Alternative hypothesis: by the standards of mortal humans, gods are totally and completely insane.
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Alternative hypothesis: by the standards of mortal humans, gods are totally and completely insane.
Given what we have seen of them thus far, I don't think "the gods are stupid" is a particularly outlandish claim, and im surprised at the totally unwarranted level of backlash its getting.
You’ll have to forgive me for not knowing what you’re claiming anymore. This argument has been about your hurt feelings, and not about your ideas, for dozens of pages now, and honestly don’t want to get in an argument about your feelings.
But for what it’s worth, I 100% agree with what I believe to be your core claim: by conventional standards of mortal humans, the repeated efforts of the gods to expend their vast creatitivity and power to construct a world, just to watch that world be destroyed countless numbers of times, is insane.
I strongly disagree trying to put a metric on that insanity (some in this thread have claimed, for instance, that the gods should measure their progress by some unknowable and mostly irrelevant thing like ‘amount of time each world survivors the snarl’), or trying to propose an alternative actuon (like the gods should give up and go back to wherever they came from).
I personally agree the positive statement that the gods, in this cosmology, are insane by our mortal human standards. You lose me when you try to make normative statements about how the gods should measure the value of their actions, or what they should better spend their time on instead.
Or it would be, if this entire graveyard was not total disproof of one aspect that was previously brought up.
The gods were discussing deleting the universe early because they know how this tune goes, and each one of those headstones is a proof that they are, at the very least, good at escaping long enough to put that damn tangle of anger back in a new cage.
It also mocks the very concept of creation and keeping up hope that one day, they'll create something that lasts forever, as stupid. This offends me as a creator myself, and I suspect I am not alone.
While this reveal makes the gods' statements at the godsmoot generally look better, it makes Tyr's own look worse:
What "strategic advantage"? They've escaped the Snarl countless times, they really aren't at risk here.
The problem with that statement is that the gods are not monolithic. The whole point of the snarl is that the gods do not agree on anything.
Imagine if you were trying to build a shed on top of a volcano where one person insists on making their part out of wood. It highly limits solutions when you have to include three pantheons worth of ideas into every iteration.
If one single god failed that often we could easily just state "you should have figured it out by now." But as most of us have experience with Democracy and haven't fixed all of our issues after 10,000 years of civilization I think we can hand them some slack.
I've wondered why the gawds didn't just cut the Snarl like Alexander the Great supposedly did with the Gordian Knot.
We have evidence that the problem persists and a solution is not found. The reason for that, viz “gods are dumb,” is something you made up.
If a million pianists banged randomly on their keybords but failed to produce Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos, does that mean they’re dumb? Not necessarily; it just means they don’t have the right method.
That's a possibility, but nobody mentionned the Dark One at the Godsmoot.
Well, for lack of a better choice, I'll think that is what he talked about.
That's how I read it at first but that was when I thought Loki was making an educated guess about their window of action should the last Gate fall, not speaking from experience as we now know he was.
so... has anyone try to aproximate the number of worlds and years of the gods yet? that has to be a great number.
the number of worlds in the comic is at least 50.000 in my opinion, probably close to 100.000, lets go with the later one.
the worlds are many, but judging by what thor says and the age of the current one, they dont seem to last a lot. the first one was not even created, the second one only lasted 4 years... the current one is on the year 1185 and there were issues with the snarl on it 60 years before. of course, maybe the world has more than 1185 years, but the gods created the world by wishing things like ninjas on it, so i would say that the actual age of the world is not going to be much more than 1185 and i will also point out that this world is probably lasting a lot more than other previous worlds thanks to the order of the Scribble so lets make that 1185 a maximun for the age of any world. if all the 100.000 worlds lasted 1185 years then we have 118.500.000 for the gods, on the other hand, if all the other worlds only lasted 4 we have only 400.000 years. one would think that the gods get better at this world making thing, so the last world is also the one that lasted more and the first world the one that lasted less, so lets add the two numbers and /2 the result: 59.450.000 years.
what do you think about that number? of course if just an aproximation, we dont even now the number of worlds.
