merely a well-paved cliffside road leading up to the Hjivin cliffs, complete with safety rails.

It is the starting position of the Shiplords of yore, before they slipped. It is, most likely, the chronologically first monument, and I think the best common ground for their ex-Tributaries, to see where the Shiplords are coming from.
I think not.

I think the Hijvin (that WAS the original spelling @Snowfire used to use, yes?) are chronologically the second or third landmark moment (and monument) in Shiplord history. I think that by the time they encountered the Hijvin, something else had already happened to the Shiplords, they'd already had some other encounter that shocked or traumatized them.

I think something else happened. Something that clipped away at their race's willingness to consider alternative strategies, or their scruples, or their ability to successfully implement such strategies. The Hijvin memorial marks the well-paved road to the cliff the Shiplords went over on their way to the slippery slope they've now descended...

...But what was it, that removed the guard rails a morally normal race would have? Or that greased the slope itself? Or that blocked off all the turning points at which a different species might have turned away from this path?

That remains to be seen, I think.

...

Hijvin is the point where a Shiplord with even the slightest scrap of self-awareness must reflect that "somehow, it all went wrong." That is probably why it's the place where we find a temple to the question of "could we have done this differently?" But the fact that they've found no meaningful improvement in an aeon of trying at this temple, or that if such improvements have been found the lesson was not implemented... This suggests that the Shiplords must have been, either previously or subsequently, in some way made incapable of learning such lessons.

No mind, or racial collective, would resort to this unless they were already, in a psychic or cultural sense, scarred. Mutilated. Damaged.

What we still need to know is how they arrived from Hjivin to Zlathbu.

How they came to send war parties against the young species, instead of contact fleets.

How they came to see the taking of Tribute, the cullings, as necessary. Because it is a step further than merely sending a war party to wreck the young species and tell them to "behave, or else".

How they came to see exterminating of the species who failed to deal damage to their Tribute Fleets, as the accepted norm.

How they arrived at this specific overly atrocious methodology, and why. And in knowing so, perhaps convince them to stop.
Oh yes, all of that too- but I think some of the critical insights predate contact with the Hijvin.
 
Oh yes, all of that too- but I think some of the critical insights predate contact with the Hijvin.
What part of their reaction towards the Hijivn do you consider unacceptable?

…I maintain that Snowfire has not quite banged in hard enough just how terrible these guys were. The Hijivn were in an obvious attractor state, but perhaps it's only obvious when you know what the Second can really do.

However awful you think they were… they were worse than that. The Hijivn had a solution. Their approach to life would have stopped all conflict forever.

There are, in fact, worse futures than "Shiplords, forever".
 
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What part of their reaction towards the Hijivn do you consider unacceptable?
No no no.

What I mean is that the post-Hijvin reaction seems, rather clearly, to be the part where the Shiplords initiated the Tribute system.

Everything the Shiplords did to the Hijvin was totally justified and my only regret is that they didn't do it eight times harder with cheese on top.

But it's fairly clear- not least from the dialogue of the Shiplord recordings regarding the Zlathbu- that the Hijvin Sphere War was in some way the 'watershed moment' after which the Shiplords instituted the Directives.

And once the Directives were in place, the Tribute Cycle or something like it became inevitable, because there would be no other way to enforce the Directives.

...

My point is that clearly the Shiplords became what they are after fighting the Hijvin, and that the horrors of fighting the Hijvin are probably a sufficient explanation for "this is what the Shiplords think they are fighting against by instituting the Tribute Cycle."

However, the fact that the Shiplords settled on THIS method of preventing a second Hijvin Sphere, this method in particular, and seem unwilling or unable to find a better way? That suggests a race scarred by other traumas, a race whose collective capacity to seek a better answer was in some way mutilated, either by an outside force or by their own reaction to a past event.

So I hypothesize that at least one of the other three star system memorials, the ones we haven't visited yet, contains clues as to how the Shiplords became what they were even before they encountered the Hijvin... Because if something else significant hadn't shaped them by that point, then they likely wouldn't have reacted to the Hijvin Sphere War the way that they did.
 
