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Thoughts on the Diagram


galendo

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I'm here to throw out a couple of ideas regarding the Diagram.  The first is one that I haven't seen discussed here before, although I doubt I'm the first to have thought of it, as it seems somewhat obvious.  The second is a piece of evidence for a common theory (that the Diagram was Odium-influenced) that I also don't think I've seen mentioned before.  Probably more due to my lack of attentiveness than for any other reason.

 

Neither insight is particularly deep, so don't go expecting too much from my soon-to-be-sprawling thoughts, but both seem pretty heavily suggested by WoR.

 

Idea #1: The Diagram, if followed precisely, would lead to a terrible future that no reasonable person would support.

 

We know Taravangian and his gang think that they're doing the right thing, that the Diagram is a path to salvation.  They know that the cost will be high, but they think it's worth paying.  I'm here to suggest that it might not be.  First, let's look at Taravangian's other ideas on his "smart" days:

1) An intelligence test to determine which people are allowed to reproduce.

2) A law requiring the less-intelligent to commit suicide for the greater good.

 

Both ideas are good in the abstract.  The result, smarter citizens, is a worthy goal in itself.  But the costs that would have to be paid to get there with these ideas are so abhorrent that very few reasonable people would support them.  I propose that the Diagram is roughly the same, just on a grander scale.

 

In addition to the parallels above, we have support from the Diagram itself suggesting that the costs to be paid will be terrible: "Q: What cost must we bear? A: The cost is irrelevant...all other considerations are but dust by comparison."  Even Taravangian, on a day of extremely low empathy, seems to realize that the costs are high.  That means that the actual costs must be astronomical. 

 

The Diagram is supposed to "shelter a seed of humanity through the coming storm."  But how much of a seed do you really need?  A few hundred people?  A few dozen?  Only two?  It's incredibly possible -- in fact I think even likely -- that following the Diagram would result in the deaths of over 99.99% of the population of Roshar.

 

I also think this twist makes a lot of sense from a literary perspective.  In a way, it's almost a shame that:

 

Idea #2: Contradictions in the Diagram indicate that it must have been malignly influenced.

 

The interesting thing I noticed is that the Diagram occasionally flat-out contradicts known information, which should have been obvious to Taravangian during his day of lucidity.  "Mankind must survive.  Our burden is that of the species..."  But Taravangian presumably, at least on his day of intelligence, should have known that humanity is not confined to Roshar.  Humanity as a species is not threatened, even if Taravangian sits back and does nothing.  In fact, the easiest way to "shelter a seed of humanity through the coming storm" would be to ship as many as you could off-world.  No fancy Diagram-inspired slaughtering necessary.

 

Another quote is just as contradicory, and perhaps even more telling: "The Unmade are a deviation, a flair, a conundrum that may not be worth your time."  Even not-super-smart Taravangian and his cronies should be able to see that this cannot be true.  The death-rattles are extremely important to them, and the Thrill was instrumental in wrecking Jah Keved so Taravangian could take over.  Neither of these effects could reasonably be described as "a conundrum that may not be worth your time."

 

Finally, let's look at the full quote (spoilers for length):

The Unmade are a deviation, a flair, a conundrum that may not be worth your time. You cannot help but think of them. They are fascinating. Many are mindless. Like the spren of human emotions, only much more nasty. I do believe a few can think, however.

There is one you will watch. Though all of them have some relevance to precognition, Moelach is one of the most powerful in this regard. His touch seeps into a soul as it breaks apart from the body, creating manifestations powered by the spark of death itself. But no, this is a distraction. Deviation. Kingship. We must discuss the nature of kingship.

We see the same pattern of thought-distraction-thought-distraction that we see with Eshonai when she gets too close to thinking about how stormform is more than she bargained for:

Venli smiled more broadly.  "I'm simply persuaded.  We must wait.  The storm will blow the wrong way, after all.  Or is it all other storms that have blown the wrong way, and this one will be the first to blow the right way?"

