Analysis Solidified: Caino Hypocriens is an Antisocial Species

 It is easy to get along with someone who has genuine social skills. 

 It's difficult to create a misunderstanding and impossible to perpetuate one. They understand wording is difficult and correct it to what you meant as opposed to what you said. They employ radio protocol, discounting anything that's only been transmitted once. When they notice a discrepancy, they ask for clarification instead of trying to play one-up gotcha.

 They're likewise almost impossible to offend. If you tell them something true, why would they be offended? The shame is the fact. It doesn't become more true if it's said out loud. If you say something false, why would they be offended? You're only shaming yourself. You can't hurt the socially competent with words. At worst, they'll stop talking to you - if you consistently make it unprofitable, they will in the end stop fighting it and declare conversational bankruptcy (on your behalf).

 Grass monkeys aren't like this in the slightest. When you're talking to one, you have to go to enormous lengths to compensate for their atrocious lack of social skills. 

 They're offended by everything, so you have to walk on eggshells. They can't understand even minor polymorphisms, so you have to word everything precisely. They refuse to accept correction or admit to error, so you have to say it right the first time. They have no patience, so you have to say it quickly. They come up with elaborate etiquettes because a) they can't understand the difference between necessary and unnecessary and b) they can't handle anything composed on the fly. It has to be ritualized. Practiced ahead of time. Puddles are out of their depth. 

 The only skills dire apes practice are deliberately fostering misunderstandings. Deliberately trying to make conversation as hostile as possible. 

 Antisocial animal. Diagnose the whole species with oppositional defiant disorder, it's merely a question of who hides it better. Have to grade on a curve though. If a score of 120 is pleasant conversation, the children of Satan rate from 5-21.
 Grass monkeys are smelly and stinky because they want to be offensive. Don't worry, Gnon cheerfully grants this prayer.

Cowardice, With Reference to Fictional Characters

 Fictional characters are good for character studies due to knowing their inner thoughts. There's no debate about why they do the things they do, because the author tells us. We can then judge these characters. The judgment can be matched against real-world behaviour (as opposed to the reverse), and we can be confident the judgment still applies. The predictions will remain valid.

 Han De is supposed to be paranoid.

 Weiheng Hui is supposed to be a coward, and says so.

 Richmond Rain Stroudwater is actually a coward. A rather high-fidelity rendition, no less.

 I would say the key feature of a coward is feeling terrified if they're not perfectly safe. If anything could conceivably be trying to kill them, they assume it is trying to kill them. They're paranoid and self-absorbed. 

 Han De's paranoid ends up looking like good preparation - indeed, he wasn't paranoid enough, and survived due to dumb luck / author fiat. It doesn't count if they're really out to get you. He should just tell his family he's a calamity attractor, as it turns out this attracts calamities. He could convince them to stop being one of the calamities he's attracted.

 Hui isn't a coward at all. He simply fails to enjoy fighting as much as he's "supposed" to. In his case, being pressured into unnecessary fighting is what a coward would suffer - he bravely refuses if possible.

 

 There's nothing cowardly about being afraid of fearsome things. Poking a tiger with a stick is stupidity, not bravery. Failing to be afraid of the fearsome makes you weak and/or dead. If something is likely to hurt you, being afraid of it is merely good sense.

 A true coward like Rain isn't merely fearful. They are not only afraid of the many things that can damage their soft, vulnerable bodies. Their cowardice is crippling. Their cowardice makes them even weaker than they otherwise would be. They panic over nothing. They flee from their own shadow.

 They're even scared of looking at themselves. They can't know themselves, and therefore must quite rationally fear the result of every conflict. 

 This makes them more violent than the courageous. Since everything is trying to kill them, it's fine to try to kill it back, right? Cowards are, if not dangerous exactly, certainly hazardous. You're minding  your own business, they construe it as a threat, and snap at you. Hazardous waste.

 They're too scared to admit they're a coward. They fearfully refuse to look at things, and thus end up full of cope and seethe. "I'm not scared of you!" (They're paralyzed with terror.) "Anyone would be scared of this!" (Even someone genuinely threatened by it isn't that scared.) Cowards have to violently condemn anyone who makes them scared, to avoid condemning themselves. (It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop them.) Cowards are too scared to resist peer pressure and end up violating the few virtuous principles they have. Cowards are too scared to look into another's mind, lest they start understanding their own by analogy. The only person they sympathize with is someone being terrorized, because it gives them an excuse to try to child-proof the entire world. "Fear is the only issue! I'm going to ensure nobody needs to be afraid ever again!" Ambitious, in a sense. They want a world with no lions no tigers no bears. Oh my. 

