I'd like to start a religion

[benkern]

*puts ashes in small vase, admires for a good minute, sets fire to Erik's left shoe*

[Kaiser Mors V]

This isn't my webcomic... no lighting my stuff on fire...

[Aurangzeb Khan]

No, we'll just shell your capital instead.

[Kaiser Mors V]

Not if I detonate a nuclear device in it first...

[Aurangzeb Khan]

I wouldn't do that if I were you. The MRWS would only try to invoice you for the civil and military nuclear programmes necessary to prepare the ground as it were for the detonation.

[Shyriath]

Not if I detonate a nuclear device in it first...

[Kaiser Mors V]

Fuck invoices... I'lll just put it in the center of the city and make it go boom....

[Yvain Wintersong]

...can this religion please get a subforum in the Multi-Temple? Soon?

[Ari Rahikkala]

Well, since I haven't been asking Erik for permission to create forums so far... * does it, and puts Beth-Matzo in as a sibling forum while he's at it *

[Ari Rahikkala]

There. Go forth and... be rational...

[Kaiser Mors V]

I will be countermanding that forum creation... The Jewish one was just a joke for Jess... Not that it's over.. it ought be removed...

[Chrimigules]

You know, this whole micronational religion thing quite proliferating, so much so that we might have to coin a new term. You've heard of YAMO, so now we have YAR (Yet Another Religion). And of course if this was the AntiBoards, I'd pull up the :yar smilie.

[Yvain Wintersong]

Your Niftiness,

With all due respect, I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to have a subforum for my religion.

- It doesn't cost you anything, not even vertical space on the main board, to have a subforum here.
- I intend to put a lot of time into my project and make ithat benefits Shireroth and adds to its activity. I would have done so already, but I only got my Internet access back yesterday.
- The Order will have more trouble carrying out its activities and keeping the dignity befit it without a place of its own.
- You have no compunctions about having five or six completely unused subforums in most Duchies, and twelve unused subforums in the Ministry of Information.

If you let me have a subforum, I will probably make it into something beneficial and interesting in a country where, to be honest, there's not many nontrivial things of interest going on. The worst-case scenario is that I'm lazy and you have one more inactive subforum along with the dozens of others that you can delete as soon as the urge strikes you. And the other "worse-case" scenario is that several other people with creative ideas ask for their own subforums to carry them out, and the Multi-Temple becomes a place of thriving religious debate and cultural development, instead of people posting stuff copied verbatim from foreign countries and making fake suicide cults.

If you do this, I will erect a monument to your generousity in the largest town square of Ynnraile not already occupied by a monument to you of some sort.

[Kaiser Mors V]

For now, I'm removing it. Maybe if I see it develop I'll consider a forum.

As for the inactive forums else were.. I would be up for archiving or removing many of them...

MiniInts forums are just cause I shoved old ones in there...

[Yvain Wintersong]

Your Highness, the accepted procedure for making a decision is to weigh the cost and the benefits.

Creating a forum costs you and Shireroth nothing. You might argue it costs you time to create the forum, but Ari did that for you, and all you had to do was leave it.

The benefits are that you might get a new religion out of it. Shireroth might become a more active country, the religion might catch on elsewhere and spread Shireroth's repute through the world, and you personally might learn something from our teachings. You'll gain my good will and avoid alienating me. And other people who want to add something to Shireroth will feel confident that the Kaiser and the government support them.(

(You may say: do whatever you want, but use the Multi-Temple forum. That's what I'm doing right now. One of the Order's most important principles is to convince people to make rational decisions - and to do that, you need to be able to explain your reasons. Another principle is that when two people think they disagree, that disagreement can be resolved by discussion. And the most important principle of all is that people should be willing, even proud, to change their mind.

So please explain your decision regarding the forums further. If you can convince me that my analysis is off, and the cost of creating a forum for me would be greater than the benefits, I will proudly admit I am wrong.)

[Kaiser Mors V]

My decision uses a more evil rational decision process... Just let it be for now.. when I have time I'll re-evaluate and perhaps even propose an evil idea...

[Ari Rahikkala]

I know I've been the one who's been creating these forums like they were just rows in a database, but I'd just like to make it known that I am also starting to feel that the proliferation of forums is a bad idea.

The fact is, every forum is a liability:

- Figuring out where and when things happen gets more difficult with every forum you add. You don't notice this when you're there in the middle of things, but it makes historical research annoying as you have to piece together what discussions and events lead to which responses all over the board. At least, it does to me - I have a bad habit of missing things like leaps of several years between posts
- Forum permissions are easy to mess up (for instance, the Temple of Beth-Matzo caused annoyance to some because of broken permissions).
- Empty forums don't look particularly beautiful.
- It fills me with a profound sense of uselessness that you could basically start a thread anywhere in Shireroth to reach any set of Shirithian people and it'd probably work perfectly well. I'm not sure what would happen if you tried to test this...