The wrong way? "How do you know?  About the direction?"

"The songs."

The songs.  But...they said nothing about...

Something deep within Eshonai nudged her to move on.

Plus, it's been a while since I've read the Mistborn trilogy, but I vaguely seem to remember

seeing the same sort of distraction effect on spiked people

.

 

Regardless, it looks like some external force is twisting Taravangian's mind away from focusing on what it doesn't want him to focus on.  A pity, in some ways -- I think I actually prefer the idea that the Diagram was a result of pure logic, as Tavargian believes.  But the contradictions within it seem to suggest otherwise.

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Hmm.... Thinking this through here..... As you mentioned, Taravangions other two 'smart' ideas are pretty terrible, which does indicate that the diagram solution is just as awful...

One thing wierd about both of those is that they only count as good ideas if you completely neglect to consider the human reaction to enforcing them. It doesnt take much to realize how people would react.... Thats not just compassion and empathy...thats an understanding of how people respond to external pressures. ( i actually have issue with thinking that a smart person with no compassion could not realize this.. But hey, we will go with it)

The diagram on the other hand seems to be based heavily on an understanding of how people will react. He creates power vacumns specifically to sow as much chaos as possible and outlines exactly what he must do to appear as a benevolent savior.

If 'smart' travangion cannot realize the problems with enforcing eugenics and average taravangion realizes the problems with it, how come super smart Taravangion understands human reactions?

Personally, while i sort of like the idea of the diagram being totally logic, i just dont see how that is possible. Far too much of it would seem to accurately predict systems i would describe as stochastic. Heck, he predicts exactly how many armies would converge on jah keved at once and it only off by 1 (. 6 vs 7, iirc). How is that even possible several years in advance? What if someone falls off a cliff a year early, or bad weather delays someones plans, what if a ship sinks, what is someone you expected to be a major player gets strangled by his daughter, what if someone you decided was a nobody didnt get strangled by his daughter and winds up as a major player?

I actually wonder if the 'capacity' taravangion asked for actually comes from his 'dumb' days... I dont see how this is possible, and i guess i dont believe it, but part of me would like to think he mixed up his boon and his bane and is focusing on the wrong one.

 

edit:spelling

Edited by Slaybalj
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Even without considering the reactions to his ideas, killing a great part of the population when a war or large calamity could happen at any moment could only make humanity more vulnerable, because who says they won't need workforce or soldiers for a big army? Or that if Mr.T decided all very smart people should hide in a shelter after he killed tge dumb ones they couldn't all be killed by a cymatic earthquake or something, making Odium's job easier.

It isn't about intelligence vs. compassion, it is about intelligence+magalomania vs. compassion+sanity. Mr.T was thinking very big and very fast when he made the Diagram, but he sure as hell wasn't thinking straight.

Edited by CognitivePulsePattern
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Even without considering the reactions to his ideas, killing a great part of the population when a war or large calamity could happen at any moment could only make humanity more vulnerable, because who says they won't need workforce or soldiers for a big army? Or that if Mr.T decided all very smart people should hide in a shelter after he killed tge dumb ones they couldn't all be killed by a cymatic earthquake or something, making Odium's job easier.

It isn't about intelligence vs. compassion, it is about intelligence+magalomania vs. compassion+sanity. Mr.T was thinking very big and very fast when he made the Diagram, but he sure as hell wasn't thinking straight.

I think Mr. T has a longview of history and conflict.  His mindset is if I leave all of these independent actors to their own devices they will all fall.  It would kind of be like America without FDR or Britain without Churchill against Nazi Germany.  He figures the best way to defeat the creatures of Odium is to create a situation where he is supremely in command and has all of humanity at his disposal to fight back.

 

So it could be that he is looking at the world as dispassionately as a chessboard and sees the only option as having every piece be under his control... or he could be a pawn in a much bigger game.

 

The only argument I would have against Mr. T. being manipulated is that his gift comes from the Nightwatcher who is a spren and so far has not given anyone else a tainted gift.

