Arguably, the biggest mistake Light made was one of abstract strategy: he started using the Death Note almost immediately after obtaining it. He should have spent many years testing the thing, pondering its implications, studying police work, etc, before putting his plan into action.
I can’t help but think that that represents a serious privileging of the hypothesis—given a little black notebook claiming such absurd powers, you shouldn’t carefully devise 20 different studies which try to falsify your various theories and inferences about its powers & limitations.
Unless you mean that after he verified that the Death Note did in fact kill supernaturally as claimed (after the biker and hostage-taker, I suppose), he should have gone into scientist mode?
In that case, my first thought is that from Light’s perspective, delay is massive waste (all those dead people murdered by people who should be dead, eg.) and he thought he could handle any challenges that came his way. Which he was almost right about, after all.
not as big a waste as getting caught. given the power to change the world one should carefully think about how this power could be taken away before you start doing low utility things like eliminating criminals.
Arguably, the biggest mistake Light made was one of abstract strategy: he started using the Death Note almost immediately after obtaining it. He should have spent many years testing the thing, pondering its implications, studying police work, etc, before putting his plan into action.
I can’t help but think that that represents a serious privileging of the hypothesis—given a little black notebook claiming such absurd powers, you shouldn’t carefully devise 20 different studies which try to falsify your various theories and inferences about its powers & limitations.
Unless you mean that after he verified that the Death Note did in fact kill supernaturally as claimed (after the biker and hostage-taker, I suppose), he should have gone into scientist mode?
In that case, my first thought is that from Light’s perspective, delay is massive waste (all those dead people murdered by people who should be dead, eg.) and he thought he could handle any challenges that came his way. Which he was almost right about, after all.
not as big a waste as getting caught. given the power to change the world one should carefully think about how this power could be taken away before you start doing low utility things like eliminating criminals.