Intergalactic Summit

Ha-- true enough.

There is also always the "unforced error" scenario, which I left out:

No, Kuvakei's actions don't make any strategic sense. Yes, he's in control of himself.

Essentially, he's making bad moves because he's a megalomaniac and challenging the biggest, most dangerous single entity in town (otherwise an obvious error) is consistent with that mentality. That may be the most likely explanation.

I keep forgetting that discounting the possibility of folly is itself folly.

Yeeeeees, funny thing, that, since it's a conspiracy theory of sorts.

I don't normally believe in conspiracies, certainly not large ones. Humans have this tendency to be about as watertight as a tea strainer.

However, a few points:

1. You live in a society in which literal mind control is commonplace.

2. This is also a society possessing a literal mastermind.

3. "Puppet governments" have been commonplace down the line of history. No need for conspiracy theorizing; go open a history book.

4. Making a literal "puppet government" has never been easier, especially in places where you only have to implant one head.

5. If Sansha Kuvakei is not already, himself, a slave, and is not himself immune, he is the most desirable real-world subject for such enslavement I can think of, particularly if you like a side-order of irony with your international intrigue.

I certainly like my international intrigue with a side-order of irony. Really, who doesn't?

Ergo, the question isn't whether anybody would want to enslave Kuvakei, or why they'd want to do it. It would be a very unimaginative intelligence officer who didn't salivate at the notion of entirely coopting control over a major hostile nation. The only question is whether anybody's ever managed it.

It only takes one slip at the wrong moment, and Kuvakei was underground for a long, long time. Are you sure his guards were up to snuff that entire time?

It might be better to call this a "theory about a conspiracy" than a "conspiracy theory." A "conspiracy theory" is typically elaborate and improbable.

The conspiracy is called the intelligence community of the Jovian Directorate, and it undoubtedly exists, or did recently. That's not at all far-fetched; pretty much every nation-state, major or minor, has something like that.

The theory is simply this: at some point during his time in hiding, they got to Kuvakei with a crate of his own medicine. This strikes me as not only simple and likely, but workable and desirable from certain points of view.



... Of course, there's still the megalomaniac explanation.



Just time to debase reasoning you can't disprove or even present evidence to counter aside from calling it a conspiracy theory, mm?

Tch.

I see you've found more time.

I think the word you are looking for is "pronouncements," Mr. Thessalonia. My Caldanese pronunciation(s) may be a little flavored with an Achur accent, but I doubt that makes it through the translator.

Let me point something out that may have slipped you by.

I'm not doing this out of any special animus towards your cause, though I did once desire revenge.

I'm doing this because it's fun.

It's fun, you see, because while I make plenty of assumptions, you make a much larger one. It renders you vulnerable, and there's nothing quite so entertaining as poking one's fingers in the open wound in the side of a man who won't admit he's wounded.

You assume, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, that Sansha Kuvakei is a man worth putting your faith in. More than that, you believe that all of us should put our faith in him-- should surrender our independent processing capacity to him.

You like to cast this as a rational decision. You like to pretend that your luckless Master is somehow so much less flawed than the rest of humanity that we can depend solely upon him for our survival.

This despite the fact that he's also a man who let a number of communities die of neglect during his interregnum. He hadn't thought to give them leaders with sufficient self-motivation to keep his slaves fed. This despite also the fact that he lacked the foresight to keep his first civilization from getting crushed into dust, ashes, and a few very unfortunate seeds.

Poor fellow. Fellows. Him and you.

It's also fun because wildly extrapolating based on available facts leads to some places that are very entertaining and may occasionally be correct.

That's even if I were doing exactly as you say. But are any of the five numbered "assumptions" I posted above even arguably wrong?



Aren't you sweet?

Like I said, Mr. Thessalonia, I did once have such animus-- back in the period where you thought of me as a "great thinker." The "great thoughts" you point to, now, were often similar in kind to what you see here: extrapolations based on available evidence, relating to self-definition and the relation of capsuleers to (the rest of) humanity.

I was a fool, at the time, in several ways (as I knew perfectly well), and you seem to disapprove of my stance now because my conclusions no longer bear any resemblance to yours.

I am, no doubt, still a fool. But perhaps, I dare to hope, a little less of one.

....

Let me suggest something you may want to consider.

In holoflicks, a great mind is often one whose function is all but incomprehensible to those in the thinker's immediate vicinity. The great mind correctly predicts the interactions of enormous casts of characters and uses them to weave elaborate schemes. Such a mind is the sort whose turning is that of wheels within wheels, whose mechanisms the average poor mortal cannot hope to grasp.

Such a mind is the domain of fiction: human behavior is easily as easy to predict, and as difficult to predict accurately, as the weather, and for the same reasons.

That is what you tell me Kuvakei is, and I do not believe you: that mind's subtle schemes depend on a predictable world. We do not live in such a place.

In day to day reality, a great mind is simply that of a perceptive mortal. It picks up on facts, processes them, and makes very tentative plans accordingly. These are plans that, in hindsight and even at the time, are simple and easy to understand. The way great minds work in practice is to examine an array of possible outcomes and their knock-on effects, and try to have a response to each, or else to simply maintain certain desired goals and try to move toward those goals with each impromptu step.

In practice, even a truly masterful politician cannot predict the outcome of every political move made. Such a person simply watches the patterns and the changes in those patterns, and navigates them with whatever simple steps seem likely to prove productive.

It is a rare blatant blunder that turns out to be anything but. Those that do, are better chalked up to luck than to skill. As the line goes, better lucky than smart.

