Alorael at Large

There was also the option of conventional bombing, but the basic question was what would be required to force a peace. If you're suggesting that simply declaring the war won and going home was an option, I think you vastly overestimate the shambles. Japan certainly wasn't going to win, but it also wasn't going to give up, and not forcing it to could leave it free to attack again. I mean, if a country has already launched an unannounced attack, it's a little much to expect anyone to accept an end to the war that doesn't involve some kind of formal end or everyone's going to have the nagging doubt that they'll do it again. And recently after the Meiji Restoration, expecting Japan to be able to suddenly pull industrial capacity out of nowhere might seem reasonable. —Alorael, who thinks the real problem might be that Japan was beaten but not humbled. And the experiences of the Pacifific theater created the real fear that it would take extreme measures to do so or have a permanent foe honor-bound to avenge itself.

I always like the shaping-heavy classes. They feel like the best embodiment of what Geneforge is really all about. Serviles, too, to a lesser extent. —Alorael, who is just disappointed that no one, rebel or Shaper, ever calls you out for your use or abuse of creations. No one cares if you have drakons in tow. No one cares if you beat your drayks and then absorb them. No one cares if you snuggle your vlishes. Cruel, jaded world.

If you cannot afford food in the US, you probably won't starve and die. You may well go hungry sometimes, but there is enough public and private food support available that outright starvation is vanishingly rare, and when it does happen it's almost always neglect of a dependent. The third world is far more likely to have outright shortages of food, where no amount of communalism or collective effort can overcome the simple fact that there are not enough calories to go around. After the bombing of Hiroshima the Japanese weren't completely in the dark about the possibility of atomic bombs. They examined the wreckage, figured out what had happened, and then guessed (not incorrectly) that the US couldn't have a large arsenal and decided to tough it out. The Japanese cabinet's decision was intercepted by US intelligence. There wasn't incontrovertible proof that the bombing was necessary to end the war; it would be reasonable to conclude that in the face of such resolve further bombing would only increase civilian casualties without ending the war. But it's not at all obvious either way. Non-lethal demonstration of the power of these new nuclear weapons was also considered, but it was ruled out because of concerns about wasting one of only two bombs, potential for failure of demonstration, and the likelihood that it would be discounted as a fake. —Alorael, who doesn't think the sparing of US soldiers' lives should be neglected. Predictions for American casualties in the event of an invasion of Japan mostly ran to over one million, although of course they varied widely. Civilian casualties could be expected to be painfully high as well. By that measure, the use of nuclear weapons was successful; it's just not clear, nor can it be clear, how good the estimates were, nor is it at all certain that a less destructive option could not have ended the war, but it's equally unclear that one could. Hindsight, in this case, is not 20/20.

There are plenty of uses. Temporary labor or assistance of any kind? Sure! That's especially useful if you can momentarily summon someone with briefly-needed but highly specialized skills. An archmage in a bottle can do all kinds of quick spellcasting for you. A priest in a bottle can cover all your medical needs. A gremlin in a bottle is all kinds of fun at parties. —Alorael, who also can't help but point out that your name looks like it says Ernie Darth in Hebrew. Kind of. There's no better solution when the words are on different lines and it's left justified, but it looks really odd.