Ah, fair.

You're not wrong.

As for the Hijivn, they're… a potentiality that actually requires no Secrets, and is fully plausible in real life. Likely, even. I will, eventually, expand on that.
 
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It's like, if the monuments were a curated history of "and this is how the Tribute Cycle evolved," then the Hijvin Sphere would probably be the first in the series (chronologically) and the Zlathbu would be one of the last. Whatever the Shiplords were like as a species before the Hijvin Sphere War would just be 'prologue,' would be taken for granted.

But if the monuments are instead a list of "here are the defining watershed moments in the history of the Shiplords that mark the defining moments that made us what we are," then there's no reason to assume that the Hijvin Sphere War was the first such moment that the Shiplords think about.

Sort of like how American history classes don't begin with the Revolutionary War, even though that is obviously the point at which the United States of America began its history as a state and is the earliest period in history that we can identify as a single, shared experience for all the colonies that would unite to form the USA. When the course is done right, we talk about stuff that happened before that, and that shaped how that even happened in the first place. Stuff like the Seven Years' War, or the settlement patterns that shaped who came into those colonies and what they did upon arrival.
 
Aristotle, clawing his way out of his grave: Virtueeeee ethiiiiiics....
Shiplords: Our definitely not suspect moral calculations have already solved the problem.
Aristotle: But have you considered that for thinking beings there's a moral imperative to not merely survive but thrive?
Shiplords: You're articulate for a zombie, but still no. We've definitively solved the problem. Have we not achieved excellence in our craft?
Aristotle: You have achieved excellence as the hammer achieves excellence - in the act of striking many things, some of which are even nails. Excellence in personhood requires-
Shiplords: If we blow up your star, we don't have to listen to anything you have to say! Problem solved. Problem solved? Problem... Oh dear.
 
All this conversation really makes me wonder if the reason for the tribute system in its current form is that certain young species adapted their use of secrets to whatever system the Shiplords put in place in a way that pushed them towards becoming something similarly horrifying to the Hijvin.
 
All this conversation really makes me wonder if the reason for the tribute system in its current form is that certain young species adapted their use of secrets to whatever system the Shiplords put in place in a way that pushed them towards becoming something similarly horrifying to the Hijvin.
We've already seen at least some of that. Observe the Shiplord reaction to the Zlathbu stellar converter, which seems to have been the point at which the Shiplords stopped trying to talk down disobedient species, unless I've misremembered or misunderstood the context.
 
The Shiplords do not plan to ever stop doing this, after all.
That's not strictly true. Once they found a better solution, they'll switch. They haven't found one in the last few hundred thousand years, but they are diligently looking!
It is the starting position of the Shiplords of yore, before they slipped. It is, most likely, the chronologically first monument, and I think the best common ground for their ex-Tributaries, to see where the Shiplords are coming from.
If I remember Snowfire correctly, the SL were already traumatized before the Sphere happened, so, I think there are older monuments around.
 
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But it's fairly clear- not least from the dialogue of the Shiplord recordings regarding the Zlathbu- that the Hijvin Sphere War was in some way the 'watershed moment' after which the Shiplords instituted the Directives.

And once the Directives were in place, the Tribute Cycle or something like it became inevitable, because there would be no other way to enforce the Directives.
I absolutely agree with the first of these two blocks.

And strongly disagree with the second one.

The Shiplords in the memory of the ancient Uninvolved were teachers. Even the war with Hjivin Sphere, for all that it changed within the Shiplords, would have failed to change that - because that is not the part of their identity it affected.

The Hjivin Sphere were historically a near-peer of an already ancient Shiplord culture. For them to reach these heights, their development needed to be independent for quite some time.

To counteract this, Tribute Fleets were not yet necessary. Finding the Young species early was.

In the aftermath of Hjivin Sphere, I can see well-meaning Shiplords build the first, or perhaps the second, iteration of whatever monitoring technology detects the first use of Secrets, to find emerging Young species and pass down Directives like a helicopter parent.