[Maksym Hadjimehmetov]

Exactly. Plus, less boards mean a nation looks more active!

[Kaiser Mors V]

More concentrated...

[Yvain Wintersong]

Right, I'm enjoying this, it's a good way to explain some basic principles that otherwise would sound dry and boring.

Next principle - justification versus prediction. People have a tendency to find the decision they want to make first, and then to come up with reasons that justify it. That is, people very often make decisions based on emotions, self-interest, or in-group identification, but they can't admit that to themselves or their friends. So they think up a good-sounding reason that also supports the same decision. Next time, when they make the opposite decision, they'll think of an opposing reason.

For example, most people around the world object to human cloning. One very common objection is that it goes against the natural order of thingsl. Does that sound like a good reason to you? Think about it for a second.

Of course, most other modern technology - cars and computers, for example - is equally unnatural. And many things people don't want around, like mosquitoes and smallpox, are entirely natural. So the statement "We should support natural things, but not unnatural things" fails pretty badly, at least in its naive form. What's happening here is probably that people don't want cloning for a personal reason - it's icky and scary - but this doesn't sound like a good reason. So they look for a reason that sounds better - it's unnatural.

It's possible to "improve" this theory to get rid of the flaws. You might say "Unnatural things are okay, unless they affect the human body." Then you get the desired result - cars good, computers good, cloning bad. But your opponent could say "Well, modern medicine is unnatural, and it affects the human body. So by your logic, medicine is bad." Then, since most cloning opponents don't actually object to medicine, they would have to "improve" the theory further. "Unnatural things are okay, unless they affect the human body, but it's okay to affect the human body as long as it's curing a disease." And then your opponent brings up in vitro fertilization, and you have to go back to the drawing board again.

It's always possible to "improve" a bad theory to account for more evidence. That way, you'll never have to abandon your illusion that your personal likes and dislikes are supported by fact. But the mark of a person with a good idea is that it can not only explain away the cases you've thought about, it can also predict a correct result in the cases you haven't.

For example, I oppose murder, because I believe the statement "Killing innocent people is bad." I can then apply this statement to a different situation, for example terrorism. Terrorism kills innocent people, so my belief predicts I should oppose it - and I do! Tsunamis kill innocent people, so my statement predicts I should want fewer tsunamis to happen - and I do! So my opposition to killing innocent people isn't just something I made up on the spot to justify a personal prejudice, it's a useful principle representing a consistent belief system.

(here is where a very smart person objects: "But what about a special case where, for example, a supervillain is planning to blow up the world, and has taken several hostages? Stopping him would involve killing innocent people, but it's the right thing to do!" I agree that the principle breaks down at some point, as do most principles, but that's because it's a specific application of a more powerful principle - what that more powerful principle is will be a topic for future discussion. I also don't mean to imply a principle should be able to predict all cases, just enough of them to prove its value)

So, your "homework" is to consider your arguments for not granting me a forum. Makysm says fewer boards make a nation look more active. Ari thinks (among other things) that any thread posted anywhere would reach all Shirerithians. And the Kaiser wants things to be more concentrated. Perhaps these statements come from well thought-out principles of forum design. And perhaps they come from less noble reasons, like that you enjoy bossing around new people, or you don't like people making new projects in Shireroth because they detract from your own projects, or something like that.

So let's test how your theory of forum creation would predict your answers to each of the following questions:

1. Should feudal nobles delete all their county and barony subforums and confine discussion to the main Duchy forum?
2. Should forums like J.A.S.O. and the Employment Office, which have been around for several years and in all that time gotten fewer posts than the Order's single week-old thread, continue to exist?
3. Should the BOOMist Temple be separate from the Multi-Temple?
4. If you came up with some really exciting new project for Shireroth or another micronation that you personally cared deeply about and which you thought would help the country, should it get its own forum? If this actually happened, how did you feel then?

If your views about creating my forum and your views about the above four questions are different, how do you explain the discrepancy? Will you change your views on either, or add new terms to your theories?

Since it wouldn't be fair to make you do all this without proposing something myself, my personal theory of forum creation (give me some examples to test it on!) is as follows:

A project should get a forum or subforum iff it falls within the scope of Shireroth, if it's sufficiently different from existing forums that combining them would be messy or hinder the project, and if it can stay active.

[Ari Rahikkala]

The reasons I gave certainly were thought up after I'd originally developed the idea of being wary about adding more forums. I'm not documenting my thought process, I'm trying to convince other people that my new opinion is correct.

