#applying game theory to predict star wars is fun

[roxannepolice]

What do you think the odds are of dramatic tragedy Renperor happening, realistically? Without sugarcoating it or making reassuring platitudes about how he has to get redeemed?

Without lemoncoating: how likely is this story in a movie for 12 year olds? 

Surprisingly, I’m not actually making reassuring platitutes that he has to get redeemed - my belief he will get redeemed is a result of trying to conjure up other case scenarios and concluding they make no sense, either because they’re a bad story or not a story I would market to kids, a reductio ad absurdum, so to speak; and mind you, it’s the exactly same mindset that made me conclude epix is going to be one hell of a dramatic bumpy ride for that redemption to happen. Now, it is true that I will take that tragedy over a light side auto da fe or a completely empty fairy tale, but there really are better, more exciting alternatives: tragedy is always compelling - but a compelling comedy is better than most tragedies.

Let’s dissect Disney-LF’s gains and losses in killing him off unredeemed game theory style.

Gains: a) a loud minority of adult politically correct and infatuated with OT fans have their egos stroked; b) they can maintain Star Wars’ illusion of being a valid and almost literal socio-political commentary; c) they have a ready made compelling story by the grace of a tragedy; d) they kill off Skywalkers allowing for more freedom with future characters*

Losses: a) a whole generation of viewers ends up with trust issues and may be unwilling to watch their future installments, let alone pass the passion onto their children; b) the core message of the saga gets undermined - no bendemption makes Anakin’s redemption very empty; c) a story with the first SW movie female protagonist gets completely overshadowed by her tragic villain counterpart in a long run; d) SW solidifies itself as some distopian political satire which puts a shadow on all of their future installments; e) they essentially walk by the most interesting and challenging story they can tell; f) they break the poetical rythm.

Now, if anyone can show me what other gains Disney-LF has to make by leaving Ben unredeemeed, I will be glad to discuss. But game theory tells me that if I’m dealing with rational and intelligent players, there’s a 90% probability they’ll go the redemption route. And in the remaining 10% there’s 9% probability they’ll want to keep things simple and force him into a grotesque Palpatine 3.0. So on the whole, the tragedy of evil renperor has about 1% probability of happening. Of course, for a good drama, the question shouldn’t be what’s the most dramatic thing probable only what’s the most dramatic thing possible - which paradoxically increases the chances of going the tragic tyrant route - but the simple truth is the tragedy isn’t the most dramatic story possible - it would be if Rey and Ben where in a good place right now, which is why for heaven sake’s, reylos, don’t hope for secret force bond dates. The way tlj ended, the most dramatic story to tell is the majority of audience instinctively predicts and most theoreticians assume impossible - hea reylo.

*and I see that argument as actually a very weak one, because: a) hitherto they have been using the family for their profit in marketing, because even if Rey/Sky got outta hand by now it was JJ’s mystery box to keep audience invested between tfa and tlj b) seeing how we get Rey Kenobi, the fact that Kylo will die an apparent virgin won’t stop people from trying to connect future characters to the Skyfam, especially by insisting there was a Mara Jade c) you simply don’t finish off popcultural icons on a cautionary tale-subvert everything note: it’s essentially as if Doyle had Holmes die of cocaine overdose or Dumas had musketeers kill each other - or actually more: as if someone other than the authors created those endings and established them as canon.

[justforbooks]

The physicist Freeman Dyson, who has died aged 96, became famous within science for mathematical solutions so advanced that they could only be applied to complex problems of atomic theory and popular with the public for ideas so far-fetched they seemed beyond lunacy.

As a young postgraduate student, Dyson devised – while taking a Greyhound bus ride in America – the answer to a conundrum in quantum electrodynamics that had stumped giants of physics such as Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe. As an author, guru and apostle for science, Dyson also cheerfully proposed that humans might genetically engineer trees that could grow on comets, to provide new habitats for genetically altered humans.

He had already proposed the ultimate solution to the energy crisis: a sufficiently advanced civilisation would, he argued, crunch up all the unused planets and asteroids to form a giant shell around its parent star, to reflect and exploit its radiation. Science fiction writers were delighted. The first suggestion became known as the Dyson tree. The second is called the Dyson sphere.

