chaosvii
Junior Member
I absolutely did not expect this!
Posts: 84
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Post by chaosvii on Apr 9, 2014 13:17:35 GMT
They lied to him. And while I don't think it was only a joke, he was kept from passing on under false pretences. That he seemed to be happy does not make the rotd's actions morally right. There you suppose that lying is unconditionally wrong. Yet, we often have good reasons to give it good value. Lying to someone else tends to be an expression of "I don't trust you with the truth, but I do trust you if I deny you a chance to it." In this case, it was a complex situation where Mort was granted a consolation stay among the land of the living for what he lost by dying. Vampire guy gave the young soldier orders not only because he thought it would work, but because it would minimize the amount of work that the ROTD would do in order to help Mort handle the truth; to cope with what Mort has come to terms with. Nosferatu's current attitude suggests that he is dismissive of Mort's ability to make his own choices and handle things properly. That he's not all that willing to tell Mort the truth, and indeed, hasn't done so for several decades. There are other approaches that don't involve the same degree of deception. Tell Mort that spending time at the Court is important, and if asked why, let him know that this because it is important for Mort to have experiences he was denied during life, that Jones values that injustice be close to righted, and by extension, so does the ROTD. Having a job at the Court will allow Mort to spend his time learning in a place that is interested in learning about him, and if Mort wants to do something else, he is free to make an appeal. And if Mort doesn't ask, they can mention it to him anyway, and ask what Mort thinks. Sure there's a risk that he won't handle it well, but if the ROTD doesn't want that responsibility, there are others that are willing to take on responsibility such as Ankou, or perhaps even Jones. As currently presented, the ROTD (or at the very least, just this bloody guy) doesn't care what Mort thinks as long as there is no fuss from Mort. Perhaps the lie turned out okay, but it still prevented Mort from ever having the chance to use the truth and instead forced him to work around a falsehood as he spent his time at the Court. Perhaps he would have had better experiences with that truth, perhaps not, but he wasn't trusted with the truth for several decades for what appears to be the sake of convenience. Which personally doesn't strike me as a good reason. One of the ways they could make this lie have no redeeming value is if they forbade Ankou from telling Mort the truth due to their sway over Psychopomps. I don't think it's likely but it happens to be consistent with what we're presented so far in the story.
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Post by ctso74 on Apr 9, 2014 13:42:49 GMT
'Nozy! You got some 'splainin to do!' - I know Ricky never caught Lucy on fire, but I bet he thought about it, sometimes.
Dichotomies and absolutes are rarely ever true, which includes the "black and white" of lying. As for where in the grey mess this lie resides, hopefully we'll find out next, with some major backpedaling from Needs Napkin the Nosferatu. Maybe, there are some more concrete reasons for Mort situation. Or...
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Post by alpacalypse on Apr 9, 2014 13:52:21 GMT
Something else that bothers me is that more than just being "trapped" in this world as a ghost, he also was trapped in the Court by hs "very important" job, unable to travel like normal people or spirits might. Somehow i feel if Jones wanted him to be around for medium training purposes that she would have told him, give him a job to do so by herself. But, since she didnt really seem to be working for the court when Mort died it, it seems she really just wanted a way for him to "live" a little longer as replacement for her negligence cause his life to end so early. I feel this situation is entirely on the shoulders of the RoTD
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Post by Deepbluediver on Apr 9, 2014 14:22:43 GMT
Clearly, the biggest drawback to being a ghost-vampire is the complete lack of situational awareness. Even Ankou knows when to step back and say "whoa dude, you're on your own here". Coincidentally (and totally unrelated, just throwing this out there, but...) fire is one of the traditional methods of killing a vampire, is it not?
Honestly, I hope it gets diffused with something like "we tell them that because it makes the transition easier for them" or something, and the ROTD doesn't end up actually being quite the douchebags they've looked like so far.
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Post by csj on Apr 9, 2014 14:40:42 GMT
I doubt we'll see fisticuffs right now (annie prolly needs to chill a little), but Nos definitely has some 'splaining to do.
Exposition incoming.
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CGAdam
Junior Member
Posts: 86
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Post by CGAdam on Apr 9, 2014 15:02:53 GMT
See, this is why Annie is more badass than Kat. Kat hid behind Mort when Ankou showed up. Ankou is now inching away from Annie when she's heated.
Also, Annie's staring down a much more intense version of the ROTD than Kat. I wonder if she'd have told off a Cthulu-esque monster as quickly as a guy in a cheap costume.
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Post by Deepbluediver on Apr 9, 2014 15:07:59 GMT
See, this is why Annie is more badass than Kat. Kat hid behind Mort when Ankou showed up. Ankou is now inching away from Annie when she's heated To be fair, Annie IS part fire elemental and has a lot longer history of dealing with this stuff, and I'm not sure what good Kat's robo-vision would do in this situation. We all love Batman for being badass despite lacking superpowers, but I think most of us would rather BE Superman.
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Post by aaroncampbell on Apr 9, 2014 15:21:02 GMT
Ah, so this is where Annie gets to practice the final records procedure?
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Post by Sky Schemer on Apr 9, 2014 15:27:03 GMT
Ah, so this is where Annie gets to practice the final records procedure? Yup. It will be baptism by fire. Har har har.