On euthanasia: I believe that the right to die is an important right. I don't think that terminal illness with terrible suffering is necessarily the only circumstance under which it's justified. On the other hand, I agree that depression is a terrible reason for suicide because the suicidal inclination is a primary manifestation of the disease, not a consequence of the other problems of the disease. But I think that's really part of the complicated and uncomfortable ways in which we restrict the rights of those with serious mental illness. On abortion, while in an ideal world I think we would be able to grow the fetus in a vat if either parent wanted it, in practice that's all on women. It's unfortunate that potential fathers can lose a desired child because potential mothers choose to terminate, but I think the right to fatherhood is completely trumped by the sanctity of one's own body. What bothers me more is the responsibility for a child that the father wants to abort and the mother chooses to bring to term, but that's a legal issue, not a directly ethical one. I think there's room for categorizing crimes that cause harm to a fetus as greater crimes without granting the fetus extra rights at all. There is serious harm to the parents—emotional harm, potentially a lifetime of consequences that inflict further financial, logistical, and emotional damage. It's not a hard case to make. Abortion at the point of viability is deeply uncomfortable, but bringing an unwanted child into the world seems a set of problems all its own. Sure, the child can be given up for adoption—maybe. In an ideal world this would work. In the real world, not always, and the real world is not hurting for children. Ultimately the question is, I think, who suffers and who is the victim, and I don't think fetuses, even late fetuses, have enough self to suffer from loss of that self. Of course their physical suffering should be minimized, but some level of cognition is required to qualify for personhood. Do babies have that even after birth? Nor for a long time, I think. Does that make the laughable concept of post-term abortion permissible? That's horrific. Should fetuses be delivered to see whether they are viable or not? That's a cruelty to women who seek abortions, and the power of modern medicine is that viability does not guarantee much about quality or quantity of life. Birth is an arbitrary dividing line, but at least it has an incontrovertible basis unlike X weeks as the cutoff. —Alorael, who thinks nukes are scary because they have immense, immediate, damaging effects followed by the lingering, scary radiation. But he's not really so sure there's much difference between dropping a few huge bombs and launching a consistent campaign of wanton destruction with smaller payloads. The problem with nukes isn't that they're nukes, it's that they're indiscriminate. (And yes, that fallout causes big long-term issues.) But stockpiles of cruise missiles with small payloads delivered with pinpoint accuracy are also scary. And if the Cold War has a lesson, it may be that the best way to handle MAD is cheaply. You don't need an arsenal fit to turn the entire surface of the Earth into glass as long as you can convincingly promise "you'll be sorry!" at need.

I feel similarly, but I marked "other" for both. Birth is a ridiculous, fairly arbitrary distinction for for having rights. I think a case can be made for fetal rights, but those rights don't include not being aborted. A fetus probably should have similar rights one hour before birth as one hour after. Granted, there are a lot of things that no longer pertain, as it's difficult for a baby to be a threat to the mother's life when it's not physically connected, but still. Babies have rights, but they don't have all the rights of an adult, nor should they have all those of an older child. For nukes, I can construct scenarios where nukes should be used, but as a general rule weapons of mass destruction should not be deployed. It's less extenuating circumstances than far-fetched hypotheticals. —Alorael, who is otherwise for rights and categorically against the death penalty and torture. The only caveat is for right to reproduction. He voted yes, but there are (slightly) more plausible scenarios where he thinks people really shouldn't have the right to reproduce. It's just that he doesn't entrust any body to enforce that fairly and well, and he believes the harms of attempting such enforcement would vastly outweigh the benefits of blanket reproductive freedom.

The fact that there are thoughts we are incapable of thinking does not necessarily imply that there are aspects of reality that we are incapable of understanding. If all of physics can be broken down into mathematics, well, we're pretty adequate at handling math. And so far the universe has largely obliged there. It's possible that some of the universe runs on rules we really can't grasp, but it's also possible that it's all just number-crunching. Not all thoughts are meaningful or worth having, just like most possible books are not worth writing: there's a lot of garbage noise. There are somewhere on the order of 10^11 neurons in a human brain. Each one can synapse with many other neurons, in many other ways. They can have different arrangements of supporting non-neuronal cells. They can express different receptors for different neurotransmitters in different numbers and different places. They can exist in different states. And they exist in physical locations within the space of the brain. Given the limits of Planck space there are a finite number of arrangements of cells within the human brain, but it is unfathomably vast. Yes, ironically it's big enough that we can't really cognitively grasp it; fortunately, we've devised tools, like that 10^11, to work with concepts we can't actually really think about. In any case, the physical potential of the human brain is so big that calling it a limitation is technically accurate while also being close to meaningless. —Alorael, who read that essay on thalience and was left unimpressed. Hypothesizing forms of thinking or logic inaccessible to humans does not make them true, and is not evidence for them. Signs of something humans can't actually think through would be good. QM vs. relativity gets tossed around a lot, but their incompatibility does not mean what most people seem to think it means and certainly does not prove any kind of failure of human reason.