He was born in Crowthorne, Berkshire. His father, George Dyson, was a musician and composer, and his mother, Mildred Atkey, a lawyer. The young Dyson reported that his happiest ever school holiday – from Winchester college – was spent working his way, from 6am to 10pm, through 700 problems in Piaggio’s Differential Equations. “I intended to speak the language of Einstein,” he said in his 1979 memoir Disturbing the Universe. “I was in love with mathematics and nothing else mattered.”

He graduated from Cambridge and in 1943 became a civilian scientist with RAF Bomber Command, which experienced hideous losses with each raid over Germany. Dyson and his colleagues suggested that the Lancaster bomber’s gun turrets slowed the plane, increased its burden and made it more vulnerable to German fighters: without the turrets, it might gain an extra 50mph and be much more manoeuvrable.

He was ignored. Bomber Command, he was later to write, “might have been invented by a mad scientist as an example to exhibit as clearly as possible the evil aspects of science and technology: the Lancaster, in itself a magnificent flying machine, made into a death trap for the boys who flew it. A huge organisation dedicated to the purpose of burning cities and killing people, and doing it badly.”

The young Dyson was already convinced of some moral purpose to the universe and remained a non-denominational Christian all his life.

After the second world war he went to Cornell University in New York state to begin research in physics under Bethe, one of the team at Los Alamos that fashioned the atomic bomb.

By 1947, the challenge was one of pure science: to forge an accurate theory that described how atoms and electrons behaved when they absorbed or emitted light. The broad basis of what was called quantum electrodynamics had been proposed by the British scientist Paul Dirac and other giants of physics. The next step was to calculate the precise behaviour inside an atom. Using different approaches, both Julian Schwinger and Feynman delivered convincing solutions, but their answers did not quite square with each other.

It was while crossing Nebraska by bus, reading James Joyce and the biography of Pandit Nehru, that the young Dyson saw how to resolve the work of the two men and help win them the 1965 Nobel prize: “It came bursting into my consciousness, like an explosion,” Dyson wrote. “I had no pencil and paper, but everything was so clear I did not need to write it down.”

A few days later he moved – for almost all of the rest of his life – to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, home of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. “It was exactly a year since I had left England to learn physics from the Americans. And now here I was a year later, walking down the road to the institute on a fine September morning, to teach the great Oppenheimer how to do physics. The whole situation seemed too absurd to be credible,” Dyson wrote later.

He went on to deliver a series of papers that resolved the problems of quantum electrodynamics. He did not share in Feynman’s and Schwinger’s Nobel prize. He did not complain. “I was not inventing new physics,” he said. “I merely clarified what was already there so that others could see the larger picture.”

Dyson tackled complex problems in theoretical physics and mathematics – there is a mathematical tool called the Dyson series, and another called Dyson’s transform – and enjoyed the affection and respect of scientists everywhere. He took US citizenship, and worked on Project Orion, one of America’s oddest and most ambitious space ventures.

Orion was to be an enormous spacecraft, with a crew of 200 scientists and engineers, driven by nuclear weapons: warheads would be ejected one after another from the spaceship and detonated. This repeated pulse of blasts would generate speeds so colossal that the spacecraft could reach Mars in two weeks, and get to Saturn, explore the planet’s moons, and get back to Earth again within seven months. Modern spacecraft launched by chemical rockets can take 12 months to reach Mars, and more than seven years to reach Saturn.

The Orion project faltered under the burden of technical problems, and then was abandoned in 1965 after the partial test ban treaty that outlawed nuclear explosions in space.

Dyson was a widely read man with a gift for memorable remarks and a great talent for presenting – with calm logic and bright language – ideas for which the term “outside the envelope” could only be the most feeble understatement.

In 1960, in a paper for the journal Science, he argued that a technologically advanced civilisation would sooner or later surround its home star with reflective material to make full use of all its radiation. The extraterrestrials could do this by pulverising a planet the size of Jupiter, and spreading its fabric in a thin shell around their star, at twice the distance of the Earth from the sun. Although the starlight would be masked, the shell or sphere would inevitably warm up. So people seeking extraterrestrial intelligence should first look for a very large infrared glow somewhere in the galaxy.

