I like that this story is based on rationality and strategy and not my-awesome-control-the-world-witchcraft-is-better-than-yours one uppance, but—after reading the horrible actions of the Volturi from a first person perspective—if, say, Bella suddenly developed the ability to erase all effects of witchcraft on the mind, past and present, in a very large EMP-.like attack—making possible the destruction of the Volturi by the overwhelming mass of unwilling manpower they’ve recruited - , my first reaction would be to cheer.
As it is, I find the likelihood of that or something similar happening very slim. I wouldn’t like such an anticlimax after my first initial reaction to the just demise of the Volturi, either. The Volturi are however looking more and more insurmountable to me, both from outside attack and anything Elspeth can currently do; key word being currently, as her witchcraft may develop in a surprisingly useful way neither she or Adelaide anticipated; Adelaide did say it had much potential for further development, and may even trump Aro’s success in that regard.
I’d like to see Bella again, but with all the witches recaptured (with the exception of the teleporter) and all of them except Edward working for the Volturi, I don’t see what she can do with those remaining of the Cullen family and a few of their known acquaintances, if they are even allied to her still. Maybe she’ll act out of desperation and somehow manage to drop a really big bomb on the Volturi complex, with the hope that it kills as many enemies as possible, while sparing her family and allies. ;)
If I were the Volturi, and had complete knowledge of everything the readers know (or even everything Adelaide knows) I would be very concerned about the fact that a supernaturally effective communicator who was also an Alpha’s imprint was working on a way to subvert the influence of my primary mechanism for ensuring the loyalty of a mass of other witches and werewolves.
That is, I don’t think it would be at all implausible for Elspeth to work out a heuristic for neutralizing Chelsea’s ability—not by supernaturally negating it, but by developing her self-awareness via the exercise of explicitly formalizing the interactions among her cognitive subagents; by prioritizing what she knows about her values over what she experiences about them (or, to use Alicorn’s terminology: by choosing to endorse the parts of her psyche that align with her pre-Chelsea values and repudiate the parts that don’t) and consequently behaving in ways consistent with what she believes to be most importantly true of her, rather than consistent with how she feels).
And if Elspeth does develop a heuristic for doing that, she can communicate that heuristic to others very effectively. That’s what she does, after all: she is a supernaturally powerful outbound communicator.
And, well, if she communicates that heuristic to the newly Chelseaed witches effectively enough, then some of them may well manage to do the same thing. And if she does the same to Jake, he is pretty much immediately on her side, and presumably a sizable chunk of wolves go along with him (especially since the wolves’ telepathic network will propagate her heuristic like a virus through Windows).
And the Volturi suddenly have a collection of powerful enemies right in their midst, and for every “turned” vampire there are another half dozen who haven’t turned but they can’t necessarily trust. Their power structure doesn’t collapse, but it certainly gets wounded, which can easily give Elspeth, Jake, and whoever ends up turned a chance to get away.
And after that, well, it’s basically a magical propaganda war.
Yes, this is probably (and hopefully) what will happen if there’s to be an escape for Elspeth and potential vampires and wolves. I wonder how much Aro knows about Adelaide’s interactions with Elspeth. Her judgement on the risk Elspeth poses may be clouded by her interest in developing the usefulness of a witch’s power, but I doubt Aro has enough interest in that or enough tolerance for Adelaide to permit this huge risk. I think it’s very unlikely that with all his wisdom and experience he wouldn’t realize the risk, if he knew what Adelaide currently knows of Elspeth. If he did, he would probably order her and Jacob killed, immediately.
So I think it’s safe to assume Adelaide hasn’t shared her information on Elspeth with him since she learned of her ability to start behaving like she did before Chelsea affected her relationships, at will. If I remember correctly, we haven’t learned much of Adelaide’s life before she joined the Volturi, and so we can’t know for sure how much of her behavior is caused by the effect Chelsea may have had on her. Perhaps she isn’t loyal to the Volturi by her original values, and now that Chelsea may be concentrating more on Elspeth and the newly seeded witches, those are starting to come through, allowing her to refrain from reporting to Aro.
