digitalbusker

Well now I feel bad for cluttering up the thread. The first paragraph you quoted is Shallan speaking, yes. But the sentence between the quoted fragments is Shallan-as-narrator thinking about how convincing Kaladin is, not Shallan-as-narrator patting herself on the back for how much authority she put into "I...". The next paragraph picks up with Kaladin speaking, and has a more traditional saidism (he said, firm).

Both of those "he"s are referring to Kaladin.

On a similar note: I started a Way of Kings reread after finishing Oathbringer, and came across Lirin telling Kaladin he couldn't kill to protect, and comparing that to "trying to stop a storm by blowing harder". Which Kaladin does, kinda, in Oathbringer.

@hoser, I don't think we have any evidence that nonsapient spren (and the Gloryspren do appear to be nonsapient, not the type to build cities or have a capital) can mutate into higher forms in the way you're describing. It might turn out it's just really rare, in which case you can point to this thread as evidence of your genius, but right now it doesn't seem likely. And even if a nonsapient spren could take on greater power I'd expect to wind up with something like Cusicesh, rather than something at a level with two spren deliberately created by Shards. Although I suppose it's possible the Shards decided to Invest the self-uplifted spren rather than create a new one from scratch.

Not saying there isn't also a Realmatic dimension, but on a basic level crediting Odium for your shameful actions is a lie that puts you in his debt, while reinforcing the idea that he can control you in the future.

I'm several pages out of sync with this thread, but I wanted to say: any discussion of Adolin's mental state that doesn't include PTSD is incomplete. True, he doesn't display classic symptoms (except his temper and impulsivity), but he's clearly familiar with the condition (his understanding of what Kaladin needed after Kholinar wasn't just from knowing Kal well), and realistically he shouldn't be "fine" after all he's been through. The Radiants seem to be doing something of a Grand Tour of mental illnesses, so I'd expect to see PTSD represented at some point, even if not via Adolin (Jasnah clearly has some trauma related issues, for instance). I also think we shouldn't assume the level of brokenness displayed by the first KR is a good gauge of the minimum level necessary. Kaladin, Shallan, Jasnah, Dalinar, et al are the low hanging fruit, the black swans that were easy for the spren to find without assistance from any mortal organization.

The color draining associated with Awakening doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what kind of Investiture powered it. Though I expect if you wanted to power an awakened object with Stormlight you'd have to attach a gem or sphere to it.

Alethi people think anybody with round eyes looks Shin. I suspect some of the worldhoppers who have gone unremarked are in disguise and some are from cultures that also have what we'd think of as Asian features. It does look like the original group of human refugees had a sizeable contingent of people with what we would call Caucasian features, though the current level of diversity argues for the presence of other phenotypes as well.

We have seen that the speed at which Stormlight heals you can vary depending on how you're getting it (in the fight with Gavilar, Szeth's Honorblade healing is much slower than what we'd later see with Kaladin or other Radiants). Is it possible that somebody with Regrowth just naturally heals faster from Stormlight than somebody without? We could get some hints from Lift chapters, I think. Or Renarin's not a dummy and saw the giant stone fist coming to smoosh him, and fired up his Regrowth palliatively.

We don't have explicit evidence that all the humans on Roshar are descended from those referred to in the Eila Stele, but the Eila Stele itself provides some pretty strong evidence that there weren't any humans on Roshar before the "Voidbringers" arrived: These Voidbringers know no songs. They cannot hear Roshar, and where they go, they bring silence. They look soft, with no shell, but they are hard. They have but one heart, and it cannot ever live.

It seems like the Unmade need to be captured by somebody whose Issues align with theirs, so I'm calling it now: Teft will attempt to capture the Heart of the Revel at some point.

The only way I can see "surgebinding will destroy the world" being the reason for the Recreance is if somehow the Radiants and their spren were all convinced that the Nahel bond was in itself destroying the world, not in a "potential nuclear annihilation" kind of way or even in a "it's probably already too late to stop catastrophic climate change" kind of way but in a "this flask of nitroglycerin is precariously perched on the edge of the crib and the baby inside is throwing a tantrum" kind of way. If that's the case, then what they did seems like a pretty good tactic to suppress surgebinding on Roshar for a long time (that was certainly the effect). I think it's more likely that it was some combination of guilt over human origins and guilt over creating the parshmen by imprisoning the Unmade that was giving them Voidlight. (I spent most of Oathbringer convinced the Recreance reveal was going to be about creating the parshmen, not the other thing.) Even so, it seems like they must have thought they were going to accomplish something. Maybe Nale is right and if all the surgebinders are gone then things will get better, and his order screwed it up by not going along?

Yeah, but if you're careful you can get it back.

To answer the subject line question: Hello, as best I recall, my reaction to that reveal was sadness, not anger. I didn't know any of the spoilery reasons why Kal's decision would ultimately work out, so yeah it felt like a really stupid call*, but it didn't, to me, feel out-of-character stupid, which is what it generally takes to piss me off. I totally get you being upset, though. I've had reactions like that to stupid character decisions that made life difficult for the characters for no good reason, too. I hope you stick it out through at least WoR, though, because if you don't find a whole crop of new things to be pissed about, I think you'll like where Kaladin winds up. *: It was a really stupid call. A decision doesn't retroactively become better when factors you were unaware of at the time make things work out.

