Student of Trinity

In vino veritagh.

Ach, kind of sniped. About competence: I dunno. Count up the people. I think the rate of corruption is alarmingly high, among Shapers who held high enough rank that they ought to have been reliable. Even if it's ten percent, that's appalling. I think it's well above ten percent. A competent empire needs to do better than that. And promoting unreliable individuals is incompetence in the system. By incompetent, I don't mean that the Shapers can't tie their shoes. What they can't do is cope with Shaping. Which is kind of the bar you set for yourselves, when you call yourselves The Shapers. I find the world of Geneforge perfectly sensible. It's just the Shapers aren't a very competent power. Many real world governments have been quite incompetent. Of course they don't admit it. Neither do the Shapers. But look at the actual evidence. It doesn't look like evidence of competence to do the job the Shapers hold. I will concede that you have to play along with most RPGs, and that if you're willing to postulate enough stuff, without in-game evidence but without any blatant in-game contradiction, then you can probably decide to assume that the Shapers are competent enough. What I'm saying is that this is just not at all the most plausible conclusion, given the evidence that's actually there in the games. The Shaper pose of mastery is a Big Lie. Once you question it at all, it falls apart.

I'm not really letting the Shapers off the hook for SVHs just because they stayed S. It's a big investment of energy to build one of these complexes, and even if it doesn't end up laying waste to an entire province, letting the whole thing go so badly pear-shaped that it has to be abandoned and sealed is not a mark of competently conducted basic research. So in G1 there's the Geneforge itself, which of course should never have been built, but there's also the dangerous and bizarre crypts, and Tek's SVH. Arguably also the power core full of uncontrolled shades. Competent and responsible Shaper installations, zero. G2 happened because, out of the team sent to clean up Sucia Island, which ought to have been the most competent and responsible Shapers in the entire empire, given what was at stake, both leaders and their immediate followers went rogue. Either that, or the Shaper council was so incompetent that it didn't send its very best people to clean up Sucia Island. Then there's Phariton, as a mad rogue Shaper; whatsername the reclusive exile, with the awful Battle Gamma in her garden shed; and the lady who is loyal to Zachary, who has that lab full of out-of-control plants and stuff. Competent and responsible Shaper installations, zero. Responsible Shapers, arguably several: Shanti, the team of loyal Shapers you find trapped somewhere, and that one captive Shaper in the Taker lands. The captive Shaper arguably counts as insanely overconfident, however, given his intention of regaining command of Taker creations. That team of trapped Shapers are also clearly out of their depth, bringing Glaahks to a Drakon-fight. And Shanti just dies. So competent, not so much. G3 has whatsisname, your teacher who goes rogue. Later you find his SVH, unless you kill him after an earlier cutscene, in which case you find a different rogue Shaper there. There's the Darkstone Mine, that awful dude on the second island, and Khyryk and Litalia have both abandoned the rigorous Shaper cause in different ways. The Gull Island governor was also involved in some kind of illegal Shaping, making mutant serviles or something, if I remember that rightly. There's also a necromancer's SVH, and that other rogue Shaping guy with the runed serviles, which the Shapers did not originate, but have failed to suppress. There's an entire Shaper army held in limbo by some kind of shade thing, until the PC shows up to help. Rahul and his wife are kind of arrogant, but maybe they can count as competent. Overall, though, the rate of incompetence and corruption among the Shapers you meet has got to be at least 50% or so. In G4 there's some kind of exiled Shaper to the south, in trouble for past faults. There's the bizarre plan with Moseh and his buddies, which reeks of hubris, and needs the help of a dubious rebel turncoat in the shape of the PC. There's the Dumping Pits. Letting Monarch get out of control was presumably not a fault of intention, but it was hardly proof of competence. Again, the PC has to step in; the entire Shaper empire can't find an Agent up to the job, or if it has one, can't get its act together to send her where she's needed. For G5, we went over the list of council members. Again the Shapers fail to impress. There's also the challenge zone boss, as a rogue Shaper-type that has not been suppressed. There's that control brain area that's gone all crazy. And wasn't there something kind of dodgy about one of Alwan's three forts? I'm fuzzy on that one. Am I missing any SVH-type places? Again, though, the point is just that the ratio of good Shaper places to bad, and good Shapers to bad, is not nearly high enough for a competent empire. Of course this is all because it's a game. There needs to be a lot of stuff that the PC needs to handle. But if the Shaper empire needs a lone PC to save it, then clearly the Shaper empire was operating on way too thin a shoestring. So the premise for the game is that the Shaper empire was never really up to the job. Naturally the Shapers don't admit this. Perhaps they're just putting on a brave face, because they have to do their best and die trying. Or perhaps it's Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and they're just too incompetent to realize their incompetence.