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Post by Daedalus on Apr 9, 2014 15:34:30 GMT
See, this is why Annie is more badass than Kat. Kat hid behind Mort when Ankou showed up. Ankou is now inching away from Annie when she's heated    To be fair, Annie IS part fire elemental and has a lot longer history of dealing with this stuff, and I'm not sure what good Kat's robo-vision would do in this situation.  We all love Batman for being badass despite lacking superpowers, but I think most of us would rather BE Superman. Actually I'd rather be Batman (na na na na na). Though, of course, *no one* would face down Cthulu knowingly. And, adding my input, Nos may have had good intentions or whatever, but that does not make it right to hide the truth for this long. It's been, what, 70 years?
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Post by fwip on Apr 9, 2014 15:37:36 GMT
Uh-oh. Somebody is about to visit the afterlife's burn ward. I doubt Annie is stupid enough to attack these people. In addition, I certainly didn't see Mort's job having no purpose coming, but I don't really think that the ROTD/psychopomps are necessarily at fault for giving him the job they gave him. Mort's ghosthood was demanded by Jones. (more later, got to go )
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zoe
New Member
Posts: 21
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Post by zoe on Apr 9, 2014 16:00:03 GMT
I like the way the dracula's mouth is pictured constantly gaping. That's more unsettling than the blood itself. It's making me imagine him communicating telepathically, though I doubt that's the case.
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Post by Deepbluediver on Apr 9, 2014 16:05:38 GMT
And, adding my input, Nos may have had good intentions or whatever, but that does not make it right to hide the truth for this long. It's been, what, 70 years? I'd probably determine whether it was right or not based on that final outcome. Has it made things easier for Mort to think that he "lived" (for lack of a better word) a long, full life that had meaning and substance, rather than dying pointlessly? Then yes, I'm totally down with lying in that case. If it was just so the ROTD could have a laugh at his expense, or so they could work one over on the psychopomps, then he needs to die in a fire.
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Gauldoth Half-Dead
New Member
Contrary to popular belief, I do NOT eat children.
Posts: 42
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Post by Gauldoth Half-Dead on Apr 9, 2014 20:14:26 GMT
Oh my, would you look at the clock! Well, it's time to get up to no good.
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Pig_catapult
Full Member
Keeper of the Devilkitty
Posts: 171
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Post by Pig_catapult on Apr 9, 2014 23:33:33 GMT
Adding my two cents on the "lying and morality" thing, and admitting up-front that my personal view is on an extreme end of the spectrum here. I am not trying to convert anyone to my way of thinking, or trying to say that my answer is the only answer; I am just stating my position for illustrative purposes.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with letting people believe a comforting lie, if the truth would be more painful and the lie isn't endangering anyone. Personally, I'm a pretty hardcore existentialist, and I tell myself comforting lies all the time because creating subjective meaning where I believe there is objectively none is the only option that exists which is compatible with happiness, and I arbitrarily consider the pursuit of happiness to be a noble goal. I am nothing more than a temporary phenomenon emergent from complex electrical and chemical reactions, the duration of which is less than a blink of the eye to an uncaring, meaningless universe, and nothing I can possibly do as this brief, meaningless phenomenon will matter even ten thousand years from now. But so what? If false meaning is the only meaning there is, then I will embrace that falsehood with open arms.
So, is the ROTD right in lying to Mort? Is Annie right in getting angry at them? I don't know. I certainly think that both parties believe they are doing the right thing, which is really the source of most conflicts between sapient beings in the first place.
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Post by nightwind on Apr 10, 2014 0:57:23 GMT
Burning Nosferatu in 3... 2... 1...
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Post by Chancellor on Apr 10, 2014 2:18:09 GMT
The Ether is a realm of experiences, emotion, and beliefs. If the "delusions" of men can almost casually create gods like Coyote, then I think it would be very much in the interests of those who handle Death's processes, to ensure that those who merge with the Ether do so in as peaceable a state as possible.
Jones herself more or less alluding to a similar thing, in that the beliefs of people can affect the world. A drop of Negativity can stain the whole pool, and I think that more than anything, ROTD exists to mitigate those drops. To take from another bit of British originated fiction, let us refer to the Warp of Warhammer 40K, another realm of pure psychic energy, the culmination of every sentient emotion and experience, where regular laws of reality no longer apply...One it was a place of relative, if somewhat chaotic, benign disposition. As a result of two major races of the day warring on a galactic scale, their hatred and pain and fears twisted the Warp into a draconian Space Hell where daemons and their Chaos God masters constantly work to provoke misery and discord on the universe.
It is VERY much in the interests of not only ROTD, but the rest of the universe, to prevent such a metamorphosis in the disposition of the Ether, and if lying as they did to Mort was the way to mitigate bad juju from entering it, then I call it justified. As to whether Nosferatu is just a bit of a situation blind asshole is another thing.
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chaosvii
Junior Member
I absolutely did not expect this!
