...charisma is not a bloody dump stat, and you can’t just substitute “Intelligence” in for it, no matter what feats you take.
Bloody hell. Great, somebody came up with an idea on how to make EA work. Only, it’s an absolutely terrible idea, but since nobody has come up with anything else, you people are going for it.
This change doesn’t pattern-match with status. It pattern-matches with cult, for the exact same reason Gleb’s behavior pattern matches with sociopath. And the reason is that you are blindly tampering with the exact same mental levers cults (and sociopaths) tamper with, with a likewise imperfect understanding of how they work. We don’t call them cults or sociopaths when they’re good at what they do, you see, because we do not notice.
But even if there weren’t pattern-matching which will completely nuke any credibility EA has as a result of this dropout-of-cult-leader-school approach, what would an ordinary person do, if confronted with a symbol that indicated that somebody has more status than them?
They’ll buy into the first half-credible explanation on why that status symbol doesn’t mean anything, and then they’ll feel higher status than all the “dumb” people buying into that status symbol, because few people can tell the difference between cynicism and intelligence (disturbingly few people even realize the two concepts are distinct, actually). Think about all the people -already doing that- because some villagers apparently fish with their mosquito nets, thus disproving EA can be useful—clearly the argument is fallacious, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re rationalizing what they already want to believe, because EA is already threatening their sense of relative status.
Remember the HPMoR bit about Phoenixes as status symbols? Same principle.
...charisma is not a bloody dump stat, and you can’t just substitute “Intelligence” in for it, no matter what feats you take.
Bloody hell. Great, somebody came up with an idea on how to make EA work. Only, it’s an absolutely terrible idea, but since nobody has come up with anything else, you people are going for it.
This change doesn’t pattern-match with status. It pattern-matches with cult, for the exact same reason Gleb’s behavior pattern matches with sociopath. And the reason is that you are blindly tampering with the exact same mental levers cults (and sociopaths) tamper with, with a likewise imperfect understanding of how they work. We don’t call them cults or sociopaths when they’re good at what they do, you see, because we do not notice.
But even if there weren’t pattern-matching which will completely nuke any credibility EA has as a result of this dropout-of-cult-leader-school approach, what would an ordinary person do, if confronted with a symbol that indicated that somebody has more status than them?
They’ll buy into the first half-credible explanation on why that status symbol doesn’t mean anything, and then they’ll feel higher status than all the “dumb” people buying into that status symbol, because few people can tell the difference between cynicism and intelligence (disturbingly few people even realize the two concepts are distinct, actually). Think about all the people -already doing that- because some villagers apparently fish with their mosquito nets, thus disproving EA can be useful—clearly the argument is fallacious, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re rationalizing what they already want to believe, because EA is already threatening their sense of relative status.
Remember the HPMoR bit about Phoenixes as status symbols? Same principle.