It's tempting to make this a sticky, just to cut down on derailment. But let's not. Sticky and alcohol makes me think of floors in residence at college, the day after a floor party. Yech.

In response to Nalyd/Wander above, I want to save the 'it's a game' argument for last, because it makes the other points anticlimactic. If you don't like the shallow debating tactic of saving the clincher for the end, feel free to skip ahead. So for the other points: Two wackos out of a council of seven is not a good innings. Then there's Astoria, who is sane precisely in that she has come to doubt the full rigor of the Shaper way, and Alwan, who is proudly fanatical. The remaining three councilors are evidently non-entities. I do not see this as a good counter-argument to my scenario. My point about how many Shaper facilities are sealed vaults of horror is not about how many sealed vaults of horror exist in the Shaper frontier lands. It's that the proportion of safe, functioning labs to sealed vaults of horror is far too low. And I don't remember there being much to show that the vaults of horror were particularly old. In most of them, the flawed experiments that led to the sealing are still very much alive and kicking. Some of these creatures are clearly durable, but we don't seem to be talking about centuries of accumulation. Often you find some evidence about what went wrong, and you don't have to read through fifty years of mundane records before you find it. The evidence seems to be that most Shaping labs have disasters within only a few years of operation. That's a horrible track record. You could argue that there are lots more safe, functioning labs somewhere else, and the games just don't happen to bring you through them. But where are they? I think I was actually the first to argue that the Geneforge zones represent isolated points of interest with long distances between them, though there's only one zone transition that is stated in the games to be a long walk. But a major research facility that doesn't even get mentioned at all? Lots of them? That seems pretty implausible. Why don't you ever get supplies from them when you're a Shaper ally, or attack them when you're a Rebel? The only place that those facilities could plausibly be, now, is in the unseen coastal cities of G5. That leaves most of Shaper territory with a marked preponderance of SVH's over functioning labs. On that scenario, the best that you could say is that the Shapers could competently manage peaceful city states. They'd still be out of their depth in running a continental empire. There's the same sort of argument about Shaper personnel. Of course it's to be expected that there are some bad apples out on the frontiers. The problem, however, is that the proportion of sane, loyal, competent individuals is just far too low. You can argue that there are many more of these, lurking between the zones, but then it's again unlikely that you never have to deal with any of them. Okay, so back to the 'it's a game' argument. I think this is something like a category confusion. Of course it's a game. But the nature of Shaper rule is part of the game. It's not as though there's a real Shaper empire out there anywhere, being unfairly caricatured by its appearance in the games of Jeff Vogel. The fact that the Geneforge games have to provide dungeons and villains is the reason why the Shaper empire has to be dangerously incompetent. It's not some kind of evidence that the appearance of dangerous incompetence has to be false. If there were even a few panels of text justifying all the Shaper corruption and mismanagement, and stating that things were much better on the whole than what the player sees, then I'd agree that that was what the Shaper world was really like. In the absence of any such text, though, the Shaper empire is the way the Shaper empire seems. It seems pretty incompetent.

Yes. If you want a picture of the future, imagine some beer spilling on some math, forever.