In 1972 – a year before the first serious experiments in manipulating DNA – Dyson outlined, in a Birkbeck College lecture, in London, his vision of biological engineering. He predicted that scavenging microbes could be altered to harvest minerals, neutralise toxins and to clean up plastic litter and hazardous radioactive materials.

He then proposed that comets – lumps of ice and organic chemicals that periodically orbit the sun – could serve as nurseries for genetically altered trees that could grow, in the absence of gravity, to heights of hundreds of miles, and release oxygen from their roots to sustain human life. “Seen from far away, the comet will look like a small potato sprouting an immense growth of stems and foliage. When man comes to live on the comets, he will find himself returning to the arboreal existence of his ancestors,” he told a delighted audience.

He went on to predict robot explorers that could replicate themselves, and plants that would make seeds and propagate across the galaxy. Plants could grow their own greenhouses, he argued, just as turtles could grow shells and polar bears grow fur. His audience may not have believed a word, but they listened intently.

Dyson had a gift for the memorable line and a disarming honesty that admitted the possibility of error. It was, he would say, better to be wrong than to be vague, and much more fun to be contradicted than to be ignored. Dyson was by instinct and reason a pacifist, but he understood the fascination with nuclear weaponry.

He enjoyed unorthodox propositions and contrarian arguments; he maintained a certain scepticism about climate change (“the fuss about global warming is greatly exaggerated”) and he argued that a commercial free-for-all was more likely to deliver the right design for spacecraft than a government-directed effort.

He had little patience with those physicists who argued that the world was the consequence of blind chance. “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe must in some sense have known we were coming,” he once said.

His Cambridge mentor, the mathematician GH Hardy, had told him: “Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.” After Disturbing the Universe, Dyson wrote a number of compelling books, including Infinite in All Directions (1988) and Imagined Worlds (1997). In 2000, he was awarded the Templeton prize – worth more than the Nobel – given annually for progress towards discoveries about spiritual realities.

He was a frequent essayist and to the end a contributor to the New York Review of Books. But he continued to think as a scientist and in 2012 entered the field of mathematical biology with a published paper on game theory in human cooperation and Darwinian evolution.

Dyson is survived by his second wife, Imme (nee Jung), whom he married in 1958, and their four daughters, Dorothy, Emily, Mia and Rebecca; by a son, George, and daughter, Esther, from his first marriage, to Verena Huber, which ended in divorce; and by a stepdaughter, Katarina, and 16 grandchildren.

• Freeman John Dyson, mathematician and physicist, born 15 December 1923; died 28 February 2020

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[davidjjohnston3]