Understanding QM is really just a matter of being willing and able to crunch through some fairly intense math, and I think math is a big problem. Maybe math is really hard; I think there's also a huge issue in the perception that math is hard, that being good at math is lame, and most of all in that we are, as a culture really, really bad at teaching math. (Which culture? Good question. I can really only claim any familiarity with US culture. But leaving that aside, we have yet to come across anything that non-genius humans can learn. Vaunted esoteric physics? There are lots of people who learn the discipline. They're called physicists. There might be things too difficult for any human, but we have no evidence of any such thing, as far as I'm aware. —Alorael, who will also note that intelligence metrics get really shaky. What does super-human intellectual capability mean? How does it work? Does it let anyone do anything that can't be handled by a human and a computer can't do together? Your problem requires too many hypothetical things that are possible but show no signs of existing.

It seems obvious to me that some of what we know now is false. It seems quite possible that there are some things humans will never know—some because they are simple facts about places we will never reach in our vast universe, and some because we'll never have the tools to observe. But claiming that we don't have the cognitive capacity to understand things? I don't know. On the one hand, it's impossible to disprove; these things could obviously be cognitive blind spots. On the other hand, there are things that are notoriously hard to grasp that we still manage to model mathematically without anything approaching intuitive understanding. —Alorael, who just harbors some skepticism of anyone claiming comprehension is impossible. It smacks a little too much of argument from ignorance.

This is a common misunderstanding of the uncertainty principle. It doesn't say that we can't measure position and momentum to arbitrary precision. What it says is that those two variables are inextricably linked, and particles do not possess these properties to arbitrary precision. A particle located precisely in space has no defined momentum; a particle with precise momentum has no defined position. These are physical truths. It's possible that the uncertainty principle is false, of course, but it's the best thing we've got and compatible with all our observations. Well, I think we basically agree. You say that free will is incoherent, so we don't have it. I say the ideal of free will without causality is incoherent, but fortunately we are casual and so have free will. It's a semantics difference, which if course is fruitful fodder for endless philosophical debate but not terribly meaningful in any practical way. A decision on some basis is determined by the basis; a decision on no basis may be in some sense free, but it doesn't match any sense of self I can really comprehend. —Alorael, who has never taken silliness as a reason not to be extremely earnest.

Thanks for the soapbox! Whether the mind is wholly physical or not has implications for determinism but surprisingly little bearing on free will. The mind's just meat? Okay, outcomes are determined by the state of the universe. And, because quantum mechanics, possibly the determinism is statistical. There's some immaterial soul at the wheels? Fine! Our decisions come from some balance of the physical state of the universe and the spiritual state of the soul. Will has to come from somewhere! Given that will is based on whatever drives the mind, physical or not, free will means choices that are determined. If someone tied you up and then gave you the choice to get five dollars or be brutally tortured, it's not really a choice at all. You take the money, because based on your history and preferences leading to that moment, five dollars are nice and torture is not. The same is true for less silly, obvious choices: you could have water or beer or soda or whatever else to drink right next time you're thirsty. All are reasonable choices. At that moment, however, you will choose based on your priorities in the moment, which are the product of who you are and everything you've experienced up to that point, and that's true whether it's body or soul doing the choosing. If you could choose against all your priorities... what kind of will is that? It is, at best, statistical noise tipping the balance when you're near equipoise. —Alorael, who also goes in for unenlightened egoism. And nihilist duopsism.

The first game was definitely a mafia-style game. The Darkside Loyalists won, and due to a quirk of the rules I wrangled a win as the DL Commander by suicide. The thread is sadly gone, but I still have the PMs of some of my finest moments of lying and misleading with rationalization. —Alorael, who believes the second game was the one that was aborted, and there were some serious issues with it. The first went fine. And subsequently it became Northern Isles with all the complex roles.