There's also that golem lab or whatever it was in G3 (Darkstone Mine — thanks, wackypanda). It's one of the dozen or so zones in the most settled island of the Ashen Isles. And there's that teacher guy of yours, the one with the cutscenes, who goes rogue and sets up his own secret buried lab. And there was this bizarre necromancer crypt somewhere, too. That may not have been a Shaper site per se, but it's further evidence that the Shapers do not have rogue magic under control, even in an area they're supposed to control. G4 has Monarch. He's not a Shaper, but the Shapers couldn't keep him down. It also has that golem guy in his — get this — secret buried lab. There are powerful rogue wizards with Shaping power in every doggone game, I think. And secret buried labs practically under every rock. The point that the games over-report frontiers and war zones is a good one. Back when I first made this argument, I raised it, and said that we would have to see whether the Shaper heartland was possibly a lot better run. Now, after G5, it's still a bit hard to say about this. You never see the peaceful coastal cities. They don't seem to take up a lot of space on the map, but perhaps they are densely populated enough to represent the bulk of Shaper society. You do get to see more of the Shaper council, though, and the ratio of corrupt and insane members on it is alarmingly high. It's like the US federal cabinet from Doctor Strangelove, you know? The most Shaper-friendly view that I found I could take was to see the Shaper cause as a tragic one. Maybe Shaping is just too hard to control. Maybe it warps the mind so strongly, that a high rogue rate among Shapers is inevitable. So on this view, the true Shapers aren't really just stupid. They're doing their best, though the struggle is doomed, and their pose of perfect power and self-control is really only a way of spitting in the eye of death. I could buy that, if it were presented, I think. The thing is that no character in the games ever really puts it like that. Everybody acts as though Shaper society is overwhelmingly successful, when the evidence is wildly against that claim.

The problem is not that 20 studies get published with one contradicting the other 19, and so you can see the noise. It's that the 19 don't get published, because they don't have a finding. They probably don't even get submitted for publication. So the entire field has a strong bias towards over-reporting flukes, even when everybody is actually following their state-of-the-art methodology as well as possible. There are subtler issues involved than just whether your findings are flatly false or correct. For example, often the way you control for irrelevant factors is to make statistical tests. You conclude that your survey about race and education has controlled for income, for example, by showing that income has no significant effect after you've applied your controls. But when significance is a weak standard, this means that a lot of controls are really inadequate. So even if your results are not exactly a fluke, what they seem to mean may be. Statistical noise is a great place to hide your own bias. In effect, you wait until the flukes confirm your assumptions. It's much harder to avoid this than one might think. Humans are instinctively primed to see patterns in noise. Whatcha gonna do, though? You can't just throw up your hands and decide we'll never know. The problem I see is more that there's some inappropriate physics envy going on, with people dressing up research that is really just qualitative or speculative as quantitative and rigorous. Some of the social sciences should back off a bit from trying to be scientific. On important enough issues, qualitative or speculative research is worth having. Fight the battle honestly, instead of with fake numbers. And on the other hand, studies that do manage to achieve really high levels of significance should be trumpeted really loudly, even if their conclusions are boring. They're not just a bit better than the other studies: they're the only real ones. The reason they don't get as much acclaim as they deserve is simple, in my opinion: if you over-advertise your premium product, you'll lose all your bread-and-butter sales. I mean publications.

Years ago, when this topic came around at that time, I remember arguing that the Shapers were really a bunch of baggy-suited incompetents, stumbling through the minefield of history. I think my main point was that over 50% of the Shapers you met in the games were in some way corrupt or crazy, and nearly 100% of the Shaper facilities you explored were sealed vaults in which something had gone nightmarishly wrong. That implied that the Shapers as a group were clearly incompetent to deal with the problems they faced. So clearly incompetent, in fact, that the few Shapers who seemed to sincerely believe in the Shaper cause must have been Dunning-Kruger idiots as well, to have been so unreasonably confident. Any intelligent Shaper would have seen the glaring evidence and recognized that they were operating well out of their depth. Instead, the Shaper idea of dealing with any problem was just to seal off the disaster, and dig a new lab somewhere else. What could possibly go wrong? The Shaper regime was a one-party totalitarian state where Chernobyls seemed to happen every year. Once I found this viewpoint, it really seemed compelling. I started hearing all the Shaper dialog as though spoken with a drunken slur and stammer. What a bunch of idiots. That was certainly before G5, maybe before G4. But I don't think those games changed my impression very much.