Yes, it does mean they are dumb for coming up with such a stupid method to try to reproduce a song.
But truth is I'm not really in the "gods are dumb" camp. I think they are either crazy or actually apathetic.
Now, what might disprove the gods being crazy? Maybe in the future we will get more exposition explaining there is literally nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. Maybe a god will explain how each and every world was meticulously designed in a controlled fashion, just like running scientific experiments. And as long as they've been collecting meaningful data? Sure, not crazy.
If, however, it turns out they don't really know how to progress anymore and are just randomly putting stuff together with only hope that something changes.... Crazy.
So I would just have to ask all the skeptics, if the gods we're in fact crazy, what would be definitive proof for you?
Even if they did have other things they could potentially be doing, or other places they could go, that would not inherently make them crazy. And I'm seeing even less of a reason to believe they're apathetic - you don't keep doing something like this over and over if you don't actually care.
You're looking at this through the lens of someone with a definitely finite existence and limited time to do things. That is not the case for the gods, and that one factor changes everything about it. When you have (potentially) limitless time, there is no such thing as wasting time.
Most opinions are valid. It's just hypocritical to say someone is making a bunch of assumptions and isn't correct, while in the same breath backing up that claim with assumptions of your own.
I've also never made it my argument to debunk someone by demanding evidence. Rather, my defense is that demanding ice water in Hel is a futile pointless gesture that doesn't get anyone anywhere and only causes frustration.
Let’s see... if we conservatively assume there are as many worlds as stars in the sky, that’s a million billion billion worlds. And if we assume that building a world takes a a million billion years, that makes the gods about a billion billion billion billion years old.
So, they’re relatively young still, for eternal beings.
Nice dodge of the question.
But that statement is nonsense. It doesn't make your opinion valid.
So if I accused you of being a murderer you would not ask me to show you that there was a body?Quote:
I've also never made it my argument to debunk someone by demanding evidence.
No, forget it, done with this thread.
Problematic assumptions:
- That this world has lasted longer than all previous ones. Progress in constructing a better Snarl jail need not be lineal. Bronze weapons are better than iron ones*, and worse than steel, but you can't get to steel from bronze without the stepping stone of iron. For the purposes of this metaphor, though, the gods could have abandoned "bronze style" planets and be on "iron style" now because they tried all variations on bronze and stopped making forward progress.
- That this world is a mere 1185 years old. That calendar is based on some king's conquest and empire building. For all we know, before he founded his Empire, 10,000 years had passed since creation. A much harder limit is that the dragons had not fully merged their bloodlines.
- That the order of the Scribble bought this world some 50 years. Even if we assume the world has lasted a mere 1000 (see above), that is not an improvement that merits the descriptor "a lot more". It's just, at best, 5% extra. Nice, but hardly amazing.
- That the first world didn't last. That world lasted long enough people were living on it when the Snarl went on his rampage.
Grey Wolf
*If you are wondering why then early humans stopped using bronze, our best hypothesis is that they run out of tin to make bronze.
"There is this kind of notion that everyone's opinion is equally valid. My arse! Bloke who is a professor of dentistry for forty years does not have a debate with some eejit who removed his teeth with string and a door."
~Dara O'Briain (circa the minute mark):
https://youtu.be/YMvMb90hem8?t=60
Also "opinions are like ********s. Everyone's got one, but they often stink".
Grey Wolf
Hah, totally knew you guys would jump all over that like stink on rice. Way too easy of an opportunity to take it out of context. What is the big asterisk in the statement "most opinions are valid"? We're still just talking about this comic, regarding Godly beings and the creation of worlds we know nothing about.
There is very little if any evidence. Without evidence, we can only guess. Therefore until we actually have evidence, most opinions are valid.
I feel rather disappointed that I even had to explain this.