1. Compatibilism, and I take it seriously. Specifically I hold that determinism is largely necessary for free will. To the extent that anything is non-deterministic, it is random, and randomness is not willed at all. 2. Epistemology is a fascinating field, but sometimes it gets a little tangled up on itself and divorced from reality. Obviously pure rational deduction has a lot going for it; equally obviously, many truths about reality cannot be arrived at deductively and require observation. So both. 3. Trying to nail down what non-concrete things really are strikes me as one of the more navel-gazing aspects of philosophy, and saying so probably means that to the extent that I'm anything I'm probably an idealist. Abstract objects exist per se as rational/psychological constructs, and I'm not interested in the metaphysics. 4. I voted for universalism, but I think there's a strong case for moral nihilism. It's meta-ethical moral relativism that I'm skeptical of; a good moral system really ought to be universalizable. (Except that's a loaded term in ethics!) 5. I take my utilitarianism very seriously, problems and all, while acknowledging that an evaluative moral system and a practicable moral system may not be identical. 6. Physicalism. We're all just meat. 7. I go for cheerful existential nihilism. Life is without meaning, so we might as well enjoy it. In fact, it's a moral imperative! —Alorael, who likes his philosophy like his coffee: black, bitter, and yet somehow delicious and great for getting you up and moving.

What countries call themselves does not necessarily resemble that country. At all. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not democratic, not a republic even by broad definition, and not run by the people. To its credit, it is in fact Korea. —Alorael, who in fairness will note that the Republic of Ghana is a republic but was not, at the time of its naming, actually territory ever held by the preceding empire of the same name.

I also just saw Guardians of the Galaxy. I actually saw it under mild duress and expected it to be awful. It wasn't. No high art, to be sure, but it walked the fine line to be a fine funny sci-fi action flick. I don't think I'd watch it again, but I'd happily recommend it. —Alorael, who thinks the only way it could be sold at all was having decades of the kind of intense continuity scrutiny that only comics gather. Many people had already done their best to turn ridiculous premises into concepts that at least merit suspension of disbelief, and it worked just fine. Everything else was covered up with lampshades.

Ooh, another shot at evasion! I promise to be honest about these one day. 1. What is your age? 65, for all you know. Hint: I'm not actually 65. 2. What part of the world do you live in? In which part of the world were you born? What countries have you lived in? I memetically live in Alaska. In reality I've lived along the east coast of the United States, where I always have. I've managed to live in seven different cities over seven years, but I've actually stayed in the same place for a whole two years running now. 3. What is your native language? In what languages are you proficient? English is my native language, and I'd like to think I'm proficient. I'm nowhere close to fluent in Spanish, but I can read novels slowly and muddle through basic conversations. And I know enough that I sometimes have to uncomfortably overrule translators who are inhibiting rather than facilitating communication. It's a problem. 4. Describe your ancestry. Mostly Austrian and Russian Jews, but I'm reluctantly descended from some Daughters of the American Revolution, who are descended from Irish Protestants who immigrated early, who were themselves actually Englishmen who were colonizing and oppressing Ireland before the chance to colonize and oppress Americans opened up. 5. Describe your gender identity and sexual orientation. I'm a cisgender male who gets a zero on the Kinsey scale. It's not great for my identity politics cred but it's very convenient for dealing with the real world. 6. Do you have any religious or spiritual beliefs? If so, describe them. In what religious tradition(s) were you raised, if any? I was raised an atheistic Jew and I'd say I remain faithful to that. Or nonfaithful. As adherent as I've ever been. Which means going to synagogue occasionally but feeling awkward about it. 7. What is your relationship status? Do you have any children? I'm [REDACTED] but I [REDACTED]. 8. Describe your social class. Have you always been in this class? My social class and my income are mismatched. 9. Have you ever served in the military? If so, what division? I have not, and I suspect I'm not eligible for combat roles. 10. What is your occupation (or former occupation)? What is your highest level of education (and your degree, if applicable)? I have held several jobs, and the pay has correlated very poorly with both the required qualifications and the actual difficulty of the job. —Alorael, who does not think Vexivero is helping. At all. Him/herself or others.