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I have to disagree on a few points.

 

I don't personally think Taravangian was influenced by odium when writing the diagram, there is no reason for Taravangian to have knowledge of worldhopping, perhaps he has an inkling of the possibility, but to him Roshar would be the only place where humanity exists, and his primary motivation throughout the Diagram is the survival of the human species.

The Diagram as I'm understanding it was on statistics and probability, Taravangian in his one day of supreme capacity saw the future laid out for him as a series of branching rivers with probability of those futures laid out as well.

Taravangian writing the diagram found the best solution, the one with the most probability of succeeding in his purpose - to save a seed of humanity.

Were there futures that were more dire or even futures of great success? I'd assume yes, but the likelyhood of these futures would be worse than the one he picked for the diagram, they probably included the rise of new KR's to try and save humanity, as well as the division of humans, which is the reason for his removing the figures of power to take control and forge humanity together while trying to keep KRs out of it.

Humans don't act rationally at all levels, I mean we can just look at our own world, the issues we're faced with don't make us do the rational thing, because of other interests.

Taravangian decided, to hell with the middle part, we don't have the luxury to squabble, I'll take the reins and save a seed of humanity to survive what's coming.

 

I don't think that's evil, it's just a very amoral way of thinking, but something that might be necessary.

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@Rakei - OK, I think you might have convinced me....however, there is still a huge problem in my mind with this.....  suppose at his most brilliant, Taravanion was able to see all the branching possibilities and made plans to ensure the greatest likelihood of the greatest number of people were to survive..   The problem is, probabilistic systems change constantly and the diagram would have been out of date the day after it was written.... maybe if he were always this brilliant he might be able to adapt his plans ( he clearly wants to do this) but he's basically predicting next week's weather based on what the weather did three weeks ago and taking no account for what the weather is currently doing. 

 

In this case, his hit list wouldn't just be for people who aren't following his plan, it HAS to be pruning people and events who can interject unpredictability to the system.  The more variability it adds to the system, the more it must be avoided.   Most likely this would include any Knights Radiant.   It's not that he knows they're going to do something he won't like, it's that he DOESN'T know what they're going to do!

 

In all likelihood the Diagram is driving towards disaster.  Without variability, everything is inching closer and closer to zero....

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In this case, his hit list wouldn't just be for people who aren't following his plan, it HAS to be pruning people and events who can interject unpredictability to the system.  The more variability it adds to the system, the more it must be avoided.   Most likely this would include any Knights Radiant.   It's not that he knows they're going to do something he won't like, it's that he DOESN'T know what they're going to do!

 

I think this is why he mentions he has to kill Dalinar.  He says if Dalinar fights and divides Alethkar he can stay alive and will turn out to be his greatest ally but if he tries to unite Alethkar he has to die because he would be an alternative not a compliment to what he is doing.

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I suspect that since he wished for capacity, each day he's given exactly as much intelligence/compassion as he needs to fulfill his duties to the Diagram on that day.  If he were overly smart when he took over Jah Keved, he wouldn't have been the loving savior.  If he were too stupid, Szeth would have chopped all their heads off and that would have been the end of the Diagram.

 

As for it bringing about doom on its own, I doubt it.  The Diagram seems to have way too firm a grasp on human behavior to be cold cruel logic alone.  That said, I get the feeling that he was going with the highest rate of success plan.  The Diagram might have a 90% chance of saving humanity on Roshar, but would require knocking its population down to, say, 4000 people.  Letting the Knights Radiant save the day might only have a 30% chance of success, but if things go well, they could probably save way more of the population of Roshar.  I feel like this is what he meant by saying that all else was dust.  Other options could work and might have potentially better outcomes, but since the death of the human species (since I doubt he knows about the other Shardworlds) has a utility value of negative infinity, minimizing the chance of that trumps all else, even how terrible things will be if you actually survive the process.