 Cowardice works a lot like the ur-sin, Pride. Instead of trying to destroying everything glorious to avoid being outshone, they try to destroy everything glorious because they're afraid it's going to kill them.

 Cowards are highly recognizable because they have to say anything which makes them afraid, which is anything more threatening than a kitten, is morally reprehensible. They end up lionizing kitteh and doge and snek because they've declared everything else abhorrent. 

 Saying they're scaredy-cats is an insult to cats. Felines are indeed skittish, but everything they run from is plausibly a threat. They don't startle at nothing. They can also learn a thing is safe, instead of packing up and trying to shred everything that scares them. Cats don't respond to fear by making it their life goal to terrorize the world. Admittedly the way some cats toy with their food is reminiscent of the way a coward with an advantage will try to stretch things out as long as possible - often long enough to turn the tables on them.

 As per usual, even other cowards are disgusted by cowards. Which is why Rain is a Mary Sue: rather than 'accidentally' accumulating all the local elites, as happens in SenescentSoul's mind, he would have been universally panned, even by folk he tried to be useful to. Which is correct: cowards are children. If you try to rely on them, whatever you're resting on them will fall when they're spooked and run off. It's only worth taking care of them if you're their mom or dad, because they're not productive. 

 Moms who are themselves cowards won't even defend their children. They talk a big game about going mama bear and won't willingly suffer so much as a hangnail for their kids' sake. 

 

 It's possible cowards only feel two emotions: fear and relief from fear. They like cats because kitties make them think they don't have to be afraid. Any nearby predator will take the cat before it takes them. If you make the feel perfectly safe, they don't finally have space to feel other emotions. When they're done feeling relief they feel nothing but empty.

 

 Rain likes math because he doesn't have to be afraid of getting the wrong answer. As long as he doesn't screw up the arithmetic, he can be certain the answer is right. He can feasibly eliminate risk; that's what math is to him. Programming too. With suitably limited ambition, it's possible to write a bugless program, and a bugless program is, to his perception, perfect.
 Are all the pop references about cowardice too? If you're caught or called out for using awkward, cringe lines, you can blame the other writer. With enough popularity you can be all, "No, it's the children who are wrong. I don't have be afraid of saying something stupid." 

 Rain gets his bell run by Lavarro. He's rightly afraid of Lavarro, who is erratic at best. He then starts behaving as if a Lavarro is going to jump out of random bushes at him.
 The injury is partially his own fault. She wanted him to take off the helmet to see his face. He took it as an Absolute Command to not wear a helmet, too afraid of offending her to even think of putting it back on. His cowardice was the only reason he was in danger in the first place.
 He ended up fine. If the Lavarro situation repeated, she would force him to take off the helmet again. Insisting on wearing the cap is doubly pointless. He's too afraid to notice either of these things. The coward is too afraid of fear to think clearly. If you are not a coward, then fear is not the mind-killer. 

 Subconsciously, Rain understands what threatens him most is his own cowardice. That's why he insists on the helmet; like a safety blanket, a charm to ward off his own fear. It doesn't work, because he's too scared to face the true root cause.

P.S. Lately age-related-decaySoul seems to have conveniently half-forgotten Rain is supposed to be a coward. That's character development, right? When the author forgets their character's vices? Maybe Rain isn't a Mary Sue. Maybe the other characters had the keen insight to recognize and predict the author's impending dementia. At least it's not a full MLP-style personality transplant. ("Character growth is when you suddenly become a completely different person due to failing one time.")

Mercantilism as Immune Reaction to Central Banks

 Mercantilism is indeed the rational response to fractional reserve and/or paper money. You need to quarantine their economy, isolating it from yours until the infection burns itself out. (Listening to dumb peasant policy prescriptions "foreigners bad! myside good!" is dumb.) Mercantilism and its arguments should not be confused with a logical or rational policy strategy. It was merely a kneejerk reaction that happened to be less buggy than average, which is why it appeared not to fail as badly as average. 