Outis, that's a really interesting question, and I think it's going on my personal list of questions-to-ask-if-and-when. Have an upvote. Intuitively it seems like it should reduce your capacity for parasocial interaction, but I don't see an obvious Realmatic framework for it unless fictional characters are actually "real" in some Realmatic sense. ...and I'm pretty sure reducing my capacity to form emotional connections with fictional characters would make Voyager more enjoyable for me.

Wasing of the living in Kansas, whering warmonths bein of boxnbox times of the twistcloud. Being wasing skylooks of the greening tonight, wasing of the reckoning of neartos wasing probably wiling twistcloud times tonight.

(Firefly, yes.) "Wasing alls of the seeing the man of the hanging of the spacing ship with the having of the gun of really bigging?" "Also? Wasing can of the killing with the brain." "Wasing a winding leaf. Watching of soaring." Wasing entertaining inordinately the translating of the "ain't" and the "y'all".

TenSoon, definitely.

"Wasing the seeming we of the getting here in justing the nick of time. Whatting of the making of us?" "Wasing the big damning heroes, sir." "Ain'ting we just."

I am a stick.

I will. Get. Dangerous.

I would imagine that the other senses would get lumped into one of the traditional five, for Windwhispers. Kinesthetic sense doesn't seem out of place for a Touchmind. Also: Touchmind sounds dirty.

For the record, I don't actually think Taravangian's intelligence-based sterilization and/or euthanasia program would be a good thing, either in the sense of being morally justifiable or being a net benefit to society (barring some kind of Diagram-level genius twist that I'm not smart enough to comprehend, but I think we can rule that out on the day in question). I suppose I should have mentioned that in my post, but I didn't want to risk derailing the thread into a euthanasia debate.

Two things. First, on the original question, here paraphrased as "If Taravangian loses empathy as he gains intelligence, why was he apparently so much better at predicting human behavior on the Diagram day than on the very-smart-but-not-Diagram-smart day when he proposed euthanizing people of low intelligence?": I think it's down to use of heuristics. In case you're unfamiliar, a heuristic is a problem-solving technique that isn't guaranteed to produce the best answer, but is usually close enough. You use a heuristic when the optimal strategy isn't known or when you haven't got the time/resources to execute it. There are lots of interesting heuristics in human psychology. One of those is empathy, although we don't usually think of it as a heuristic. If you want to know how someone will react to something (e.g. being told "You are too stupid to live and should therefore kill yourself immeditately.") the closest we can imagine to an optimal solution would probably involve something like collecting all the data you have about the person's behavior in the past and trying to build a model of their response to arbitrary input based on that. That's really hard, so what you and I actually do to attack the question starts with applying the question to ourselves ("Well I know I wouldn't kill myself just because the King told me to, so...."). We can adjust to some extent for the different experiences and circumstances of the person we're imagining ourselves as, but fundamentally we're using our own mind as a proxy for the other person's, rather than building a model of that other person's mind inside our own. I think that's what explains Taravangian's apparent boneheadedness on Euthanasia Day compared to Diagram Day. He was brilliant enough to see the ways his idea would improve the world in the coming generations, but not brilliant enough to directly model the minds of his subjects in his head. So he fell back on the empathy heuristic, which was flawed because he was in a brilliant/manic/sociopathic state where he absolutely would have been willing to kill himself if presented with a compelling argument that it was the best option. On Diagram Day, on the other hand, he actually did have enough mental processing power to model other human minds directly, without falling back on his thoroughly-broken empathy heuristic, which is why on that day he was able to understand human behavior well enough to predict world events with what appears to be near-perfect accuracy. He lost his empathy, but he didn't need it any more, because he was able to do the emotional math in his head. (That's still not to suggest that the Diagram won't turn out to be fundamentally flawed in some way related to the "hearts of men," to borrow a phrase. That trope is so deeply ingrained in our culture that I will be amazed and impressed if it doesn't creep in somewhere.) That brings us to Thing Two. I hadn't thought of this before now, but if on Diagram Day Taravangian was able to compensate for his lack of empathy by coming at it the long way 'round via intelligence, maybe when/if he has a day at the other extreme he'll be able to compensate for his lack of intelligence via compassion somehow. This provides an interesting way out for the "It would be cool if Taravangian were wrong and it's actually his compassionate/dumb self that has the capacity to save the world, but how does a drooling idiot save the world, regardless of how compassionate he is?" conundrum. How cool would it be if, on the Anti-Diagram Day, Taravangian is so open to and connected* with his fellow beings that he becomes a vessel for the collective will of humanity (and possibly the Listeners)? Or maybe it would open him up to some kind of supernatural influence, clearing away enough of his ego that, say, Cultivation could step in and get some things done. *: Upvote to Moogle for observing the similarity to Feruchemical duralumin.