 

Is he liable to knock humanity back to the stone age?  Yes.  But I very strongly doubt that he'll actually pose an existential risk to the people of Roshar.

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The problem is even if he is aiming towards a 90% chance of sucess, he has no way of predicting whether current events have already pushed the end result outside that window of success. The diagram may have had a 90% chance of success on the day it was written, but that chanc eof success is probably getting smaller and smaller and smaller bcause people keep doing things Taravangion cannot control. And if only 4000 people would have been saved in that outcome, then now following it just means low probability of success and barely enough people to survive extinction.

Assuming he wrote the diagram while understanding probabilities of various events occuring and how they would affect the future his plan only works if you can continuously update the diagram.

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Even so, I think he just has to trust it and trust that things haven't degraded.  He has no way of knowing if they have or not.  For all he knows, it might need to get worse before it gets better.

 

An idea that just occurred to me...  What if Taravangian lied to himself to manipulate his own future behavior in ways that wouldn't arise unless he didn't know about it?  He remembers nothing from the day of lucidity, only what they were able to recover afterwards.  That day he'd obviously known he'd never know what happened on that day, so it's entirely possible that Taravangian came up with a surefire solution to save 70% of the population of Roshar and merely told himself the chance of success was much lower to properly motivate his non-genius self or something.  I don't think we can say that the deviations like Dalinar and Elhokar surviving assassination thanks to Kaladin were planned though.

 

There would have been no way for him to know that in a few years some random kid would end up as a Surgebinder and the captain of Dalinar's guard.  I think I have to agree with what was said above about the unpredictability of the KR.  Not only are they an unknown factor in terms of their political stances, they're only just emerging so it's not an organization, it's individuals that suddenly manifest powers.  Dalinar becoming a Bondsmith is probably about the single worst thing that could happen to the Diagram.

Edited by VoltCruelerz
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Well, on one hand it's true that chaos factor throws some spanners in the works, but everything depends on the precision of the Diagram. It's one thing "Ally with person X, then when person Y attacks, backstab him and sell him out to Z to gain his trust to attack Y together" and other thing is "Gain power over X,Y and Z". The broader and more vague is Diagram, the less it would degrade.
For example, it's pretty logical that Dalinar would try to do something with Highprinces, but Diagram doesn't know what and if he succeeds. So it simply says "If it's probable that he would unite them, dispose of him. If not, let him be". The Diagram doesn't need to specify which Highprinces would ally with Dalinar or which would go against him - those things can be judged at the moment one has to make a move. So Taravangian reads the Diagram which says "Don't let Dalinar unite them" and then he makes actions towards that goal: he checks if Dalinar is successful at uniting them, where are possible weak points in his alliances and so on. Those things don't need to be predicted by Diagram.

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Now there's another interesting thought.... If he only gets as much capacity he needs on a given day, then that means the day he wrote the diagram was the ideal day to lay out 'the plan' and it also implies that after the diagram there were likely days when he needed to be dimwitted enough to make mistakes.... That is't not necessarily the diagram itself that will lead to the best possible solution, but that screwing up while attempting to follow it will...?

That, of course, assumes that his intelligence is Not random.

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He knows the predictions are degrading, that's why he's been collecting death rattles to hopefully find some clues as to what might happen that he won't be able to know.

Which hasn't been working to well but he's out of ideas.

Yes, he knows its degrading, but he doesnt know by how much and all it takes is a small number of low probability events with massively variable outcomes to shift things well outside 'normal'

For instance, lets assume the diagram said to kill the leader of Azir then continue to kill whoever is elected to replace him repeatedly and that the intention was for azir to end up exactly as it did..... Noone wants to rule and azir is either left with no ruler ( allowing taravangion to take over directly) or ends up with a ruler that can be easily puppeted. I cannot imagine the diagram gave very high odds that the ruler would end up being a young thief who will (probably) be heavily influenced by Lift. Can the diagram now predict anything related to azir? And how will this affect anything else lift, gawx, or azir might influence?