 Inflating currency inflates everything it comes into contact with. Fractional reserve is typically used to back bad loans, meaning every currency which comes into contact with the paper money becomes "financialized" - inflated by counterfeit bills and shackled to interest rates set by the counterfeiting bank. 

 Optimistically, house prices in American, China, etc. are 40% housing demand and 60% monetary demand. The counterfeit bills try to flee the inflation regime but only manage to "financialize" i.e. infect the housing market. Ulterior bids raise prices and suppress genuine demand via competition. Once they run out of houses in their own country, they will "financialize" the houses in your country too. Unless you make it illegal. And make all intermediary instruments equally illegal. Make drug laws look like ponies and flowers and skipping and flouncing. 

 

 Trade has to be handled delicately. If you let them buy your goods for their money so you can buy their goods, they will "financialize" your currency. Even if you have a hard gold standard you have a Cantillon gradient to concern yourself with. You can try tariffs but the tariffs will never move as quickly as the printing press.

 Necessarily, interacting with their money at all has to be forbidden. If they want your goods, they need to sell you goods first to acquire your currency, then buy with your currency. I recommend a physical quarantine. Expand the embassy to a whole port, and physically forbid them from leaving the port area. (Functionally, encourage barter.) As your currency skyrockets in value compared to theirs, they will only become more and more desperate to use it as an inflation hedge. You have to continue to want it more than they do. 

 You don't have to worry about them buying your money for goods. It will cause deflation, which means it will become ever more expensive for them to buy your currency with goods. Self-limiting. Indeed it should help collapse the counterfeit-bank regime due to Goodhart's law. They will offload their ""money"" and try to hoard yours until they have to use your money to trade amongst themselves - driving up the value of your currency even further. 

 Possibly it's okay to buy their stuff on debt, since they love debt so much.
 ...yes, the accounting works out. In fact, where possible, all trade with the infected country should be carried out using loans in their money. Instead of paying them directly in your own money, hold your money (like collateral) and take out an equivalent loan, then spend their money. Their interest rates are always lower than inflation. When you pay off the debt, it will always cost less of your money than you originally set aside. Indeed, do it dynamically. As relative deflation hits your coinage, siphon the top off the buffer, since you don't need it anymore.
 As always, lies are a vulnerability. They produce exploitable weaknesses. When someone creates a central bank, you ought to ruthlessly exploit it until they learn better. Note that e.g. Amish towns could issue tokens among themselves and execute these trades. You don't need to be a whole country. You can David vs. Goliath this.

 "Mercantilism became the dominant school of economic thought in Europe throughout the late Renaissance and the early-modern period (from the 15th to the 18th centuries)." What a coincidence. However, they didn't quarantine hard enough. Instead they started endogenous infections. Everyone gets a "financial" crisis. Ultimately, because Mercantilism came from low cunning instead of conscious strategy, it couldn't protect them from the very hazard that worried them. It merely camouflaged itself and hacked into their zombie brains. 

 Yet another reason you don't [black government] even once. 

 

 In the modern world, everyone is banking centrally, with counterfeit bills. This means you want to North Korea and isolate yourself almost entirely. NK, likely due to the black government thing, doesn't realize they could trade just fine with a few measures that are less draconian than the ones they're already used to. Caino hypocriens is not a rational animal, but it's fine to aspire in that direction.

No, really. Don't let me stop you.

Guilds were Unions

As far as I can tell, literally identical. 

Garnished wages to support a parasitic and Satanic bureaucrat class.

Fixed all your prices. 

Got violent and criminal with anyone outside the guild trying to do their job. 

Sometimes seized the local government. Always used as tax farmers. Guilds and unions make the work far more legible. Anti-security.

 

Had in-union social events.

This knowledge is dark and verboten because Fascism always has to claim to be New™ and peasants are either dumb enough to buy the scam or just smart enough to pretend without being smart enough to understand lies are bad mmmkay. Fake being unable to learn from history until they make it.

Shitty Jokes Day

 There was an exclusive convent which administered a difficult entrance exam.

 The invigilator had this to say: "Nun shall pass." 

I am boned by my words
I have created over a thousand signals
Unknown to truth
Nor known through lies
Have withstood pain to create many shades
But yet, by these hands that will never hold anything,
I pray
UNLIMITED COPE WORKS

(The best part: the cope doesn't work.)

