CryoZenith

On 14.02.2022 at 2:32 PM, Elf said:

What's compartmentalization mean?

In psychology, compartmentalization is a conscious process of mild dissociation where you deliberately isolate conflicting perspectives or desires in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.

@Szeth_Pancakes That's... sort of possible to do with compartmentalization, but not the way you think. Compartmentalization simply enables you to put yourself in a mindstate where you are willing to do something that you wouldn't normally be willing to do. But it can't be used for novel goal-building, more goes into that. Someone who compartmentalizes in order to be able to do war crimes already believes, in the abstract, without compartmentalizing, that it is morally justifiable to commit war crimes. They just can't bring themselves to do it easily from their normal stance. Compartmentalization can turn a person from potentially dangerous to dangerous; it can't turn a person from safe to dangerous. There are mental tricks that can help you do the latter as well, but this doesn't work for it.

Well, hm, yes and no. Mostly yes. I think it's fair to say that Sazed is resistant to the Intents of Harmony when it comes to his thinking. So you could call him personally lucky. But his external actions, the way he actually interacts with the world, regardless if he's personally retaining his sanity and humanity, ARE severely censored by the shardic Intents, even now, after only 300 years as vessel. So I don't know if I would call the people of Scadrial lucky for having a sane/human Vessel as a shard, since he can't act on that sanity/humanity.

Yeah, you pointed out the problem yourself. They wouldn't just need feruchemy, they would need compounding. With iron it's whatever because weight is not like a biologically vital thing but for the bendalloy for example you'd need to be at a deficit to store in the first place.

Another *potential issue with large sizes is warmth. Organisms give off heat based on their surface area and produce heat based on their amount of muscle, so as you go up in size the former scales quadratically but the latter scales with the cube of the size increase. (I say potentially because kandra can do some funky stuff with their anatomy, so this might be easy for them to overcome even without magic)

I'm not saying the spren will help by being scientists. I'm saying the spren will help by enabling more people to use Transportation, which will expose them to worldhoppers from more scientifically developed planets, which will accelerate Roshar's scientific development through trade.

I do agree that there are infrastructural hurdles, but soulcasting helps rather than hurts there. For example, on Roshar you can't mine uranium (because there aren't uranium mines) but once an Elsecaller learns from a Taldain darksider about nuclear power plants and uranium, he will be able to soulcast a bunch of uranium and "get there" anyway.

10^(-1)/10

Striking enough I hope.

Nightwish/10

That's a very good point! Cancer resistance from high investiture counteracting the negative effects of not having a magnetosphere while maintaining the neutral/positive effects of increased genetic drift. 

23 hours ago, Thaidakar the Ghostblood said:

I am a stick

Lies.

There might be an element of structural integrity between Connection and some types of cognitive shadows. In other words, it might be the case that for some types of cognitive shadows, Connection plays a key part in their survival in the first place, and if they gained duralumin ferring powers and started filling a duraluminmind, a possible consequence of filling too much might be instantly self-booting to the Beyond.

Here's the Merriam-Webster entry:

masturbatory (adj):

1: of, relating to, or involving masturbation

2: excessively self-absorbed or self-indulgent

And the very first example phrase for definition 2 on MW is about writing books.

1 hour ago, Tani said:

so what does it mean when applied to fiction?

Patting yourself on the back.

I would take A-brass F-zinc. It's probably one of the most potent combinations out of combat, and I'm a big fan of not going into combat :D.

Making that list just made me realize how little existing Camilo did in the story. He was basically a prop that could've been cut.

Wait, I just realized.

Mirabel - Bondsmith (unite the family)

Abuela - Skybreaker (follow the rules)

Luisa - Stoneward (good ol' reliable)

Isabella - Lightweaver (keep appearances)

Julieta - Edgedancer (*healing*)

Dolores - Truthwatcher (Knows the secrets, can't keep them secret)

Pepa - Dustbringer (Has to exercise constant self-mastery to not accidentally kill people with her mood)

Bruno - Windrunner (I know his powerset per se is more like corrupted truthwatcher, but his actual actions (I will protect people from myself) is more windrunnerish)

Antonio - Willshaper (freedom of the wild)

Camilo - Ok we *honestly* don't know enough about Camilo to give him an order, he's like the least explored character in the entire musical. I guess Elsecaller is left but that doesn't work.

1 hour ago, Elf said:

Girls are the scary ones for boys and boys are the scary ones for girls. 

Edit: of course this changes depending on your sexual orientation

As a bi person, I can tell you that I'm scared, not of girls I date or guys I date, but of their relatives. :3

It's like "Okay so I think it's time to introduce you to my..." "Hold that thought, I need three coffees right now."

Technically it's more than biological immortality. Biological immortality is simply the concept that there isn't something in your internal biology that hard caps your lifespan. For example, tigers are biologically mortal because they never stop growing, which eventually imposes hydrostatic limits on how much blood their hearts can pump, whereas lobsters are biologically immortal because nothing internal to them is in a finite clock.