My personal "theory of forums" involves a notion of significance, which is unfortunately not a real-valued metric due to various gnarly social and cultural bits mixing it up (the most significant bit being, of course, Erik's opinion).

On your questions, my answers are probably no (*), tentative no (in favour of archival), yes, and no. Yeah, I know, I filled up the subdivisions with County forums, so you might be wondering about that last one, but it doesn't really apply since it wasn't a project and, for what it's worth, I didn't feel deeply about it (it simply made manifest the structure that was already there). Seriously though... if I had such an idea, I'd run it on the most appropriate already existing forum. Once it picked up some speed, I could ask for a forum and have Erik's opinion in my favour. I ran Straylight in Yardistan's forum for a while by prefixing my threads with "(SL)", you know.


(*) Considering this same matter for Straylight has given me some perspective, though... I acted quite rashly when I created those forums in the first place, and now I've been pulling out every reason I can to avoid having a huge list of Counties for Straylight...

[benkern]

Yvain: I like people like you, when I'm not in charge. Because with logic you can argue anything, nullifying it as something you should base your life or religion on, so you can piss people off like no tomorrow, and as I say when I'm not the boss I'm one of those snickering kids in the corner who do nothing wrong but still laugh. However if this were NB I'd have banned you so fast you wouldn't know what hit you by now... you're lucky Shireroth is so nice.

[Yvain Wintersong]

Yvain: I like people like you, when I'm not in charge. Because with logic you can argue anything, nullifying it as something you should base your life or religion on, so you can piss people off like no tomorrow.

Nice. You've cut to the heart of the issue very quickly.

Logic does seem to be something you can argue anything with, doesn't it? And yet it's also clear that, in theory, logic is one hundred percent correct and accurate. Does it bother you that a system that should in theory be flawless is actually so full of holes as to be completely useless? It bothers me a lot.

Your caricature of the guy who can argue any point well enough to confuse others certainly matches a lot of people. And it's something I hate. There is nothing that annoys me more than the standard sort of internet argument you get on discussion boards about the existence of God or whether gun control is good or bad or whatever, precisely because itatching a seemingly perfect tool degenerate into uselessness. The Order isn't my attempt to practice that, it's my attempt to eliminate it.

My conjecture is that logic really does give a clear, indisputable answer to every meaningful problem, but only when it's applied very, very carefully. Let me keep giving an example based on this forum question, since it's nice and practical.

Should the Order get a forum here? I think it should, and I can list reasons all day long why it would be a good thing. The Kaiser thinks it shouldn't, and he can list reasons all day long why it would be a bad thing. Since it's not as simple as looking at everyone's reasons and seeing who has a longer list, this sniping at each other is certainly relevant and not exactly illogical in the sense of "Fairies told me the answer!", but it's a far cry from a full logical analysis of the question. Here's how I would do it in a more formal way:

STEP ONE: DEFINE THE QUESTION. Everyone needs to agree on what we want. "Should Shireroth give me a forum?" is meaningless until we define why Shireroth "should" or "shouldn't" do anything. One possible definition would be "Would Shireroth gain activity if it gave me a forum?" Another would be "Would the people of Shireroth, in general, be happier if they gave me a forum?" If we can't agree on a goal, then the question was meaningless to begin with. For example, if by "Shireroth should give me a forum", I meant "I really like having a forum, it makes me feel important!" and the Kaiser, by "Shireroth shouldn't give you a forum" meant "I hate you and don't want to help you in any way", then our problems are way beyond being solved by any sort of discussion, rational or otherwise, and we might as well call it a day. But I think more often than not people can pretty quickly agree what the real question is.

STEP TWO: ESTABLISH FACTS. In each of the above questions, we've reduced the complicated moral-sounding issue to a factual one. If what we want to know is whether Shireroth giving me a forum would increase activity, we need to find a way to test this. At the very least, we could do thought experiments ("If I had a forum, I'd post stuff more often") ("Yeah, but if you had a forum, you'd probably look at other threads in the Multi-Temple less often"). Even better would be to do a real experiment of some sort - for example, check whether other micronations that offer people forums have religions that are better off than those who don't. If this were a very important issue, we might even want to conduct a full-scale scientific experiment - get as many subjects as possible, get them all to start religions in Shireroth, give some but not all of them forums, and compare their outputs with a t-test or something similar. Of course, 99% of problems aren't important enough to merit that kind of effort, but it's a good limit to have in mind.

