Inner Peace (Through Superior Firepower) – Episode 030

[cheeseaholic]

And, of course, there's always the possibility that the author gnerated the Casters specifically to give us the widest possible understanding of magic. Repeating caster types does not introduce new info, so to get as many descriptions out as quickly as possible, he selects ones that have not been selected yet.

I like this idea simply because the kingdom name is FAQ.

[drachefly]

How unlikely would P(data|u.i.d) have to be for you to reject it? {...} With something like 'randomly among those not already on the side'... what probability ratio would you have to see to put you in serious doubt?

That value is the value you implicitly are already using as your prior. You're just not admitting it.

One can work back from some arbitrary cut-off threshold like 0.05 chance of the evidence matching the hypothesis, yeah. Of course this just shifts the problem around aimlessly. Either justifying a cut-off or a certain prior belief, same thing - how? Or is it that this selection is fairly free, bound (or not) by other experience and subjective, complex and infinitely debatable?

There are, technically, rigorous ways of identifying priors. They are ridiculously computationally intensive, so we have to approximate. In more quantifiable fields or subjects, you can get more constrained priors via practical approximations - use a population average, say. Discrete, singular laws-of-nature kinds of things are more slippery. This is one of those. One can get into arguments over priors, but unless they're orders of magnitude different, there's not much point. I wasn't so much arguing against your 40% as against the lack of a rule used to generate it.

I based my initial estimates off of the reference class of those rules we've seen in action that are as analogous as possible in each case. The most subjective was the very low 'positive autocorrelation' probability, which was largely relying on this being a work of fiction that is not primarily comedy (it would be very narratively unsatisfying for casters of one type to clump up purely based on biased luck without any other influences), followed by my discounting Fate from >90% to 10% by qualifying the theory to neglect the main strands of fate. Signamancy, Luckamancy, terrain... these all play about that much role in the relevant reference classes, as described.

Do you agree that the prior on u.i.d. ought to be somewhere vaguely near the order I gave, not >80% and not <5%, and that such an assignment is not absolutely arbitrary, but something that one might have legitimate reasons - however arguable the exact numbers are? If you think so, then we have no remaining argument.

[Balerion]

I have to say.... I did miss our long, overly technical/precise discussions of minutiae. Especially given how often they aim in everyone agreeing we lack enough information and are unlikely to ever have it

[BLANDCorporatio]

Do you agree that the prior on u.i.d. ought to be somewhere vaguely near the order I gave, not >80% and not <5%, and that such an assignment is not absolutely arbitrary, but something that one might have legitimate reasons - however arguable the exact numbers are? If you think so, then we have no remaining argument.

I'm not sure we had an argument to begin with, strictly speaking. The figures seem reasonable, the quoted paragraph is agreed on. I just wanted to know if there's a simple way to unambiguously quantify that.

[oslecamo2_temp]

The Thinkamancer does something Units cannot -- permits direct diplomacy with the enemy, direct orders to expeditionary forces, etc. No known units in the Jetstone inventory do that. It's new functionality, and while not directly militarily powerful, indirectly it can be game changing. Even a Level 1 Thinkamancer might be able to end a War and save the Side with one two paragraph conversation. Could a Battle Bear do that?

No. But any unit able to talk could pull it off. The thinkmancer just saves you the trouble of sending messengers, but you can still communicate with other sides and expeditionary forces whitout it, it just makes the logistics harder. Just like the dollmancer eases up your heavy production logistics.

[Chit Rule Railroad]

In the words of Einstein, "Make everything simple as possible, but not simpler". So in that spirit I'll have to agree with Marbit, Random w/ no Duplicates is the simplest model that still fits the (albiet limited) data.
As for OPINION, I think it's Random with non-equal probabilities for all caster types, no dupes....but the Titans "mess with the dice" every so often. But there's not enough data to get into something that complex, and I doubt there ever WILL be. This is probably one of those things we will never "figure out", it will either be told to us, or left a mystery.

Given that Rob is a Titan, an alternate simple explanation is that the Titans have selected caster pops that satisfy Fate, to the extent that Fate cares, while also attempting to obscure what Fate cares about by letting character concepts and pop culture references determine the casters not required by Fate.

It seems to me that someone who asserts that the non-Fate-driven pops come from a process of "(a) roll a die to determine caster type, then (b) find a clever reference to fit that caster type" should provide evidence of that process, since it is clearly more work for the Titans than the process "(a) think of a clever reference".

If you feel this is unsatisfyingly meta, consider the evidence that the in-universe concept of signamancy extends to pop culture references that don't make sense in-universe: the dog food Knights getting chewed up, Sammy Haggar rocking, the Arkentool attuners having Stupidworld corporate tool-related names, Lloyd looking like the Deadly Duplicator, etc. Even if Parson's mind did not create Erfworld, it is clear that Parson and Erfworld found each other through a Parson-centric version of the anthropic principle, and that shouldn't be ignored when trying to simulate what the Titans have built.

I haven't looked at the Erfworld simulation game threads, but perhaps instead of using a table of caster type probabilities, such a game should look up random biographical pages on sites like Wikipedia, the IMDB, and Allmusic.com and apply a mapping of profession/genre/etc. to caster type. (Allmusic.com in particular has "mood" keywords that can map to personalities that can be matched up to caster type stereotypes.) That won't give the same probabilities as Rob's brain, but it might capture the spirit better.

[0beron]

You're muddling two aspects which may be (and in my opinion are) very different things. Rob is telling us a story. And a story-teller does not necessarily have to obey all the "rules" of the world he operates in. So just because Rob chooses certain casters for plot and humor reasons doesn't necessarily mean that's how Erfworld actually works normally.
Of course if this is the case, then we have basically no idea what determines caster popping...which is something I'm fine with accepting.

[Chit Rule Railroad]

You're muddling two aspects which may be (and in my opinion are) very different things. Rob is telling us a story. And a story-teller does not necessarily have to obey all the "rules" of the world he operates in. So just because Rob chooses certain casters for plot and humor reasons doesn't necessarily mean that's how Erfworld actually works normally.
Of course if this is the case, then we have basically no idea what determines caster popping...which is something I'm fine with accepting.

I suppose one could imagine a "normal Erfworld", devoid of Stupidworld references, where someone like Genghis Khan, or a Starship Troopers brain bug, might have been summoned rather than Parson. But that world is the one we don't know anything about.

In role-playing terms, each caster is popped with both crunch (class, specials, stats) and fluff (name, face, clothing, personality). The rules of Erfworld include natural signamancy tying together the fluff and the crunch. The summoning of Parson, under the conditions specified by Stanley, tells us something about Erfworld fluff, which tells us something about Erfworld crunch.