Posts: 84
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Post by chaosvii on Apr 10, 2014 4:59:43 GMT
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with letting people believe a comforting lie, if the truth would be more painful and the lie isn't endangering anyone. I fully agree with these statements as they are constructed. The conditions however, are very difficult to determine as to whether they are in place or not though. Falsehoods, ignorance, ill-informed decisions, and delusions are endangering to people only sometimes, not always. And as far as I've seen, merely most of those situations in which such danger does exist are the ones worth correcting, for which humanity has no shortage of. I am not trying to convert anyone to my way of thinking, or trying to say that my answer is the only answer; I am just stating my position for illustrative purposes. I'd like to echo that sentiment while contrasting my position with yours. I don't have an interest in internet preaching so much as learning through the statements of others and the formation of my own statements. Personally, I'm a pretty hardcore existentialist, and I tell myself comforting lies all the time because creating subjective meaning where I believe there is objectively none is the only option that exists which is compatible with happiness, and I arbitrarily consider the pursuit of happiness to be a noble goal. I am nothing more than a temporary phenomenon emergent from complex electrical and chemical reactions, the duration of which is less than a blink of the eye to an uncaring, meaningless universe, and nothing I can possibly do as this brief, meaningless phenomenon will matter even ten thousand years from now. But so what? If false meaning is the only meaning there is, then I will embrace that falsehood with open arms. I too, deceive myself often as well, some unconscious in the form of cognitive deficits, some more overt. I try to ground my beliefs in utility, as true things tend to be useful and false things have limits on their utility. I think that my school of thought is most aligned with Negative Pragmatism. I personally avoid assigning the label "false" to subjective meanings of that which I experience. I prefer "worth replacing" & "tentatively useful," as there is no reason to suppose that what I believe to be useful is a false belief simply because I am as of yet unable to prove it true, only that I cannot practically convince others of my beliefs in a objective manner. Regarding the pursuit of happiness, I have concluded in my own flawed way that happiness is probably not a matter of demonstrable meaning on a broad scale but rather a narrow one, filled with arbitrary definitions and assigned values that are not well quantified and even less well understood at present. And despite the flaws in the model, can still be demonstrated to be useful in the pursuit of other goals that are beneficially affected by the experience of happiness. That happiness has so many neurological factors affecting it that any given data set of objective happiness measurements (obviously said measurements of happiness would be most often expressed in terms of kilojubiles) would be very hard to scale in such a way to be generalized to the population as a whole. But that happiness does not need to be communicated in objective terms in order for it to be experienced in a way that can be partially measured during and after said experience. So, is the ROTD right in lying to Mort? Is Annie right in getting angry at them? I don't know. Fully agreed. The harm isn't apparent yet. The fact that said hypothetical harm was easily preventable with different actions by the ROTD is not an indicator of whether or not it was the right call to not take such measures. Annie's anger may be due to a misunderstanding, or it may lead to less risky choices by the ROTD. I don't know if any of these possibilities are the case either. I do however, expect that Friday's update will not confirm any one of them!
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Post by zimmyzims on Apr 10, 2014 11:27:22 GMT
There you suppose that lying is unconditionally wrong. Yet, we often have good reasons to give it good value. Lying to someone else tends to be an expression of "I don't trust you with the truth, but I do trust you if I deny you a chance to it." In this case, it was a complex situation where Mort was granted a consolation stay among the land of the living for what he lost by dying. Vampire guy gave the young soldier orders not only because he thought it would work, but because it would minimize the amount of work that the ROTD would do in order to help Mort handle the truth; to cope with what Mort has come to terms with. Nosferatu's current attitude suggests that he is dismissive of Mort's ability to make his own choices and handle things properly. That he's not all that willing to tell Mort the truth, and indeed, hasn't done so for several decades. There are other approaches that don't involve the same degree of deception. Tell Mort that spending time at the Court is important, and if asked why, let him know that this because it is important for Mort to have experiences he was denied during life, that Jones values that injustice be close to righted, and by extension, so does the ROTD. Having a job at the Court will allow Mort to spend his time learning in a place that is interested in learning about him, and if Mort wants to do something else, he is free to make an appeal. And if Mort doesn't ask, they can mention it to him anyway, and ask what Mort thinks. Sure there's a risk that he won't handle it well, but if the ROTD doesn't want that responsibility, there are others that are willing to take on responsibility such as Ankou, or perhaps even Jones. As currently presented, the ROTD (or at the very least, just this bloody guy) doesn't care what Mort thinks as long as there is no fuss from Mort. Perhaps the lie turned out okay, but it still prevented Mort from ever having the chance to use the truth and instead forced him to work around a falsehood as he spent his time at the Court. Perhaps he would have had better experiences with that truth, perhaps not, but he wasn't trusted with the truth for several decades for what appears to be the sake of convenience. Which personally doesn't strike me as a good reason. One of the ways they could make this lie have no redeeming value is if they forbade Ankou from telling Mort the truth due to their sway over Psychopomps. I don't think it's likely but it happens to be consistent with what we're presented so far in the story. Value by definition is tied to evaluation, it is not that something just exists as valuable or not, it is that something is valued or is not valued. People are so bad in telling who lies and who speaks truth that they would generally do better by flipping a coin each time. If you believe in any kind of evolutionary genesis of values, you must realize that lying and believing in lies must be in fact valued by people. Indeed, I leave the rest of the maths to you, but you will realize that lying is essential for all society and self-deception is essential for animal functioning, including especially that of human beings. This was one particular case where we lie regularly for the good of the people we lie to: we lie to kids all the time to protect them and to allow the live happier, more functional, trying to do things that they would in the end want to do but would not do if they knew some truths. If you come up with something like "we should not lie to kids, that is pointless and mean and we just should try to explain everything to them", I just say good luck raising up kids of your own. Mort in particular was given here a sense of importance, something he seemed keen to have as living already, a possibility to feel that he contributes to others, that his being there is not pointless, that he can be proud of something. That's a big thing for everybody. It gives meaning to your life, or afterlife, even if it is usually tied to some stimulated self-deception. That lie about importance keeps Mort there much more than trying to tell him "this is good for you". When he feels it is not, and during those decades there might be many moments when he does feel so, he might want to go directly to the ether. Spending the decades he had to spend to finally actually want to dissolve in ether appeared very valuable time for him. Would he have wanted to part with that all before he would not have met Annie. Or he might have started to cause all kind of trouble, you know, as a ghost. And that's what they wanted to avoid.
