Comic for Thursday, May 4th
Okay, this time I will not try to claim that it’s still Thursday somewhere. Only because I am fairly sure it’s not.
So, I think I will update normal next week, and then the week after will very likely be a break from normal updates while I try to remake a buffer of some sort. I will not leave you guys entirely out in the cold, I will probably publish the little prequel story Minus Years I wrote for Patreon over that week – I don’t know quite the logistics of it, but probably will do more than one page an update as otherwise it’d run for 5 weeks (and work on a bit of a Patreon backlog and new little fun thing maybe on there, so they aren’t getting no new content on Patreon).
I would like to be a little more consistent both in the time pages have, and the time I have to do pages. I think there are process flow and allocation solutions to the problems for the most part, but I need to get a little more disciplined with how I use my time. While I’m happy to just keep things as they are in many ways, I’d also like to get back at least a little to doing more with working to improve the comic and expand the audience and set up new goals, expand the rewards, and do better on delivering the ones that exist (like… early updates… 😐 ) for Patreon – it’s not an operation about money, but such things are still nice and a good thing to work toward, since, ideally, rewards are the sort of things that benefit both the Patreons and the readers in the long run (more art, more stuff).
Anyway, I shan’t delay this already late comic further with my incessant rambling… ah… wait… I already have been for the last ten minutes?! To the presses people! Publish! Publish!
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Occam’s Razor could go for more than just science. But no, not always best applied there.
I bet panel 1 is completely wrong. The only thing he gets credit for is panel 3. You got one thing right, and even where that led you was wrong! (Probably. I assume, anyway.)
(Did she not get the memo of “best to not suggest a ‘kill them all’ plan to Mium”?)
While it can apply to a vast array of things, I think I’d throw in with Mium on this one that politics is one of the places it is least useful 🙂
I’m not sure to what Mium’s line, “I suppose in your case it’s more ‘first’ than ‘fewest,’ rather more dangerous still, I think,” is reacting, responding, or otherwise related. What’s it trying to get across?
It makes dubious sense, but, occam’s razor goes by typically verbage:
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Mium appears to be speculating that rather Kokato may haven just gone with the hypothesis supported by his first assumption rather than the hypothesis supported be the fewest assumptions.
I haven’t heard Occam’s Razor phrased that way before; I have always heard it as, “The simplest explanation is usually the most accurate.” Or, less poetically, “The least convoluted explanation is probably right.”
Though I do see how the phrasing you suggest works.
My issue with Mium’s line is that it leaps too far, since “first” and “fewest” lose the context of “assumption” and it doesn’t track with the grammatical construction of the phrasing of Occam’s Razor you’re using well enough to follow.
“Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. I suppose in your case it is more ‘first’ than ‘fewest,’ rather more dangerous still, I think,” would be how that would read if people unpacked the phrasing you were thinking of. I don’t think that paragraph tracks.
Actually, far from being dangerous, a correct application of Occam’s Razor would help significantly here, assuming we (the audience) aren’t in for a huge reveal of a reason why Peter wants a war. The reason Kokato’s been kidnapped is simply to keep him from his meeting. That really is the simplest explanation. Kokato is NOT even coming close to applying it, so scolding him for failing to do so would probably make more sense.
So maybe I’d suggest something like:
Mium: “Occam’s Razor is a useful device, Mr. Kokato, even if it is more usually applied to science than politics.”
Kokato: (same reply as in comic)
Mium: “In your case, you’re leaping from assumption to complicated assumption, failing to ask yourself what the simplest possible motive could be.” (continue with lines as printed already)
This removes the comments about “dangerous” applications of it, but fits more in line with the schoolteacher tone and more properly identifies Kokato’s failure to even glance at the simplest, most straight-forward consequence of his kidnapping: that he’s missing the meeting to which he was headed.
Also, sorry for the length of this and the presumption to give advice, but … I can’t help myself. ^^;
Oh, also, thanks for explaining it. I can’t believe I forgot to say that. >_<
It’s quite possible the fact I studied philosophy and not science is showing through on the wording, but that’s how the wording I’m familiar with goes for Occam’s razor anyway 😛
I think your notes are valid and would probably have been a better way to handle that part, it reads is a little confusing as is. Text gets moved around the page a lot when I am writing it; likely Mium’s second line there originally came right after the first without Kokato’s line between them.