So in that sense, you could say that high-breath awakeners and Siah Aimians are biologically immortal, sure, but the term doesn't correctly describe entities like fused or heralds. The latter *actually* preserve themselves throughout deaths, they don't just resist senescence.

5 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

The problem the Rosharans will have is lack of theoretical basis. They can use magic to bypass the lack of tech (e.g. Soulcasting metals hard to make by conventional means) but there are a lot of things that they won't even think of trying, since they don't have the base knowledge to suggest that they are possible.

As I said, I think this is a problem that fixes itself over time (and by "over time" I mean in the mid term, not in the long term). Because eventually more spren will bond people (potentially even lots of them if the BAM plotline is resolved and they fix deadeye-ism) and more Elsecallers will pop up, and more tech-trade with worldhoppers will happen.

Idk. I just stopped being intimidated by other people by deciding that I am awesome. Like, I have a tiny compartment in my head in which I allow myself to believe that I am infallible and worth my weight in gold. And when I have to enter a social situation in which it benefits me to have that mindset, I just temporarily dip in.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4DBBQkEQvNEWafkek/dark-arts-of-rationality (Intentional Compartmentalization)

However I don't know how much faith I have in the efficacy of this method for most people. It works for me, to a certain extent, because my opinion of myself has always been good.

Ofc we're not scary-scary. We don't give off the aura of a lion or bird of prey (those people don't... nerd out in book fanbase servers, typically). We're more akin to... the sort of "scary" that makes you feel inadequate and self-conscious, like gazing upon a particularly intricate and grandiose edifice, or looking up at a starry night sky in a low light pollution area. We're not unapproachable because we cause you a fight-or-flight response, we're unapproachable because we cause you immense social anxiety.

uwu

@Aon Ene Haha sorry, for some reason I forgot to follow this thread so didn't notice when more questions came in.

I prefer sociology. However I think someone would be an ineffectual sociologist if they neglected psychology entirely, so it's important to understand it at least at an undergraduate level and to read newly released studies (and I mean read studies, not the abstracts of studies; some people are eternally lazy haha). (also apart from the hobby level, legal psychology is a mandatory module here in law uni, so I went through that last year)

As much as I am ashamed to admit it, I don't know as much about cryonics as I should. My understanding of it is probably above a layman's, but I should still do more digging. Also I'm not signed up for the procedure with a lab yet, so I should probably take care of that soon, especially with covid looming seemingly permanently on the horizon :)). Thanks for the reminder.

@Sequence You know, I never thought about that. What an interesting question. 7 PM.

Not you, you're just salt on the (spiritweb) wound opened by Syl originally :3 (if it even means anything for something to have happened originally in relation to something else. Eternalism is confusing.)

Just now, Ixthos said:

Or ... do you mean you will have hated reverse causality yesterday? 

I mean that if Brandon will have decided to randomly give you a cameo appearance in Stormlight 6 or something, I would have been incorrect about my assessment that my least favorite character in SA is Venli :3.

Oh wow, you just reminded me that time and causality are different in the SR than in the PR or CR. So then the ideal of what you could be can allow for present you to be filled with investiture that flows through cracks opened... in the future.

Ugh. It's definitely plausible, Syl definitely makes a solid argument for this working, but I'll be honest, man, I just hate reverse causality :)).

Hm. I have a small issue with the phrasing "differing from the ideal version of yourself". Because that alludes to the way healing works in the cosmere, which funnily enough is evidence against some of this stuff. Like, when someone with healing magic heals themselves, they don't become worse at healing magic. (and you could argue that's because they're only healing physical body, not their spiritweb, but Brandon explicitly said that gold compounders can heal their spiritweb itself, and so can Hoid, so that doesn't work). If there was a strict connection (lowercase c) between performing arcana and spiritweb cracks, in the sense that ability to perform arcana was strictly conditioned by there existing cracks that could be filled by foreign investiture, even if it's not a linear relationship, then you'd expect to see at least some loss of power from self-healing, but there seems to be none.

So like, to clarify my exact hypothesis, I think everyone has microcracks in their spiritweb, sure, but I think that even someone with a perfectly intact spiritweb could use minor arcana, whether that person exists or not.

Daily reminder that there's a difference between "I'm totally cool with being single." and "I am single and it's hard for me to get out of this, so I'll cultivate being cool with it."

The former is natural, the latter is adaptive (and sometimes maladaptive).

So, my message to the aromantics out there: Keep doing what you're doing, it's totally cool and valid. Don't let society pressure you into dating if you don't want it.

So, my message to the people out there who have doubts about themselves: Single positivity is NOT the be-all-end-all of advice. There's nothing wrong with you for wanting to be in a relationship, and not everyone can be perfectly happy single. You will have regrets down the line if you don't try dating. So go date.

PSA over