All signs point to Kuvakei's challenge to us on our home turf as a blunder. Can you give me one reason, other than your Master's supposed omniscience, to think otherwise?

He's making us rich. He's making us strong. He's making us heroes in the public eye. If this were meant to distract us from something, he's (1) failed to distract all that many of us, and (2) failed to take any obvious advantage of the distraction.

What does this accomplish that he has any reason to want?

"You just can't comprehend the sophistication of his thought," is not an answer, unless you admit that it is beyond you, as well.

And yet you continue to respond, don't you?

... with less and less substantive responses. It must be embarrassing for a man who likes to think of himself as a thinker.

Chaos theory, Mr. Thessalonia. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions, or, to put it a little more bluntly, the "you need a one-to-one scale, faultless model of the universe in order to correctly predict the universe's behavior" principle.

The slightest difference can and all-too-frequently will change the outcome.

Sadly, there's only one such model that we know of, and we live in it. Makes running simulated scenarios in advance a bit tricky.

Elaborate, long-range planning is dicey, at best. Apparently nonsensical maneuvers in pursuit of specific (and arcane) outcomes tend not to work out as planned. And the longer-range the plan and more complicated the procedure, the less likely it is to work.

Consequently, elaborate, fragile schemes are the domain of fools.

That, I believe.

In turn, one who continues to respond (without substance) in such cases is demonstrating another shortcoming, one that I sometimes demonstrate, myself: an inability to not have the last word.

That's not so much the case here. I'm quite enjoying getting to point out, each time, that you keep failing to engage with my reasoning except to make the conclusory claim that it's balderdash and not worth your time.

Mr. Thessalonia, if you actually believed it wasn't worth your time, not only would you not be responding, you wouldn't be reading it before responding. Some of your quotes have come from mid-argument; you appear not only to be reading my fairly extensive work, but reading it in detail.

That doesn't suggest an actual belief that my arguments are worthless.

You both speak with such passion, but I worry that perhaps it clouds your eyes somewhat. Aria, if I may, let me reply instead of Tiberious upon one of your points. Specifically, the idea of Kuvakei being prone to human error. He is human, after all, and holovids are not evidence for the existence of flawless masterminds.

I worry that you may misjudge the potential of the technology hat Kuvakei has at his disposal. In both networking his people together as well as taking over some arguable portion of their independence, he has in effect created the most massive decision network ever dreamed of. Depending on the structure of the mediating agents in the network, seemingly impossible stochastic problems could be broken down into manageable chunks. Such a network *could* make long range political forecasts, and *could* intelligently protect itself from manipulation.

I used to think that such a network of minds would be to us as we are to insects - a scale so vastly greater that we simply could not conceive of it. I'm less prone to think this now - they are still human minds and still limited in the ways that they can think. Make no mistake, however - the decision network which is Sansha Kuvakei is the greatest which we know of. There is not enough reason to conclude that the Jovians have any advantage over him. Until such evidence arises we must maintain the null hypothesis, that there is no correlation between the two entities.

You are obviously more knowledgeable on the state of the Alvus Hive than I. Point ceded. I think it's reasonable to say that Kuvakei has one of the largest, however.



I'll have to contend on this point, I'm afraid. Many simulation algorithms use an iterative method to refine their solutions, a larger network will be able to find a more precise answer. Further, a larger network would be able to run multiple simulations as you say, and can therefore explore more alternatives than a smaller network. Such a network will have a larger tree of possible actions to call upon.



I know that they're assumptions. I didn't make any statement regarding Kuvakei's goals, just the resources at his disposal.

I've heard you say something like this previously and it confuses me. Human intelligence isn't measured in total number of synapses but the ability to understand and apply certain concepts. If you and I merge brains, the result isn't a mind that's twice as smart, but a mind that's a rough average of our intelligence.

If you're a brilliant person, connecting your mind in any way to a massive group of people who are stupider than you seems like a bad idea.

Mr. Thessalonia:

You may consider this a grumpier addendum to the last.

About your hoped-for "biting retorts," I was never much for those, except for the occasional clinical dissection of someone who was making a special fool of him or herself, especially people who undercut their own causes. I prefer to stick to the substance of things. Analyzing a point to death tends to be adequately "biting" without needing to so much as smirk knowingly.

But even if I did love rhetoric, Mr. Thessalonia, instead of finding it an obstacle, you haven't given me much to work with, except by your refusal to either engage or disengage. A summary of your input so far in this thread:



That's it. That's all. Value judgments, declarations of belief (or lack of need for J's, er, mine), and conclusory statements-- nothing I can get traction to argue against, nothing I can use to develop my own thoughts, nothing I can recognize the truth in so that I can recognize my own errors.

The closest you've come to substance is to present the superior processing power of your Master, the CPU in chief. You haven't even engaged with the bits related to chaos theory and systems modeling, a conspiracy theory on par with the laws of thermodynamics.

My belief is not required, is it? Perhaps not, but, as the line goes, exceptional claims require exceptional evidence, and you have claimed that your Master is an exception to the general rule that control is an illusion.

All you've offered me is faith, insult, and processing power, each as irrelevant to the problem as the others.

I'm the one who's disappointed, Mr. Thessalonia.

So, what to do? Let's see-- oh! How about I examine that faith in the light of reason, unpack those insults and show the intellectual honesty of your debating tactics around, and explain in depth the folly of taking processing capability as a substitute for what you'd need to accomplish what you credit Kuvakei with, to wit, omniscience.

Perhaps I have occasion to dissect a fool's arguments after all.