If the diagram is pure logic and probability, taravangion could not have predicted where the edgedance would show up, that it would be lift, and that she would basically fubar his plans for azir....

Otoh, if you assume he is given the capacity required for the days events, then the diagram may well be logic, but the Nightwatcher understood where lift would appear and that taravangion was able to write the diagram so he could (for instance) trigger the azir succession and put gawyx and lift in the palace at the appropriate time to ensure the diagram cannot be followed.

I may be overthinking this....the correct solution might be to assume there a little fridge logic in the whole taravangion/diagram arc and let it slide.

Side note: i expect from the comments related to Hoid the diagram noticed that wherever he pops up, the chances of greater success increase, i bet he never leads to poorer outcomes...

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Well, on one hand it's true that chaos factor throws some spanners in the works, but everything depends on the precision of the Diagram. It's one thing "Ally with person X, then when person Y attacks, backstab him and sell him out to Z to gain his trust to attack Y together" and other thing is "Gain power over X,Y and Z". The broader and more vague is Diagram, the less it would degrade.

For example, it's pretty logical that Dalinar would try to do something with Highprinces, but Diagram doesn't know what and if he succeeds. So it simply says "If it's probable that he would unite them, dispose of him. If not, let him be". The Diagram doesn't need to specify which Highprinces would ally with Dalinar or which would go against him - those things can be judged at the moment one has to make a move. So Taravangian reads the Diagram which says "Don't let Dalinar unite them" and then he makes actions towards that goal: he checks if Dalinar is successful at uniting them, where are possible weak points in his alliances and so on. Those things don't need to be predicted by Diagram.

Thing is, taravangion is driving towards a successful outcome based on a diagram that doesnt know if dalinar will be a warleader or a peacemaker, and the probability of success of the diagram is different from the probability of success of the diagram given dalinar is a peacemaker.

If you assume taravanion wants to keep the diagram as stable as possible and that radiants add instability then the fact that dalinar is not only a peacemaker ( which taravangion wanted to avaoid) but also a bondsmith then we are now on a much more chaotic future path... Even small changes can now have large effects and actions that might have led to stability or improvement for warleader dalinar could lead to instability or negative outcomes for peacemaker dalinar.

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Another point against the Diagram: it assumes it is the only way, and seeks to remove what it can't predict instead of seeing those things as possible opportunities or alternatives.

Ideally, the Diagram should just give acurate predictions for some important events, knowledge that could be useful and a list of possible factors outside of its control and how they could be used or circunvented, leaving all the planning and execution to the readers.

Instead we have an outdated monster plan that explains exactly how to take over the world and is so inflexible it must waste resources destroying everything out of its control, and possibly creating more losses and stray variables on the way.

No great plan survives direct contact with reality. It seems that when Taravangian's intellect grows, so does his arrogance, and on the day he saw so much, he was unfortunately blind to the fact that he may have not seem enough, and that others could learn things he didn't.

EDIT: Not that I think the Diagram is of Odium. I just want to point out what I perceive as some pratical flaws in its brand of the "ends justify the means" philosophy.

Edited by CognitivePulsePattern
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I also believe that on the day he wrote it he could not concieve of not being brilliant enough to keep it up to date.

No, I am pretty sure he knew that. He just couldn't concieve that he having to rely on other people less smart than him thinking for themselves wasn't a bad thing.

EDIT: What I mean is that Mr.T when writing the Diagram, despite all his intelligence, was wrong in assuming it was better for humanity to follow half-blindly an outdated super-plan instead of using what they had to adapt and think for themselves.

To put it shortly, when his brain was the most powerful he forgot how useful the human brain is. The Nightwatcher does like complex irony if this is right.

Edited by CognitivePulsePattern
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The diagram REEKS of precognitive influence.

 

I don't care how smart Taravangian got.  There's no way that he could have conjured all of the information in the diagram with the information given to him.