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chaosvii
Junior Member
I absolutely did not expect this!
Posts: 84
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Post by chaosvii on Apr 10, 2014 16:32:16 GMT
Lying to someone else tends to be an expression of "I don't trust you with the truth, but I do trust you if I deny you a chance to it." In this case, it was a complex situation where Mort was granted a consolation stay among the land of the living for what he lost by dying. Vampire guy gave the young soldier orders not only because he thought it would work, but because it would minimize the amount of work that the ROTD would do in order to help Mort handle the truth; to cope with what Mort has come to terms with. Nosferatu's current attitude suggests that he is dismissive of Mort's ability to make his own choices and handle things properly. That he's not all that willing to tell Mort the truth, and indeed, hasn't done so for several decades. There are other approaches that don't involve the same degree of deception. Tell Mort that spending time at the Court is important, and if asked why, let him know that this because it is important for Mort to have experiences he was denied during life, that Jones values that injustice be close to righted, and by extension, so does the ROTD. Having a job at the Court will allow Mort to spend his time learning in a place that is interested in learning about him, and if Mort wants to do something else, he is free to make an appeal. And if Mort doesn't ask, they can mention it to him anyway, and ask what Mort thinks. Sure there's a risk that he won't handle it well, but if the ROTD doesn't want that responsibility, there are others that are willing to take on responsibility such as Ankou, or perhaps even Jones. As currently presented, the ROTD (or at the very least, just this bloody guy) doesn't care what Mort thinks as long as there is no fuss from Mort. Perhaps the lie turned out okay, but it still prevented Mort from ever having the chance to use the truth and instead forced him to work around a falsehood as he spent his time at the Court. Perhaps he would have had better experiences with that truth, perhaps not, but he wasn't trusted with the truth for several decades for what appears to be the sake of convenience. Which personally doesn't strike me as a good reason. One of the ways they could make this lie have no redeeming value is if they forbade Ankou from telling Mort the truth due to their sway over Psychopomps. I don't think it's likely but it happens to be consistent with what we're presented so far in the story. If you believe in any kind of evolutionary genesis of values, you must realize that lying and believing in lies must be in fact valued by people. Agreed. A poor choice of wording then. "One of the ways that they could make this lie have no avenue by which Mort could have any likely chance to ever make use of the truth, unless Mort confronted the ROTD directly, would have been to forbid Ankou from telling Mort the truth due to their sway over Psychopomps. A technique that could have been a proper choice given the circumstances, but if those circumstances boil down to little more than the sake of convenience, then I wouldn't call it a proper choice." This was one particular case where we lie regularly for the good of the people we lie to ... Mort in particular was given here a sense of importance, something he seemed keen to have as living already, a possibility to feel that he contributes to others, that his being there is not pointless, that he can be proud of something. That's a big thing for everybody. ... That lie about importance keeps Mort there much more than trying to tell him "this is good for you". Except it's not evident that this particular deception was at all necessary. Useful perhaps, convenient yes, but not necessary as there are alternatives which are viable. I take it that telling Mort that "the oldest creature ever to exist on this planet, of whom has seen much of humanity live and die insisted that you, yes you, carry on here, not only does the ROTD respect and honor that request, but so does the reaper guy you saw earlier. You are given this job as a chance to make use of the time she has given you, I expect you treat it with the same degree of importance that she appears to." is not one of those things you believe Mort would value. But I don't see how it is necessarily worse than what we can observe & conclude happened in the comic. we lie to kids all the time to protect them and to allow the live happier, more functional, trying to do things that they would in the end want to do but would not do if they knew some truths. If you come up with something like "we should not lie to kids, that is pointless and mean and we just should try to explain everything to them", I just say good luck raising up kids of your own. I'm not familiar with the sorts of lies that help children as opposed to help adults raise children and by extension help the children. I recognize that children have significantly different cognitive abilities, and as such would not make use of certain abstract concepts when offered as explanations. And while I have no intention of raising any children myself nor with my partner, I would like to know some examples of what you are referring to rather than have it glossed over preemptively. It [sense of importance] gives meaning to your life, or afterlife, even if it is usually tied to some stimulated self-deception. I don't know as to whether or not one's sense of purpose is usually tired to self-deception or not, but I can say with confidence that the beauty of self-deception as opposed to deception created by others is that nobody actively keeps the truth from us as a conscious choice. A sense of purpose can be defined in such a way as to not be coherent yet still remain powerful to oneself & others, or be perfectly consistent with itself but not at all compelling to anyone else due to subjective esoterica being a part of it. This power of an incoherent sense of purpose does not lend credence to the definition, only that it is a useful tool to be discarded whenever it doesn't work. Even a coherent sense of purpose may depend on premises which are not true, but it still retains power until the individual wielding it no longer values it. After all, people value things other than the truth all the time. Or he might have started to cause all kind of trouble, you know, as a ghost. And that's what they wanted to avoid. Then the job is at the very least an important thing for precisely this reason. It is more important to have Mort focused on a task that is not necessarily constructive than for Mort to be left wandering, unguided and at risk of being destructive. Perhaps this reason for his task's significance would not be compelling to Mort no matter how well presented it is to him, but it shows that the Dracula-guy has a definition of "really important" that doesn't include this. Or maybe that he doesn't think about it too much.