STEP TWO POINT FIVE: QUANTIZE EVERYTHING. Every part of the "establishing facts" step is likely to be riddled with bias. Let's go back to the thought experiment - I would probably suggest that giving me a forum would motivate me to post a lot more often, while the Kaiser would probably suggest it would cause me to miss a lot of threads in the Multi-Temple all the time. As long as we're both saying "a lot", we can stick to our positions without meaningful communication. A better approach would be for the Kaiser to say something like "There's about two new thread in the Multi-Temple a week. You seem interested in religion, so I think you'd usually post on half or so of those, but if I give you an extra forum, you'll miss them all. And if you get an extra forum, you might be motivated to make one extra post a week, but that's cancelled out by the extra Multi-Temple post you'd be missing." If I disagree with him, I can't just say he's wrong and I'm right...I have to find exactly which number of his is inaccurate, or else concede that he has a point. And if I'm intellectually honest, if his numbers seem about right I'll have to admit it. This step doesn't have to involve literal numbers - it can just be an argument based on "this bit is much bigger than this big, so the overall effect is positive."

STEP THREE: CONCLUDE SOMETHING. If we agree that the goal is high activity levels, as measured in posts per day, and we settle on numbers for how giving me a forum would affect the posts per day, then it should eventually become clear whether giving me a forum helps or hurts our goal. If it hurts our goal, I am honor-bound to abandon my crusade for a forum and apologize for wasting the Kaiser's time. If it helps our goal, he is honor-bound to make me the forum and apologize for causing me so much trouble. It would be dangerously easy for me to come up with some after-the-fact rationalization of why my point is still good even though the discussion didn't support it (see my discussion of cloning above) but in that case, I'm no better than what you accused me of being - an annoying guy trying to piss other people off by using clever arguments.

In reality it's never quite as simple as this, and most of the time the point under discussion (like whether or not to make a forum) isn't worth the amount of time it would take to come to an indisputable conclusion. But I think it's important to have established the possibility of a decision procedure so that people can't just say "Oh, logic. You can prove ANY old thing with logic. I'll stick to sacrificing children to the sun god, thank you very much."

[Yvain Wintersong]

Also, in a more unofficial capacity, I can't help but respond to this:

However if this were NB I'd have banned you so fast you wouldn't know what hit you by now... you're lucky Shireroth is so nice.

Maybe that's why everything I've heard about NB suggests it's a second-rate, derivative micronation.

NB has become a medium-level power despite what you say is a policy of banning any citizen who tries to create an interesting project or hold a political discussion. Shireroth has become a great superpower despite its policy of ignoring and refusing to help any citizen who tries to create an interesting project or hold a political discussion. If I had the time and webspace, I think I'd found a country that actually encouraged citizens to create interesting projects and hold political discussions. Who knows where it might end up?

[Ari Rahikkala]

* points at Cyberia *

[benkern]

New Brittania has problems, that doesn't mean it isn't a great nation. It sounds to me like you've been listening to bitter enemies of which there are many to the New Brittanian Empire... Jeremy's ostentatiousness inspires hatred in the hearts of most men. :P

NB has become a medium-level power despite what you say is a policy of banning any citizen who tries to create an interesting project or hold a political discussion.

No, wrong. As a Prince of the Realm I instituted a personal policy of trying to get ISIT banned through Jeremy; other than that there was little actual banning going on. NB never attracted those kind of citizens in my view; sure, people wanted a say in what the nation ended up like but that doesn't mean they wanted to start up "interesting projects". The only interesting projects that were ever churned up by NB were half-baked and mine - the feudal system for one.

If I had the time and webspace, I think I'd found a country that actually encouraged citizens to create interesting projects and hold political discussions. Who knows where it might end up?

I wonder if such a thing could be done... probably end up like Antica. The Dinarchy that is - SMACKDOWN'D!

[Kaiser Mors V]

All your logic doesn't take into account that my goal is to support the State(ish) religion of Cedrism over all other ideologies... Further... I've explored logic and such based ideologies.. and find they have certain aspects missing... and find it more effective to work by a descriptive model of human interactions and thought then to try to prescribe to them one as you seek to do.

[Maksym Hadjimehmetov]

These bickering threads which ultimately result in nothing but personal feuds are such an integral part of micronationalism. I love it. And the thing which is even more amusing is that nothing will change as a result apart from Yvain and Benkern's writing styles, which develop rapidly with every post! Beautiful!

[benkern]

Hey, at least I've avoided fisking... for the most part. :P

[Yvain Wintersong]

All your logic doesn't take into account that my goal is to support the State(ish) religion of Cedrism over all other ideologies

No, it doesn't, because you never told me that until now Now I can take it into account, and I understand your position better. In fact, I wish you'd told me earlier when I asked you what your reasons were.

I don't think, though, that the Order and Cedrism would be very good direct competitors. A group for rational discussion of issues psychology and philosophy, and a collection of myths about evil tree demons and stuff, satisfy very different needs.