 

Some of the stuff is fairly obvious.  I'll give him a pass on his fixation as Dalinar, as anyone with half a brain would know that he would be important.

 

However, predicting a bridgeman to become a radiant?  Writing the diagram in a completely unrecognizable language?  Some of his predictions are far too specific and off the wall to be pure intelligence.

 

Also, my personal pet speculation is that Taravangian wrote the Diagram in the Dawnsinger language.  You know, with the translation key, and the huge mentions that Dawnsinger civilization has gotten so far.

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I dont think the diagram ever mentions a bridgeman radiant. It just mentions that one way to find radiants is to look for people who just dont seem to die when they should....taravangion concludes there must be a radiant among the bridgemen because the story of the bridgemen saving dalinar and becoming dalinars bodyguards is so extraordinary,

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I'm almost positive that Odium had a hand in the diagram. Brandon has said that if you mapped out the intelligence of Taravangian on various days there would be an obvious pattern. This would suggest that the Day of Extreme Intelligence was an outlier, which is very suspicious amongst a pattern, or that the Day was not even apart of Taravangian's boon/curse. The diagram also runs basicly contrary to what Tanavast has told Dalinar to do. All that, mixed with the obvious precognitive elements apperent in the diagram tells me that Odium pretty much 100% influenced the diagram, then wiped Taravangian's mind. I wouldnt be suprised if the diagram is written in Yolish, which I suspect is the dawn singer language.

Even if Taravangian wasn't under the control of Odium when creating the diagram, he wrote all that stuff in a non-invested surface, meaning that Odium probably could have Ruined (in both senses of the word) what was written there.

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I see most of the argument is that the plan is outdated, but I see very little proof that it necessarily is outdated.

 

The Diagram seems on a large scale highly non-specific and more general, with few specific details that are of importance.

The diagram isn't completely correct anymore, somethings that have happened have been off by a slight degree according to what we've been shown so far.

Now assuming you know and can account for all variables and parameters prediction of the future would be possible, that's how I assume the diagram came to be, by taravangian having access to knowledge on all of those parameters and variables, he's able to make a model a Diagram that predicts the future to such a degree that it's like he can see it, then suppose he knew of the possibility of KR's and the unpredictability of them, he'd scatter them in various forms through his calculations and still come to believe it's unreliable to try to rely on KR's perhaps because 7/10 times they fail, so he determines it'd be better for humanity if they didn't interfere with the "correct path".

 

Think of the diagram as a weather-climate model, we can to some degree predict with a high level of certainty where and how weather will act in the near future, we can also with a very high degree of certainty predict, global climate many years into the future (we've been doing so since the 80s)

We can't know the exact shape of the weather at any given time, but it's possible to say how it's most likely going to look like.

 

I think the same sort of logic applies to the diagram, and they do speak of having to adjust it and take into account different things, as I understood that's what T tries to do on his brightest days, but he'd ideally like another burst to revisit the whole thing and update it to be more accurate again.

 

It also could be that it's accurate enough to keep following and it allows for enough deviation for it's goal to still be reachable even if the variations mean more/less people are saved. Azir falling out of the more direct control of T's hands might just be an allowable deviation, that doesn't matter too much in the long run.

 

of course I also think the gathering of the knights will be the end of the diagram as a viable path.

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I don't personally think Taravangian was influenced by odium when writing the diagram, there is no reason for Taravangian to have knowledge of worldhopping, perhaps he has an inkling of the possibility, but to him Roshar would be the only place where humanity exists, and his primary motivation throughout the Diagram is the survival of the human species.
...

 

I'm not sure that I can buy into the idea that Taravangian was ignorant of worldhoppers on the day he wrote the Diagram.  To begin with, he seemed to be able to intuit a number of not terribly obvious things very quickly (e.g., he seems to realize that the Honorblades are in Shinovar within a few seconds).  And although one might think that worldhopping would be too obscure even for that, remember that enough people on Roshar either know about it outright or have enough pieces to the puzzle that Taravangian should have been able to put it together while brilliant.

