Jochi.

[Scadrian Truthwatcher]

I can’t find the quote right now, but at some point in RoW, Jasnah offhandedly mentions, whilst saying how Shalash was a great firsthand historical resource and what not, something along the lines of “All those arguments and Jochi had been right and she had been wrong.”

Whilst Jasnah is not perfect, statistically she should have won about half of those debates. I may have got the quote wrong, but that is a huge anomaly! All those arguments?

Is it possible that our beloved Thaylen baker-scholar is more than he says? I doubt he’s a Herald, but could he be a Worldhopper or someone else who would have witnessed those events firsthand too?

[Dracnor he/him]

5 hours ago, Scadrian Truthwatcher said:

I can’t find the quote right now, but at some point in RoW, Jasnah offhandedly mentions, whilst saying how Shalash was a great firsthand historical resource and what not, something along the lines of “All those arguments and Jochi had been right and she had been wrong.”

Whilst Jasnah is not perfect, statistically she should have won about half of those debates. I may have got the quote wrong, but that is a huge anomaly! All those arguments?

Is it possible that our beloved Thaylen baker-scholar is more than he says? I doubt he’s a Herald, but could he be a Worldhopper or someone else who would have witnessed those events firsthand too?

Or they just have two different ways to look at historical events and human behavior. E.g., in that chapter, the example that Jasnah gave were ones where she looked for rationnal decision-making from past rulers, while the ones of her opponents who were ultimately right favored human failures / unexamplarity.

Add that to the fact that Jasnah might be exagerating (this is her point of view, and she's frustrated, she might look over debates she won but that had little value to her), and it's not that surprising.

 

Bonus : the statiscally 50% win is an illusion. First they can both be wrong. And even so, I higlhly doubt there have been enough debates for the average to converge to 50/50. And even even so, thet debates are not indepedant (methodology / way of thinking, etc, that's a huge bias). So no way you can apply that convergence theorem to the average ^^

Edited January 22, 2021 by Dracnor

[yulyulk]

Jochi is actually the Herald Vedel disguised as a male Thaylen pastry chef disguised as a female philosopher! (just kidding.)

[Kyn]

Rhythm of War Ch. 99 (emphasis mine):

Quote

In her lifetime studying history, Jasnah had been guided by two principles. First, that she must cut through the biases of the historians in order to understand the past. Second, that only in understanding the past could she properly prepare for the future. She’d dedicated so much to this study. But a life’s work could be shaken when history got up and started talking to you.

She leafed through papers more valuable than the purest emerald, filled with her interviews with the Heralds Ash and Taln. Living history. People who had seen the events she’d read about. In essence, years of her life had been wasted. What good were her theories now? They were halfway-reliable re-creations of what might have happened, pieced together from fragments of different manuscripts.

Well, now she could simply ask. The Challenge of Stormhold? Oh, Ash had been there. King Iyalid had been drunk. The treaty of four nights? A delaying tactic intended to position the enemy for a betrayal. All those debates, and Jochi was right while Jasnah was wrong. Settled as easily as that.

 

On 1/22/2021 at 7:36 AM, Scadrian Truthwatcher said:

Whilst Jasnah is not perfect, statistically she should have won about half of those debates. I may have got the quote wrong, but that is a huge anomaly! All those arguments?

That’s…not the way statistics and debates work.

A person is only as likely to be correct as their information and interpretations are accurate. If two people argue and the person with a vastly more accurate model wins (nearly) every single debate, that’s statistically likely...because statistics expect a better model perform and predict proportionately better.

Spoiler

(Except in lucky/interesting cases where a wrong interpretation amusingly predicts, or at least models, events sometimes more accurately than the actual relevant details. Like the way regional ice cream consumption in the US tends to predict violence because both correlate with increased temperatures).

Think of it this way. If one person believes the Earth is flat, and makes their predictions of real-world behaviors based on this assumption, they may occasionally get something right. But if a person believes the Earth is roughly spherical, and makes their predictions based on that, they will be fairly consistently correct (they may need more detail to always predict correctly) because their model and their assumptions far more closely echo reality.

In debates about historical events, whoever’s assumptions about the actual situation are most similar to the reality (or least dissimilar), whoever’s reading of the personalities and relationships is more insightful, and whoever most closely recreates the social and cultural environment is dramatically more likely to be right...even consistently. In fact, it is to be expected that if somebody misunderstood the historical and cultural setting and personalities, they would be highly likely to be wrong nearly all of the time.

On 1/22/2021 at 1:30 PM, Dracnor said:

Or they just have two different ways to look at historical events and human behavior. E.g., in that chapter, the example that Jasnah gave were ones where she looked for rationnal decision-making from past rulers, while the ones of her opponents who were ultimately right favored human failures / unexamplarity.

That is probably most of the reason for Jasnah being fairly consistently wrong in this particular case. A person like Jashah, who relies so heavily on learning, might paradoxically be disadvantaged by her preference for data and reason. She needs a lot of information or observation to know enough about individual participants in an action to use their personalities and emotionality to guide her predictions. She’s unlikely to accurately assess human causes behind events if her own extreme rationality makes her assume historical events had similarly rational actors, because this rarely actually happens – most human decisions are emotional or reactive and only justified afterwards. Most people aren’t Jashah.

Yes, Jasnah’s particular, rigorous and data-oriented scholarly tendencies make her well-suited to predicting what is most likely to happen given enough input data, or what pattern of events is likely, or what is statistically probable or most likely across a wide number of events (which is how statistics work). But these same tendencies ill suit her to judge why individual humans do what they do, or what will happen in any particular circumstance about which she must make situational assumptions rather than having concrete data.

[Jondesu he/him]

I read that as Jochi being right about one particular instance that she asked Shalash about. Not everything.