Facebook Insomnia 7.25.2021 1. I am still sad to conceptualize life in terms of fiction and the condition of fiction rather than Christianity undivided.   Today I had a lot of images of Japan in my mind.  I heard the phrase 'Japanese Breakfast' which is the rock-star name of the author of 'Crying at H-Mart' a famous book. I remembered someone who once dated someone who became my enemy. This person I respected I now realize and I am happy that I didn't say anything excessively stupid that would have implied I look down on her, saw her as easy, saw her as 'material to work on,' someone to have a plan for etc.   I asked her once for help getting someone to interview at Deloitte for consulting only this person was in Accounting. I never really saw this person as in my league or anything to me except as a 'Curriculum Developer' I guess I outranked her and so wasn't shy of talking to / with her in official functions.   Later we drank together and I said a few random things like that I stress- / binge-eat apples, like 5 apples a night. My friend once did a funny imitation of her that in retrospect sounded a little like my Taiwanese ex-girlfriend's imitation of Kaori Mochida from Every Little Thing; the funny thing I now realize is that he too had lingering affection for her despite everything.  I feel he became anti-Korean racist and I don't know where he is now but in retrospect he definitely never crossed a line with her that I know of except for asking questions I would never ask.  He called her by her Asian name which was something I never did in those days feeling it pretentious.   'The mysterious maiden of the Moon...' - It's a line from Yi Kwangsu's 'The Soil' in which a married man is comparing his wife with someone else like his former student.  In good Korean custom since his former student once had a puppy-crush on him and gave him some corn, when her husband finds out, he kicks her to death in her pregnant stomach and this is why I oppose many things in principle such as tribalism, marriage, and for all intent and purposes the nuclear family. Yi Kwangsu is a problematic figure and as a Christian or aspiring Christian / 'Christianist' I don't recommend it.  It has incredibly exquisite descriptions of women that could make you brain-dead.  Yi Kwangsu also supposed Japan's occupation of Korea so that to this day talking about Yi Kwangsu can get you crucified.   I also seem to recall something like '_ _-ya, you got run over by a train you one-legged prostitute; now you have to love your husband even more.'  But I don't remember the context. Ironically or not 'The Soil' is the title of a Knut Hamsun novel the author of which supported Hitler; I do not.   I wonder where she is now. This person got shot at a lot and I regret adding to her burdens with my sin-eater-type confessions or just shooting my mouth off when stuff happened.  I had a crush on someone else and started saying I was sad I lost my virginity in college; IDK why I said anything. This person also had high alcohol-tolerance - extremely high for a female Asian - and although I could also drink a lot I always did bad self-destructive things. In the Middle Ages one form of 'trial by ordeal' was to reach your hand in to boiling water to pull out a pearl and if the boiled skin healed well you were exonerated or sth.   She must be 'somebody's everything; my impossible girl.'  IDK why she talked to me and I made fun of her and all my fictionalized versions of her and theories of her were derogations.   Like me she played the piano. She once said '_ _ is popular' which was a burn I appreciate since I'm anti-popularity and anti-personality-cults. She went to a school part of which is Victoria College where a literary critic I admire(d) taught for many years. I am stuck in America, hounded by Satan through the personages of my Maoist biological family and 'family tree' of America torn between past and future, un-death and life; due in large part to my excessive tendency to defend myself, to lash out, to wash my hands on the outside without cleaning my 'interior mentality' to paraphrase the 'Da Xue,' or to blaspheme the Spirit in some respects, I feel. I regret talking about her and at the same time why would I talk about lesser maidens? IDK what her favorite piano-piece was as I never endeavored to enage her in discourse about art or aesthetics given she is not a 'kisaeng' or 'geisha' and I am not a museum-curator or whatever.  Other people would be like 'Oh!  You lke the Grande Valse Brilliante; I know you spent the summer of 2003 teaching yourself repeat-notes.'   Everyone wants to drag everyone in to their mud or graves these days.  Am reminded of Endo Shusaku's 'Silence' about why Jesuits would apostasize in medieval Japan.  His conclusion was that the 'swamp of Japan' was too full of sensualism, the Portuguese Jesuit wanted a Japanese mistress or wife.  I once yelled 'swamp f-ggot' at someone due to their tendency to emotionalize and 'contextualize' everything which was an underhanded way of trying to make me change my sex as well.  In an effort to mitigate some of the tempting evil pornographic things I said about KR over the years I said a few more but this is a person, whose name means 'Pearl' as in 'the pearl of great price for which oe sold everything else.'  It is said that AAPI Twitter, America, house-slave Am-Kor own-goal Korean self-exploitation honor-killing squadsters, etc. want to these people in the trash. I found my Gideon Kor-Eng NT Psalms with the 'victory song' that sounds like Mandarin in its Revelation, that I had worried I'd lost.  That might be the 'most grateful' thing that 'happened.' I also remembered what my Mandarin name used to be though I had many in different classes I took. I was going to say many things, but in the end: the mystery of Charity.