And then, as failures mount over the eons and their warnings are disregarded, decide time and again:

"A more stringent lesson is necessary."

Edit: oh. So That's their fatal flaw.

The Shiplords are perfectionists, and they have let their search for a perfect solution to blind them to using a workable one. Because above all else they cannot abide failure in themselves, and so far when they seek to perfectly preserve the galaxy from the danger of Secrets used without restraint, they keep failing. Keep failing to teach the Young species perfectly, keep using methods that have a chance of failure.
 
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All this conversation really makes me wonder if the reason for the tribute system in its current form is that certain young species adapted their use of secrets to whatever system the Shiplords put in place in a way that pushed them towards becoming something similarly horrifying to the Hijvin.
If you are confronted with the SL system, it's easy to see how 'this line must not be crossed for moral reasons' is getting crossed. The SL system is, among other things, a vicious cycle that creates the situation it purports to be invented to stop. Because if you decide as a young race that the tribute system etc. isn't for you, you'll have to dig really deep into the 'forbidden applications' to think to have a chance. Or you decide to go out with a bang because you cannot stand it any longer. Which of course provides the SL with still more examples of why their system is necessary, because every few hundred thousand years a young race tries to become 'Sphere Mk. 2' (as proven by a worst case simulation by the SL).
 
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That's not strictly true. Once they found a better solution, they'll switch. They haven't found one in the last few hundred thousand years, but they are diligently looking!
That's not a plan.

That is, optimistically for the members of the species who are not utterly lost, a hope.

And probably, cynically, for a fair number of them, just a thing they say to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay.

I absolutely agree with the first of these two blocks.

And strongly disagree with the second one.

The Shiplords in the memory of the ancient Uninvolved were teachers. Even the war with Hjivin Sphere, for all that it changed within the Shiplords, would have failed to change that - because that is not the part of their identity it affected.

The Hjivin Sphere were historically a near-peer of an already ancient Shiplord culture. For them to reach these heights, their development needed to be independent for quite some time.

To counteract this, Tribute Fleets were not yet necessary. Finding the Young species early was.

In the aftermath of Hjivin Sphere, I can see well-meaning Shiplords build the first, or perhaps the second, iteration of whatever monitoring technology detects the first use of Secrets, to find emerging Young species and pass down Directives like a helicopter parent.

And then, as failures mount over the eons and their warnings are disregarded, decide time and again:

"A more stringent lesson is necessary."
Then you have misunderstood the second block. I'm not saying the Shiplords instantly snapped over from the immediate aftermath of the Hijvin Sphere War to the full implementation of the Tribute Cycle.

I'm saying that once the Shiplords started down the path of attempting to enforce the prototypical form of the Directives on all sentient life, something like the Tribute Cycle. The exact form of the Tribute Cycle might have wound up different, but the endpoint would be broadly the same: a ghastly unending cycle of brutal 'punishments' delivered by the Shiplords against countless species innocent of all wrongdoing and all ill intent.

Because once you decide to take away very valuable tools from all young species' hands, and to enforce that decision by force, the rest of the story writes itself.

Edit: oh. So That's their fatal flaw.

The Shiplords are perfectionists, and they have let their search for a perfect solution to blind them to using a workable one. Because above all else they cannot abide failure in themselves, and so far when they seek to perfectly preserve the galaxy from the danger of Secrets used without restraint, they keep failing. Keep failing to teach the Young species perfectly, keep using methods that have a chance of failure.
Because a layered and flexible network of workable strategies, plus a fallback plan, can work MUCH better than any single 'perfect' plan... but having such a network and a fallback plan requires things like "learning to engage with others" and "learning how to ask for help."
 
So, the SL are motivated by fear. Or Angst? So deeply traumatized that they don't risk to trust others, doing what they tell themselves is best ... no wonder they didn't change in the last few millenia. To get through this shell, you need at least the Diplomacy of Amanda to have a very minor chance at all.
 
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