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Post by zimmyzims on Apr 11, 2014 8:31:19 GMT
If you believe in any kind of evolutionary genesis of values, you must realize that lying and believing in lies must be in fact valued by people. Agreed. A poor choice of wording then. "One of the ways that they could make this lie have no avenue by which Mort could have any likely chance to ever make use of the truth, unless Mort confronted the ROTD directly, would have been to forbid Ankou from telling Mort the truth due to their sway over Psychopomps. A technique that could have been a proper choice given the circumstances, but if those circumstances boil down to little more than the sake of convenience, then I wouldn't call it a proper choice." (1)This was one particular case where we lie regularly for the good of the people we lie to ... Mort in particular was given here a sense of importance, something he seemed keen to have as living already, a possibility to feel that he contributes to others, that his being there is not pointless, that he can be proud of something. That's a big thing for everybody. ... That lie about importance keeps Mort there much more than trying to tell him "this is good for you". Except it's not evident that this particular deception was at all necessary. Useful perhaps, convenient yes, but not necessary as there are alternatives which are viable. I take it that telling Mort that "the oldest creature ever to exist on this planet, of whom has seen much of humanity live and die insisted that you, yes you, carry on here, not only does the ROTD respect and honor that request, but so does the reaper guy you saw earlier. You are given this job as a chance to make use of the time she has given you, I expect you treat it with the same degree of importance that she appears to." is not one of those things you believe Mort would value. But I don't see how it is necessarily worse than what we can observe & conclude happened in the comic. (2) we lie to kids all the time to protect them and to allow the live happier, more functional, trying to do things that they would in the end want to do but would not do if they knew some truths. If you come up with something like "we should not lie to kids, that is pointless and mean and we just should try to explain everything to them", I just say good luck raising up kids of your own. I'm not familiar with the sorts of lies that help children as opposed to help adults raise children and by extension help the children. I recognize that children have significantly different cognitive abilities, and as such would not make use of certain abstract concepts when offered as explanations. And while I have no intention of raising any children myself nor with my partner, I would like to know some examples of what you are referring to rather than have it glossed over preemptively. (3)
It [sense of importance] gives meaning to your life, or afterlife, even if it is usually tied to some stimulated self-deception. I don't know as to whether or not one's sense of purpose is usually tired to self-deception or not, but I can say with confidence that the beauty of self-deception as opposed to deception created by others is that nobody actively keeps the truth from us as a conscious choice. (4)A sense of purpose can be defined in such a way as to not be coherent yet still remain powerful to oneself & others, or be perfectly consistent with itself but not at all compelling to anyone else due to subjective esoterica being a part of it. This power of an incoherent sense of purpose does not lend credence to the definition, only that it is a useful tool to be discarded whenever it doesn't work. Even a coherent sense of purpose may depend on premises which are not true, but it still retains power until the individual wielding it no longer values it. After all, people value things other than the truth all the time. (5)Or he might have started to cause all kind of trouble, you know, as a ghost. And that's what they wanted to avoid. Then the job is at the very least an important thing for precisely this reason. It is more important to have Mort focused on a task that is not necessarily constructive than for Mort to be left wandering, unguided and at risk of being destructive. Perhaps this reason for his task's significance would not be compelling to Mort no matter how well presented it is to him, but it shows that the Dracula-guy has a definition of "really important" that doesn't include this. Or maybe that he doesn't think about it too much. (6) 1. I would actually even further my point: that lying is valued by people is obvious, but that it is also objectively valuable is a point that we can make with the evolutionary history making us what we are. Anyway, it is also very obvious that the society runs on lying, keeping up of illusions, that are as necessary to our survival as they are to our success. It is not to say that truth didn't have value, there are obvious places where it has great value: say, concerning things like what happens when you do something, what really is around you, and such, it is important to actually know the truth in the correspondence sense. Anyway, back to responding to you and not to myself, I didn't quite understand what you said here, but since you started with agreement I guess that's of lesser importance. Let's get to the disagreements, they are much more interesting. 