*

I never considered the full implications of socialism or mental socialism till today.  I assumed that it was valid mitigation.  Some are born rich, some are born poor, it's wrong to let the latter starve on principle alone.   I don't even know how to say this.  I remember during the Iraq War being struck by how much the government - like my mom - was asking outsiders for advice about how to fight.  Dick Cheney got in trouble.  Years later I was skeptical of the F-35 because a lot of idiots with no skin in the game wanted to build it here or there. Wisconsin wanted to build the 'Littoral Combat Ship' which who cares. It made people worse and worse. The only thing is, the CCP - who ultimately serve I dare not even say whom, but clearly not the ghosts of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin or perhaps even Mao Zedong - figured out awesome killer ways to troll Republicans like Scott Walker w/ their 'FoxConn Fallujah hokey-pokey' whereby they got an avowed capitalist to promise socialists something that actually came from-post-hyper-anti-socialist hyper-capitalists with a plan to kill all white people or something. My father used to talk about the University of Chicago School of Economics all the time and it made me sulkily ask myself why 'Poor Dad' is talking so much about stuff that supposedly makes people billionaires while Jacob's English major dad is Bloomberg's 'chief of staff.'   I say again it's just like Biden saying all the right stuff, 'knee on the neck of the American soul, bone of our bone, winter of peril, hey dumbfuck, articulate, they're killing people.' Writing grant-proposals to the government to fund private research in to brain-injury that is itself applied by the government to veterans sent to get brain-damaged by a government that said good things and did retarded things based on their readings of the good things they said a bit like Karenin in 'Anna Karenina.'   I remember when George W. Bush said 'I'm the decider.'  I once told my dad to get out of my face so he got really sloshed up and vapored, 'I'm in your face!'  I'm not even saying that to defame someone but welcome to reality. Every so often every male seems to try to man up then they defend themselves like, 'No that is not the way in which I meant that I was manning up.'  You could call this 'self-draft-dodging.' It's ancient history but if I had been wiser I would have tried to predict the future for myself rather than visualize it as an abstract spectatorial notion.  At day's end mental socialists can literally not understand why it is wrong to steal.  Stealing is compulsory under socialism - I again come back to 'Pearl' since her ex-suitor and I used to reflect on how Korean collectivism drove people into themselves.  Similarly mental socialists cannot but hoard 'capabilities' so that in the end they'll falsify anything, steal anything; the only limit I guess is living with themselves.

I keep giving myself to fantasy and coping of all kinds like a 'mental Changrae Lee novel, mental David Guterson novel,' or ultimately Vergil (Virgil).  There has to be a new music, a new dream, something, a new city, though it is odd to think about pre-Christian times and a legend of what came before Rome in a Christian moment amid realignment in 'late Roman history.' My favorite YAL book still perhaps is 'The Giver' since it deals with the uses of history, with abortion, and with escape or exile.   I was going to say a while back something about 'Light in August' which relates to escape - as well to complacence - and to interracial relationships, pregnancy, the right to live.  I was in Minneapolis but mind was on Japan, on all these swords, not the Olympics but histories of swords and strange armor, halberds.  There was a huge sword called a 'field sword' in translation. I don't even want to see these people again; I sincerely pray the Japanese Prime Minister, the men and women of their armed forces, Tokyo's apparently amazing counter-terrorism and response capabilities for NBC / WMD / etc. attacks since the Aum Shinrikyo Sarin subway attacks and maybe their counter-nuclear or ability to respond after a nuclear blast will be enough.  People in America are trying to live by a little of the old, a little of the new, but it seems utterly impossible. When people abuse me I get really dreamy.  I read Virgil in high school; I was thinking of 'post-Covid YAL' or so in which people are just on the run, harrowing themselves, not even nostalgic for Babylon or anything in it.  It is almost like 'the meaning of the soul.'  I realized that in addition to new churches and new government laws Covid will engender new birth-defects and there will have to be new medicine.  Japan is a country that I said bad things about especially when in Korea but she never did anything bad to me - I remember playing 'Final Fantasy' and thinking someone out there loves me; they made an investment in children worldwide.  The only thing is I'm too old for such adventures and I fall apart quickly. All these birds in Japan, colors of red - people get obsessed with the Otherness of Japan and want to abnegate Belial-like (a demon or fallen angel of sensualism, to my understanding).  

I took so many notes and voice-notes yesterday that I devoutly hope my visions will pass to someone.  The future is going to be so beautiful for somebody but I have lost so much faith in my ability to mitigate or restrain evil.  Those who I had thought were simply stupid but were diabolically opposed to my existence - whom I did not wish to understand and whom I had 'fancied' I could placate or appease through offerings - turned out to be radically evil, unconditionally evil.  I feel that my father (biological) would steal my soul if he could; would eat it in a way.  My mom is always sitting on the porch and gives a look of hope like I could change her mind but it'll never happen.  I want to kill myself; I think things worldwide will get worse before they get better; I don't trust Biden or anyone who says the right things without showing exactly what they are doing.  Christians seem so petty sometimes like melanin, hairy legs, in Japan this therefore that, Native American Indian manhood rituals.   I just want to know which pastor has the 'batting average' I can believe in but it has to be John MacArthur doesn't it?