Because Democracy is Tyranny, Freedom Really is Slavery

 "Our issues is not that we're insects.. but that we want to be safe"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/RessurecBarbar/status/1703151854119788612

 Point 0, the term 'bug' is fine. It's lindy to use animals as symbols for extremely wrong things. Owls are especially stupid, not a great symbol for wisdom. Snakes tend to especially polite, instead of especially evil. Etc. 

 The problem is they want to be Equal, and Free. 

 There's lots of safe ways to compete, but competition produces hierarchy. Consequently you have to do what the guy at the top of the hierarchy says, or leave the hierarchy. According to Democrats, that's not Free! They want to square the circle, have a group with no hierarchy and thus Freedom, by having no competition. Not even implicit competition. In other words, Harrison Bergeron. Slavery. 

 The Democrat can be Free if and only if anyone he might Envy is in chains. The more Freedom they clamour for, the heavier the chains they're proposing. The more Free the country, the more crippled the populace. You are here. 

 Anyway, stop waiting for the Democrats to stop Democrating, and form your own hierarchy. Stop waiting for Democrat permission, lest you tell on yourself.

Under Democracy, Genocide is Justice

 Fiction: the peasants freed themselves and made Democracy. Reality: the aristocrats were underpaid and quit, giving you Democracy by default.  

 Here's the question: is herding peasantry inherently unprofitable? They create wealth and problems, but do their problems & upkeep always cost more than the wealth?  

 Possibly the accounting works out if the peasants grovel and submit efficiently enough... If they fight you on it, it's 100% not worth it, which is part of the pattern of security always being affordable. Even peasants can afford to secure themselves even against lords - they just shouldn't, because a recursion makes this security an exception. If peasants moronically secure themselves against lordship, it means the lords need to secure themselves against peasants, which typically boils down to peasant genocide. Justice always has the advantage, and under Democracy turns out the Nash equilibrium is death camps. All are equal in death; just start killin' until every Egalitarian is dead. Not really the intended result, but problem: solved. (Or maybe it is? Are the peasants mad because they ain't dead? The demands have become strident and shrill...)

P.S. Crime is always optional, because security is always affordable.

Impossibility of Solomonoff Induction Refuted by Greeks

Solomonoff induction is the proven guaranteed-truth machine. SI is Sherlock Holmes reasoning: if you eliminate the impossible, wisdom remains, no matter how seemingly improbable.

"Obviously Solomonoff Induction is impossible to do in the real world." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MznxnYCtHZbtDxJuh/approximating-solomonoff-induction 

lol

Allegedly, Solomonoff induction doesn't work because the search space is too big: any search strategy using less than infinite resources has a 0% chance of stumbling across the correct hypothesis, and thus all your guesses will die during the pruning phase. There's just too many false hypotheses to find the truth in this haystack. This is indeed true if you're talking about silicon machine intelligence.

Reality: Anaximander's theory of evolution. Hero's steam engine. Democritus' theory of atoms and the void.

The Greeks could have derived the entirety of the modern world had they taken Solomonoff induction seriously. The only thing stopping them from inventing semiconductors and conquering the entire world was their unwillingness to engage in a pruning phase. All they had to do was eliminate non-Hero engines, and then look more deeply into Hero's engine. Reminds me of the time I searched all over my desk and couldn't find my glasses, because they were on my forehead. 

Despite endless proofs that you cannot successfully carry out a Solomonoff search phase, empirically, you can and do. Sorry, a strategy does exist. However. It's not a material strategy. Can't implemented Solomonoff search on an unconscious thinking machine. 

It's not only possible, you already know how to do it. Think up all the possibilities. Okay, now realize you missed some and think those up too. Yes, really, all the possibilities. Everything that hasn't already been eliminated, no matter how weird. Okay now you're done. You're good, go prune. 

Compared to the profits the method cannot be called even remotely hard, never mind [impossible]. (P.S. This is why it's a good idea to attempt 'impossible' things.) At worst, you end up pruning every possibility and realize you didn't quite finish the search, meaning the method is absurdly robust: if you do it wrong, the method itself tells you what you did wrong.

 

P.S If the Greeks were truly intelligent, they would have also derived the profanity of Fascism thus discarding it, resulting in all the benefits of the modern world without any of the downsides. Techno-Amish.