2. I'd simply wager, by all my knowledge of how animals and humans in particular behave, that the truth in this case, that is "someone important wants, and we all agree with her, you to do this for yourself, so we give you this job that is useless and you can quit it anytime without any consequences, but trust us, it is good for you to continue in it, a valuable chance really", would not work for long with most cases. Not with kids not with adults, but especially not with kids. You see, what Mort was experiencing there for decades of time might have for large part been quite boring. A kid may get fed up with his task in a day if it is boring. So may an adult, but a kid even more so. These illusions of importance are important for adult workers everyday, but maybe even more important for kids who are so naive as to want to believe in doing something good. So, what if he had a boring year. he would not just keep up his work if he didn't attach to it any value. He would not necessarily request being carried to ether either. Instead he would be likely to cause that fuss that they didn't like and that all to his own misery, because he really, in the end, was probably better off just continuing a work that is meaningful to him, even if that is just an illusion. We all do that quite a lot, and realizing how meaningless we are would be detrimental to all our efforts. 3. I'm not sure why you oppose these two things. Little is more valuable to kids than being well raised up by their parents. One good example of this precisely is Santa Claus. If kids did not believe in it, they would have no incentive to act well, because they would know that they will get their Christmas gifts regardless. This would allow them to grow bad habits instead of good ones. Good habits are of immense value: despite all our best reasoning, a habit is difficult to change, and so if we already have a good, unreasoned habit, we are better off than we would be with a bad habit and all the capacity to reason what would be good. (see Plato's "Laws" or Aristotle's "Ethics") This applies to adults as much as to kids, but kids have the advantage of having less habits (so can be better taught) and disadvantage of being worse in reasoning. Younger they are, the greater the advantage and disadvantage alike.To some extent you can explain the truth quite early on: kids understand to eat less candy because it is bad for their health, but often you have to add something, like telling that they will grow up beautiful princesses (or whatever they seem to dream of) if they it healthily, and will be fat if they eat candy. This causal relation is not proved, it is not true as such. But it helps a little girl to understand why it is better to eat vegetables than toffee, and that is directly good to her health ecause of better nutrition, and indirectly because of growing a good habit. Now, another common lie is the one told to Mort here. We often let kids believe that what they do is very important. Say, when they are "helping" us to cook or clean, we let them believe that they are doing valuable job despite the fact that they are mostly slowing us down. That is because that way they will continue doing it and will learn useful skills instead of pestering us when we try to do something that actually is important. Or we can give them a basically meaningless task that however teaches them the simple thing of accomplishing a task, which in itself is not meaningless. You could try to explain these purposes to kids instead of deceiving them, but here I just ask you to either believe me, read a whole lot of developmental psychology, or try it out yourself, the results are worse. You will have to face some short form of the question "what do I do this for if it is meaningless in itself, can I not do something that has meaning here and now?", one that you hear in schools all the time. Maybe you will hear just the answer, really: "no, I don't want to do this". And you just have to figure out that the kid questioned the meaningfulness of his tasks. This question is omnipresent for adults too, it echoes the fundamental existential question of "does my life have any meaning?" or "why am I here?". More we dwell on that question, the less functional and happy we are and the less we achieve. Adults too need an answer to that question in their jobs. Often a hefty paycheck can be a sufficient answer, but especially if that is not available, you have to make them acknowledge their importance for the community, and usually to exaggerate it. Otherwise they will feel bad and do their job badly. At some point that paycheck needs to be important too, or then you have to deceive yourself that money is important in itself, or tells about your importance. And this applies to life in general. 4. The truth is, we need to be deceived by others very often. The power of self-deception is not often sufficient to keep the lie up if we plainly know the truth. If you are told by your boss that your job really does not matter at all, it is just a form of social security and they could as well just kick you out but choose not to because they are doing this as a charity, will you be able to deceive yourself to a sense of importance. I doubt it. 5. I don't get this and don't have time to re-read it carefully enough to make sense of it now. If you wish to pursue this point, I kindly ask you to elaborate it in a clearer manner. 6. But not important in a way that would usually be good enough reason for Mort to carry that task so that he would achieve this end for which it is important. This is just the point: you need to believe in things that make you achieve the other ends that are important but that you would not choose to strive for.
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chaosvii
Junior Member
I absolutely did not expect this!