I don't know these studies about childhood exposure to alcohol, so maybe they're really great, but in general I'm awfully skeptical of studies that 'show' that something causes something else. Lots of complicated things would be great to understand better, so people have to study these things. It's really hard to study these things, so these fields tend to develop methodological standards that cut people some slack, so that they can actually get out and do something instead of just pounding their heads against the wall. And maybe over many decades the field does get somewhere. In the meantime, though, you tend to get peer-reviewed, state-of-the-art research that simply isn't really very good. The subject is just too hard, so the standards for what counts as progress are too low. The poster child for this disease is the 95% confidence level as a standard for significance. In a lot of fields, that's considered a gold standard. In fact, it's nearly worthless. It means that every twentieth study gets published, with significant results, even if there is absolutely nothing there but noise. There are a lot of important topics on which there are a lot more than twenty studies being done at any given time. And even a single study may comb through its data looking for at least twenty different possible effects. So somebody is always 'showing' something. Then when somebody else tries to replicate the findings, it goes away — 95% of the time, at any rate. Maybe persistence will pay off, and you just have to wait while all the flashes in pans fizzle out. Or maybe no science really gets going until it gets some solid theory under it, so that you can figure out how to control experiments well enough to get far better than 95% confidence. Add a few more sigmas and you do start to approach practical certainty. But there's a threshold of understanding you have to reach, I suspect, before you can start to push those sigmas further.

So it's okay as long as you don't drink anything older than you are? Actually, trying wine or beer at home, which is legal in a lot of places long before you're allowed to buy the stuff for yourself, is a good idea. In fact, speaking as a parent, I'd recommend deliberately getting drunk at some point, at least a bit, while safe at home with family. Experience doesn't make you less affected by alcohol, but it teaches you to stop drinking it before it feels like you need to stop, because that's when you do need to stop. I'd rather have my children learn that at home than out in some bar. Then they can do what they want, once they're grown, but at least they'll know what's going on.

Congratulations, Trenton! This thread is not just a milestone for one member, but a milestone for the boards in general. We can let it mark an era: the rise of a class of members with postcounts in the few thousand. A middle class is emerging. Its brash ways may make Old Money sniff, but it's here, and its post counts are rising. Soon it will wield more and more power. Society will change. More and more, the new immigrants who arrive here, with nothing but dreams in their post counts, will look up not to the few old folks who came over on the Mayflower, but to the bustling middle class members of the community. Upward mobility. It's the Spiderweb Way!

it's a timeless classic that will never get old. See?

In any kind of style, the only good thing about pushing the envelope is that it pushes the envelope. Look at old clothes, old cars, old appliances. The things that went for a classic look still have it. The things that look old are the things that tried to look new. This is obvious if you think about it. Newness is precisely the thing that ages fastest, by its very definition. If nobody ever tried to look new, I guess we'd have only boring old things. So if you want to try for a new look, and you don't mind making something where the thing itself is just an excuse to try something new, then that's good. If you want to make something that lasts, though, I don't think it's good to try to look new.

Also, you're playing on Torment. That screws with the canonical difficulty gradient.

What does it mean to play an Amberite? You get a permadeath curse?

Back in G2 there was a point going through the Taker labs where a team of servile assassins, or something like that, spawns and hunts your own character. Unexpected and scary when you're a deadweight Shaper and your gazers are all half a zone away.

Yeah, the G5 expert area is probably the toughest of all of them, though it arguably makes the least sense plot-wise for it to be there.

That just needs some rich, creamery butter.

40 years is a long time. The pony might learn to sing.

Not coming until Fall 2013. But the anticipation has begun.

Insurance companies don't actually have to be horrible. If they charge fair premiums, then they ought to be able to make a fair profit based on the fact that even the people who never make a claim have enjoyed security. So the business itself ought to be sound. What that might mean, though, is that the best companies won't offer the lowest rates. The ones offering the lowest rates may be planning to boost their profits by swindling claimants. That having been said, one might argue that buying cheap insurance from jerks is really just taking a higher deductible. Presumably you're still covered for the bulk of the worst case, where you injure someone and are on the hook for immense medical bills. The laws that say you have to have insurance to drive are there to make sure injured people are covered, not to bring auto body repair to the masses. So even the most noxious insurance company is probably legally obliged to offer ironclad contracts about paying up for major liabilities.

Bastardizer!

<approbation> It's always nice to mark these milestones. <meaningless> Rah rah rah! You go, internet person! </meaningless> Here's to the next two-thousand! </approbation>

Ach, nein!