The time from last word typed and page published is currently measured in minutes, so the editing process is a little abbreviated. I read through the final page and think “yes that makes sense” or “no that doesn’t make sense, go redo parts”, but, as there is a long history established for, a lot of things make sense to me that probably shouldn’t 😛
I do appreciate the feedback! I’ve noted a few times that I’m no more a writer than an artist; this is my first real writing project, so it’s a learning process. Learning processes are far more efficient with feedback, so I will never turn it down (…well, usually not. Sometimes people leave a steaming pile of bile, but that is an obviously different case than this 🙂 )
Typically speaking only a few of the words on a page are from my outline/script, and usually those are somewhat edited. Likely it was just a concept from the script/outline I tried to keep a little too hard or didn’t put enough work fitting into the scene properly – I combine a point-event model with character-based partially improvised dialogue, typically speaking the longer I spend on this merger, the better both sides (the delivery of information and the characterization of the speaker) come out.
Anyway… sorry for bit of a ramble, and thanks for the feedback 🙂 Always enjoy comments and feedback, and they help make it a better story. It’s come a long a ways since the early pages, and no small amount of that is from the readers that have helped out.
Well, I greatly enjoy the story. I have never been able to write the “episodes” that fill in event to event when I have a plot in mind. Character-driven does seem like the way to go, but even that still requires knowing where they’re going to bump in to each other.
In any event, I appreciate your work on it. I probably underestimate how much goes into each page, and it seems a monumental task to me as-is. Always glad to help edit, if you would like such help, and pleased to offer feedback when I have any I feel worth sharing.
^_^
I plan on someday soliciting help for the editing, but there are a few hurdles between here and there still. For starters, I would need to actually get the buffer back up so the pages existed before they were published 🙂
As for writing, well, I’m not the best person to offer advice on how to, but all I can say is that in my experience the only thing to do is do it, and than do it again and again until it works slightly better. I think writer’s block is everyone’s default state, and to overcome it you just keep whacking your head into the blank page until ideas fall out. That was pretty much the entire existing of Past Utopia Print!
For me I think I have a solid idea how a scene is going to play out, then I sit down and promptly realize that there is somehow a huge gap between what is in my head and what I can draw/write on paper. So I developed the model making a tent post style outline, and using the “how would the character deal with this” style story telling to fill in the gaps.
It’s basically an on going exercise though. Minus Years was my stab at episodic content, and I think it failed miserably at that (people like it I think, since it’s more of characters people like, but it failed miserably at being a self contained story imo).
Publishing my
failuresdubious successes online is still one of the harder steps, there is a temptation to just keep redoing or working on something till it’s “right”, but that’s the path that leads to no more updates/content 😛Thanks for the advice; I’m aware I probably should just push at it more. It was more meant as praise for your sticktoitiveness than a plea for help, but the advice is still appreciated.
Honestly, posting your “dubious successes” online is an interesting thing to say is one of the hard steps; it’s amazing how many webcomics fail and falter for the opposite reason: the artist is too willing to post something online when he isn’t able to sustain the pace.
So, while the loss of your buffer is sad, the fact that you keep producing at the advertised rate is, itself, a quantifiable success.
Oh man Kokato is making some good leaps on one critical, uncleared AND wrong assumption: That he knows all the parties who have their hands involved. Which is a very BAD assumption to be making in the best of times, and Peter makes it even worse.
I think he is quite used to knowing what is going on, it just doesn’t occur he might be wrong because he’s not very used to that idea. Also he is probably pretty unnerved/panicked/completely shitting himself, at the situation he’s found himself in.
I get the feeling he is not really inclined to listen to advisers. This is a pretty hazardous affliction for a country leader. He seems to be a big believer in centralized authority (Saria told Ryn the ambassador to Malsa was largely symbolic because Kokato handled it personally, Mium implied there was no Kokato trusts, which is why he left a sealed order in case he went missing instead of a delegate). He probably starts with the assumption that he is right and justifies the world from there.
“I’m sitting here, teaching my sister basic human etiquette, and you decide we’re from fancy human families. Come on, man. If it jumps to conclusions any faster, your squishy meat-brain is going to strain itself and have a nasty spill.”
I’m so going to have to use that in the first person the next time someone asks why I ask so many questions about something. “Because Questions help you to find things out that you don’t already know, rather than repackaging things you already think.”
You may want to make it ‘repackaging’ which sounds less stilted but that could just be Mium.
I agree with the modified wording, changed it. It’s probably some fancy thing about tenses. I don’t know.
This is priceless! ^^ Kokato is so far out of his depth that he doesn’t realize that he isn’t on solid ground. 🙂
Viewing the world through a political filter is leading him in all the wrong directions. It’s good that Mium’s default expression is “Poker Face”. ^^
It’s nice to see that Ila is focusing on the important topic, and I love the comment about “Occam’s Razor”.
Although when dealing with Peter’s plots, Kokato would get a better result with “Occam’s WeedWhacker” ^^
Ila follows the Occam’s Spoon method to narrow options to the ones most likely to result in more ice cream.
tasty food is always on point with ila. tho mirs influence shines through; “it would be so much easier if everyone was DEAD!!!!!!!!”
i cant put the 8 red underlines that mir would put on it tho.