Posts: 84
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Post by chaosvii on Apr 11, 2014 18:00:20 GMT
1. I would actually even further my point: that lying is valued by people is obvious, but that it is also objectively valuable is a point that we can make with the evolutionary history making us what we are. Anyway, it is also very obvious that the society runs on lying, keeping up of illusions, that are as necessary to our survival as they are to our success. It is not to say that truth didn't have value, there are obvious places where it has great value: say, concerning things like what happens when you do something, what really is around you, and such, it is important to actually know the truth in the correspondence sense. Anyway, back to responding to you and not to myself, I didn't quite understand what you said here, but since you started with agreement I guess that's of lesser importance. Let's get to the disagreements, they are much more interesting. 2. I'd simply wager, by all my knowledge of how animals and humans in particular behave, that the truth in this case, that is "someone important wants, and we all agree with her, you to do this for yourself, so we give you this job that is useless and you can quit it anytime without any consequences, but trust us, it is good for you to continue in it, a valuable chance really", would not work for long with most cases. Not with kids not with adults, but especially not with kids. You see, what Mort was experiencing there for decades of time might have for large part been quite boring. A kid may get fed up with his task in a day if it is boring. So may an adult, but a kid even more so. These illusions of importance are important for adult workers everyday, but maybe even more important for kids who are so naive as to want to believe in doing something good. So, what if he had a boring year. he would not just keep up his work if he didn't attach to it any value. He would not necessarily request being carried to ether either. Instead he would be likely to cause that fuss that they didn't like and that all to his own misery, because he really, in the end, was probably better off just continuing a work that is meaningful to him, even if that is just an illusion. We all do that quite a lot, and realizing how meaningless we are would be detrimental to all our efforts. 3. I'm not sure why you oppose these two things. Little is more valuable to kids than being well raised up by their parents. One good example of this precisely is Santa Claus. If kids did not believe in it, they would have no incentive to act well, because they would know that they will get their Christmas gifts regardless. This would allow them to grow bad habits instead of good ones. Good habits are of immense value: despite all our best reasoning, a habit is difficult to change, and so if we already have a good, unreasoned habit, we are better off than we would be with a bad habit and all the capacity to reason what would be good. (see Plato's "Laws" or Aristotle's "Ethics") This applies to adults as much as to kids, but kids have the advantage of having less habits (so can be better taught) and disadvantage of being worse in reasoning. Younger they are, the greater the advantage and disadvantage alike.To some extent you can explain the truth quite early on: kids understand to eat less candy because it is bad for their health, but often you have to add something, like telling that they will grow up beautiful princesses (or whatever they seem to dream of) if they it healthily, and will be fat if they eat candy. This causal relation is not proved, it is not true as such. But it helps a little girl to understand why it is better to eat vegetables than toffee, and that is directly good to her health ecause of better nutrition, and indirectly because of growing a good habit. Now, another common lie is the one told to Mort here. We often let kids believe that what they do is very important. Say, when they are "helping" us to cook or clean, we let them believe that they are doing valuable job despite the fact that they are mostly slowing us down. That is because that way they will continue doing it and will learn useful skills instead of pestering us when we try to do something that actually is important. Or we can give them a basically meaningless task that however teaches them the simple thing of accomplishing a task, which in itself is not meaningless. You could try to explain these purposes to kids instead of deceiving them, but here I just ask you to either believe me, read a whole lot of developmental psychology, or try it out yourself, the results are worse. You will have to face some short form of the question "what do I do this for if it is meaningless in itself, can I not do something that has meaning here and now?", one that you hear in schools all the time. Maybe you will hear just the answer, really: "no, I don't want to do this". And you just have to figure out that the kid questioned the meaningfulness of his tasks. This question is omnipresent for adults too, it echoes the fundamental existential question of "does my life have any meaning?" or "why am I here?". More we dwell on that question, the less functional and happy we are and the less we achieve. Adults too need an answer to that question in their jobs. Often a hefty paycheck can be a sufficient answer, but especially if that is not available, you have to make them acknowledge their importance for the community, and usually to exaggerate it. Otherwise they will feel bad and do their job badly. At some point that paycheck needs to be important too, or then you have to deceive yourself that money is important in itself, or tells about your importance. And this applies to life in general. 4. The truth is, we need to be deceived by others very often. The power of self-deception is not often sufficient to keep the lie up if we plainly know the truth. If you are told by your boss that your job really does not matter at all, it is just a form of social security and they could as well just kick you out but choose not to because they are doing this as a charity, will you be able to deceive yourself to a sense of importance. I doubt it. 5. I don't get this and don't have time to re-read it carefully enough to make sense of it now. If you wish to pursue this point, I kindly ask you to elaborate it in a clearer manner. 6. But not important in a way that would usually be good enough reason for Mort to carry that task so that he would achieve this end for which it is important. This is just the point: you need to believe in things that make you achieve the other ends that are important but that you would not choose to strive for. 1. Yes I was in agreement. What I was saying is there are reasons why lies are useful to groups of people as well as individuals, and that convenience for one group at the necessary expense of one other individual's ability to ever handle the truth and all it implies doesn't strike me as useful enough for everyone affected by the lie. 2. A wager then. Glad to see we're both standing on shaky ground. Because I would be willing to say that all of those factors remain in place with the lie too, and the only reason why we can say with confidence that the lie worked to address those factors is because the comic has shown us that it worked. It is still a wager between the effectiveness of the lie (your wager) to help Mort and the effectiveness of the truth (my wager) to help Mort at the time the decision is made, barring the clairvoyant powers we've been granted regarding how the deception turned out. I'd like to know why you think that the odds of helping Mort are unfavorable in the case of less deception, as well as why