That's the basic problem with democratic politics, too. People who seek power, even if it's diluted across many people, would often not really be anyone's first choice for power-holder. And the more of a cesspool the system becomes the less likely it is that anyone really good for the position will want to wade in. Eventually it becomes a vicious cycle of political one-downmanship until, ideally, everyone gets so fed up that the idealists go in out of a desire to fix things and the scum get voted out because everyone's totally fed up. —Alorael, who sees the risk as voters focusing too hard on cleaning house and not hard enough on exactly what they're replacing the problem with. It's possible for incompetent, unrealistic idealism to be worse than pragmatic, functional small-mindedness/cronyism/corruption.

The problem with politicians is that they don't necessarily know anything about the stuff they're making laws about. The problem with not having politicians is that then all your laws are made by people who don't really understand laws and government. —Alorael, who has to say, with the understanding that it's now trite, that the current political class in the US Capitol really makes the case for not having a political class.

You can't capture anything larger than a single space, if I'm remembering right. —Alorael, who certainly has never captured dark wyrms.

There is also a difference between the form of government and the policies. You can say that you want a representative democracy and a strong welfare system, but the two are unrelated. You can have totalitarians who happen to dictate welfare (and, in fact, it's a time-tried policy for maintaining enough popular opinion to avoid rebellion), but it's quite possible that the representative democracy won't provide welfare. Like America. —Alorael, who is of the opinion that representative democracy is a very solid system. It could use some constitutional protection against current American-style total deadlock or idiocy, but it's not at all trivial to build that into a constition. Not gerrymandering seems like a reasonable start, but it's just that.

You should probably have Windows running in Parallels/Fusion under OS X, ideally on a Hackintosh. —Alorael, who will give lots of bonus points if instead of running a PC someone implements OS X on Minecraft. Which should also be run on an emulator on a VM, of course.

I like single-player games and multiplayer games. I do not like my RPGs to be multiplayer and I don't think competitive games would really work without the multiplayer. Stories are great, but you don't need one with great game mechanics. And I'll forgive some pretty lousy mechanics if the story is compelling enough. I don't think gameplay and combat are really separate; often the combat is the gameplay. Planescape is the big exception here, but again, it's carried by story. Graphics are nice and all, but distinctly secondary, and I'll take ASCII if the game merits it. I like a variety of games. Your last question mixes mechanics and plot. I'll take any plot as long as it's good and any mechanics as long as they're fun and fit the game in question. I don't need hack and slash combat in my deep philosophical exploration of the human condition. I don't need puzzle mini-games in my hack 'n slash. —Alorael, who mostly prefers games that choose an identity and embrace it. Not everything benefits from multiplayer. Not everything benefits from single-player either. No need to shoehorn much of a plot into your game purely about high-intensity platforming. No sudden, unnecessary tooth-gnashing horrible platforming in a story- and choice- driven adventure.

Geneforge capped at 6 because of the nature of classes in that game. They are just the arrangement of skill costs, and there are only six possible arrangements. With truly unique classes in Avadon it's possible to produce more. The real limit is Jeff's apparent goal of having one party member for each class. Too many classes means too large a party, especially for the traditional final fight with all of them. —Alorael, who neither expects nor would be surprised by an extra class. But that's also a long way off still. There's another Avernum in the way.

I can't say FYT, but I did make it better. —Alorael, who wonders if the annual Sadness Sale will fall to the power of constant sales everywhere else.

I actually had the window open for hours and didn't see your edit. Or any posts after yours. —Alorael, who will also add that he's convinced colleges do have some absolutely useless classes. That tends to be more based on absolute lack of rigor or material in the class, not because of the subject.