Below, PastUtopia stated, ” The problem with people that are wrong is they so frequently got there on purpose. ”
My impression of Mr. Kokato is that this could be more true than anyone would guess. Readers may be guilty of the very thing they are accusing Mr. Kokato – of hastily jumping to the wrong conclusions.
Consider what you would do if you were in Mr. Kokato’s shoes – kidnapped and being held against your will. You have little to no idea of who your kidnappers are, why they kidnapped you, or what they want – what they -REALLY- want.
If you are smart, you may realize that asking direct questions may only result in them telling you what they want you to know and what they want you to believe. They may not want you to know anything. Or, they could lie about such things to further their agendas. For instance, they could misidentify themselves, laying the blame for the kidnapping on one of their rivals or enemies. That may result in the Malsan government eliminating an enemy or rival. They may lie about their agenda to achieve a similar effect.
BUT, if you jump to all sorts of conclusions without asking any questions, that rather thwarts such a strategy. Moreover, if you keep making bold, outrageous assumptions, you may upset your captors to the point that they accidentally blurt out something just to correct you, likely revealing or giving clues to their true objectives.
Then again, Mr. Kokato is a politician. And he’s a figurehead, at that. I may be giving him too much credit. But I wanted to throw this possibility out there.
Besides, I’ve read that some recent U.S. presidents supposedly have a high IQ. Though, having a high IQ doesn’t necessarily make a person wise or even clever. But, I think highly successful politicians have to be talented actors. After all, they routinely lie to their constituents very convincingly.
I see the possibility, but it is hard to see what his end game there would be. From what we have seen, Mium is not really interrogating him. Trying to defuse interrogation only works if they are actually questioning on.
I wonder how IQ applies to Mium? Does he have a functionally infinite IQ? Compared to humans, throwing quantitative reasoning at him would be an almost pointless exercise. I wonder how Ila compares? It seems implied that her ability to calculate things exceeds human capacity (the six-spell-parallel processing), but is that just Eidos calculations or can she do math basically instantly like Mium as well? Miko’s test to see if she was running on Mium’s mind was to be instantly process math problems, which is opens a whole new can of worms. Is Miko’s IQ while plugged into MYM the same as MYMs? Whose IQ is that then?
I’m pretty sure Kokato is attempting to establish a position of “I’m in control.” People who can seemingly divine truths the ones with the obvious power thought hidden appear to be in command of the situation even without a single visible source of power at hand.
Unfortunately, after the third or fourth totally wrong guess, you lose the chance at that aura even if you get it right eventually, and he doesn’t seem to understand that.
And what I’m pretty sure Mium’s getting at is that he’s so busy looking for the complex, far-reaching political consequences and the potentially short-sighted but still medium-range agenda of the “neophytes” who’ve “lucked” into kidnapping him that he’s missing the obvious consequence that might be the purpose: he’s missing that meeting to which he was headed.
He might be impressed by their wetwork skills, but he thinks them misguidedly applying them for an uninformed cause.
According to a 2012 article, ‘Does IQ Test Really Measure Intelligence’, there may be at least three components of intelligence: short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal recall. As A.I., I’m sure that Mium and Ila would ace any test that hinges on short term memory or verbal recall. They’d also ace practically anything involving math. In those capacities, their IQ may be nearly infinite.
Their reasoning would be insanely high, too. Abstract reasoning tests are about being able to quickly identify patterns, logical rules and trends in new data, integrate this information, and apply it to solve problems. If Mium and Ila are anything like A.I. research in real life, they should be built to excel at it. Even so, their reasoning could not be infinite. Some problems are just way, way too abstract and/or complex. Heck, it seems that there are a number of things about humans and their society which Mium fails to understand. And, even for an extraordinarily advanced A.I., that sounds about right, IMO.
As for Miko plugged into MYM: She’d surely have capabilities comparable to MYM. If it’s sufficiently advanced science, then manipulating reality has got to involve a -lot- of math. But, obviously, it would not be fair to attribute the IQ of a Miko/MYM merge to Miko since she’s borrowing a lot of capacity. (That, and Miko’s brain overheated after only a couple of seconds of this.)
Anyway, IMO at least, there’s more to intelligence than just memory retention and reasoning. The value of a creative mind should not be underestimated. And a mind that finds it difficult to express itself or impossible to come up with original ideas is rather limited.
I like how Mium almost explicitly tells Kokato that he’s completely wrong, but that he (Mium) is willing to clarify, but Kokato keeps tricking himself further.
The problem with people that are wrong is they so frequently got there on purpose.
The quip game is on point today between this page and these comments.