they less unfavorable in the case of more deception, then we might be able to work with something more than "both truth & lies are valuable, and if you tell the truth with some of the worst rhetoric, it's way less useful than if you are halfway competent with rhetoric but base what you tell that same person in lies." 3. I'm not certain what you are referring to when you say "I'm not sure why you oppose these two things." Which two things? Deception? I'm not opposed to it, though I feel that it should be handled with care like all tools capable of harming others. Child rearing? I'm not opposed to it, I just have no interest in raising a child myself nor does my partner herself nor the two of us in tandem. I suppose you could say I'm opposed to being a parent in a similar way as I'm opposed to having a tiny dog for a pet, but that's really stretching language and I don't expect it to be relevant to your statement of uncertainty. Deceiving children, much like deception itself, is not something I am wholly opposed to, but it has a potential to harm as well as to help. I happen to oppose most forms of harm, so I oppose some forms of deceiving children, and I take a general tentative stance that most lies that I know children hear are not helpful enough to justify a risk of harming them with said lie. Santa strikes me as one of the worst examples you could provide. It is popular, sure, but I seen no reason to consider it effective nor necessary (there are large swaths of the population that don't celebrate Christmas and those that do but consider Santa a heathen tradition and are astoundingly competent at child discipline). And I'm happy to express a reason why it could be detrimental to invent a lie of a magic man with the magic ability to reward you for being good: The child may be rewarded despite developing bad habits that the parents are simply not aware of, and as such, be given reason to believe that their lack of punishment is confirmation that the bad habit is actually a good habit because the magic man only rewards the good ones. This delusion is present in adults too, who only assign ethical value to something based on whether or not they are punished for it despite having the cognitive ability to reason beyond that level and have to be told that there is a magic punishment man (Krampus of course) that always punishes even when you think you'll get away with it in order to have them be contributing members of society. The prevention of consuming excessive sweets is a very good example. The deception holds no power over individuals that don't believe in magic fairy princesses or learn that being a princess was a pretty rotten deal back in the day. There may be a way to have a similar effect using no deception, but as far as I understand, it would require a great deal of creative effort to work around a young child's lower capacity to comprehend abstract concepts and as such, would be a less useful tool if the energy is not there. Your use of "basically meaningless task" is separate from mine. What you described as a child learning to value assisting others at the expense of the task's overall efficiency towards completion is not all that dissimilar from on the job training for adults except that the adults tend to know that they will be detrimental at first and that's not a bad thing, while the children tend to not recognize this and thus there is nothing gained from telling them that they are not contributing in this particular instance. In both cases, what is valued is the eventual capacity to help. Teaching the child that learning how to help, as well as the process of valuing the help that they can eventually provide, are important for this particular goal. I don't consider it a lie to not bother telling them details that they probably can't make use of due to cognitive limits, rather, it would be a lie to tell them that what they are doing when they try to help is "basically meaningless" unless the person speaking just doesn't value that lesson the child would be learning. I have taken developmental psych, so I believe that I do recognize what you're getting at. As for the matter of adults learning to cope with immediate tasks versus long-term goals, yes that is troublesome, yes I see how this ties to children having brains that simply cannot process that level of abstraction, yes it is a contributing factor for why lies are at all useful tools, but it doesn't change my view of how you structured any of your examples. It does not influence the first. I already agreed with the second one, and this serves to strengthen the agreement. I disagree with the underlying premises & structure of your third, so it cannot influence the third without resolving that. 4. That example doesn't mean anything anything to me because businesses where I live tend not to operate on that poor strategy of throwing money at people that contribute nothing towards the business' profit through that labor. It may be an unpleasant truth that a given worker's labor contributes significantly more than what they are paid, but if an accountant can determine that paying them is basically charity, a person representing the business' interest would have to have a separate reason for keeping the worker around. I understand & accept that there are lies which are so useful as to be necessary in our current societal structure, but just because there are necessary lies, does not make any given lie necessary, useful, preferable, or harmless. That's a case-by-case thing. 5. It is rather muddled yeah. The idea was that beliefs regarding a sense of purpose simply do not have to be falsifiable in order for them to have empower or constrain an individual. And that's why such beliefs can be false without necessarily constraining & harming the one that holds it. Abandoning a false belief of importance can induce a large amount of harm & disillusionment, adopting a false belief of importance can induce a large amount of harm too. If pressed, I'd say the only helpful belief of self importance is one that empowers in a wide range of circumstances, contributes an irrelevant amount of constraint or only constrains in circumstances that happen so infrequently as to be irrelevant to the believer's life. Specifically, is not so easy to demonstrate as false or implausible that the previous clause has an obvious risk of kicking in without a set of delusions being adopted in order to protect the belief. I'm not sure what a true set of beliefs of importance would look like aside from being narrowly defined, can stand up to scrutiny aside from the typical unassailable philosophical problems that all beliefs ever fail to overcome, and might be difficult to generalize or model effectively due to people having widely different & nuanced environments as well as the notion of purpose not being necessarily simple. 6. It still stands that there are true things of value to the ROTD regarding- oh I get why you worded point four the way you did now. I suppose I need more information from Dracula-guy regarding what the ROTD is all about before I can tell how cogent what you & I said is to this whole deal. Yes motivating others to achieve important things that they would not personally strive for if asked can entail telling them to believe in things that you know to be false. But I suppose there's a separation in agreed upon assumptions because I can't tell whether we are talking past each other at this point. A big ol' edit later or an entirely separate posting is in probably in order when I think I have a better grasp on whatever details I'm missing, but I leave it at this for now before I neglect my hosting duties in meatspace.
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