 

More evidence of his probable awareness comes from the Diagram itself:

"But who is the wanderer, the wild piece, the one who makes no sense?  I glimpse at his implications, and the world opens to me.  I shy back.  Impossible.  Is it?

--From the Diagram.  West Wall Psalm of Wonders: paragraph 8

(Note by Adrotagia: Could this refer to Mraize?)

 

Personally, I suspect that "the wanderer" mentioned here is Hoid, who really is only noteworthy because he's done a bunch of worldhopping.  If so, and if Taravangian can "glimpse at his implications", he must have been aware of the possibility of travelling between worlds.  But even if this quote doesn't refer to Hoid, at the very least we know that the Diagram followers know of Mraize, who is also a worldhopper (or, at the very least, a collector of otherworldly goods).  Either way, it seems unlikely that Taravangian, when brilliant, would have missed the connections.

 

I suspect that since he wished for capacity, each day he's given exactly as much intelligence/compassion as he needs to fulfill his duties to the Diagram on that day.  If he were overly smart when he took over Jah Keved, he wouldn't have been the loving savior.  If he were too stupid, Szeth would have chopped all their heads off and that would have been the end of the Diagram.

...

 

That's a very interesting idea, but we know that he spends approximately the same amount of time being brilliant as he does being stupid.  It seems unlikely that he would need to be smart/stupid an equal proportion of the time.  This seems more like a ferruchemical sort of balance to me.

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What if the nightwatcher gave Mr. T access to allomancy and the day where he wrote the diagram he had unknowingly did a duraluminum assiated atium burn?

Edit: i would like to state that i have zero evidence or proof of this. Just seemed like a cool idea/theory

Edited by stonedshaman
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I'm not sure that I can buy into the idea that Taravangian was ignorant of worldhoppers on the day he wrote the Diagram.  To begin with, he seemed to be able to intuit a number of not terribly obvious things very quickly (e.g., he seems to realize that the Honorblades are in Shinovar within a few seconds).  And although one might think that worldhopping would be too obscure even for that, remember that enough people on Roshar either know about it outright or have enough pieces to the puzzle that Taravangian should have been able to put it together while brilliant.

 

More evidence of his probable awareness comes from the Diagram itself:

"But who is the wanderer, the wild piece, the one who makes no sense?  I glimpse at his implications, and the world opens to me.  I shy back.  Impossible.  Is it?

--From the Diagram.  West Wall Psalm of Wonders: paragraph 8

(Note by Adrotagia: Could this refer to Mraize?)

 

Personally, I suspect that "the wanderer" mentioned here is Hoid, who really is only noteworthy because he's done a bunch of worldhopping.  If so, and if Taravangian can "glimpse at his implications", he must have been aware of the possibility of travelling between worlds.  But even if this quote doesn't refer to Hoid, at the very least we know that the Diagram followers know of Mraize, who is also a worldhopper (or, at the very least, a collector of otherworldly goods).  Either way, it seems unlikely that Taravangian, when brilliant, would have missed the connections.

 

 

Ok I'll concede T could possibly know of worldhopping, but it also stands to reason that T might not be aware that humanity exists elsewhere in the cosmere, He could believe that the wanderer and the ghostbloods are originally from Roshar.

 

Or and this is an interesting theory I just thought of, perhaps the ancestors of the Rosharan people were humans that fled from Yolen (Yolen = Tranquilline Halls) and T has the belief that they're therefore part of the original humans and therefore special in a different way from others, and more important to maintain that seed of humanity.

I remember at least on Scadrial humans were created by the shards there, Roshar has a mythology about a mysterious heavenly place from which they were displaced, so far on Roshar the theology/mythology has been uncannily true, the myths of voidbringers and heralds and Knights Radiants and desolations all true (though more fiction to some than others).

 

Anyhow yes I concede T likely knew of worldhopping (also knew it was very obscure and not a viable solution to his issues)

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