I imagine Aro would be worried enough to take action if he knew of Chelsea’s continuously failed attempts to keep Elspeth’s values of her relationships in check, too. Maybe she’s too busy being afraid of what he may do if there’s reason to believe her witchcraft isn’t as infallible as previously believed, to consider whether Elspeth can pass the ability onto others or not. Just recently they learned of Bella, who she can’t affect at all, and now Elspeth is, to Chelsea’s knowledge, seemingly somehow able to restore much of her previous values, despite increased maintenance. She’s probably scared out of wits of being deemed dispensable, irrational though it is, as neither Bella or Elspeth has any means to spread their immunities to others, yet.
If Elspeth is to do this, she will have to do it all very quickly at the right opportunity, and before Aro or anyone who would think the risk not worth anything she contributes gains the knowledge Adelaide and Chelsea posses. The Volturi have ways to detect what she is doing or about to do if she takes her time spreading her heuristic; Alice will for example likely see many vampires fleeing or rebelling—unless there are wolves or half-kinds nearby her or the subjects of her visions—when she makes the decision to spread it, or even as a result of her sessions with Adelaide, before she makes the final decision. Alice may however think about this before she informs Aro or anyone else in the Volturi, and decide to avoid doing that and instead flee together with Jasper when the others do, especially if she sees herself and Jasper flee in her initial visions.
since she learned of her ability to start behaving like she did before Chelsea affected her relationships, at will.
Well, even if I’m right, it’s not clear that Aro is likely to believe it. It is quite an inferential jump from “can talk to herself” to “can undo the effects of Chelsea’s magic,” after all, and we are not always aware of the implications of what we know.
Unrelatedly, but for example: it occurred to me the other day that if someone had told me a few months ago that we would soon be receiving the first confirmed signals from a technological artifact outside the solar system, I would not have believed them, despite that fact being trivially derivable as the highest-probability outcome of things I knew about.
I like that this story is based on rationality and strategy and not my-awesome-control-the-world-witchcraft-is-better-than-yours one uppance,
Isn’t that how the Volturi are winning? They are using strategy, of course, but the captive witch archive (probably their main tactical innovation) is only a good plan because of Adelaide. The loyalty of their army is only because of Chelsea.
It’s true that without certain witches like Adelaide and especially Chelsea, the Volturi would have nowhere near the same amount of power and control they have now. Their witchcraft isn’t so powerful that they got where they are simply because they exist though; they’ve been using them intelligently, and creating situations in which they can be used most effectively, by other means.
There hasn’t yet been, in my opinion, any I-WIN witchcraft that enables a witch to fight with anyone and everyone without caution, or making them unable or unwilling to fight. They’ve all had flaws and counters, and the Volturi are winning because they’ve been doing a good job of covering those for a very long time. They’ve been simultaneously killing off opposition and potential threats—by destroying the people responsible for it, or capturing them and making use of their talents—and painting themselves as good, necessary vampires. All this make Adelaide and Chelsea’s witchcraft more powerful, as both are more useful the more people the Volturi surround themselves with.
They seem to me to never be overly overconfident; they’re always trying to be conscious of their own weaknesses and try to cover them as fast and effectively as possible, while also trying to be as informed of potential threats as possible, so they may use their weaknesses to eliminate the threat they pose as fast and effectively as possible. That’s very rational behavior in a conflict, in my opinion. I also think it’s a very healthy mindset to have in everyday life, because not all threats to your well-being and over all happiness with life has to be an armed person directly threatening yours or your beloveds’ lives; often it’s someone in a position of power who either intently or obliviously negatively affects you and others everyday lives through laws, economy, educational systems, judicial systems, health systems etcetera.
Sadly today’s societies have little to no insight to this problem, beyond those who sit in these positions—who may be corrupt, or ignorant that their actions cause other people harm, and that they can stop this. I believe this is why we live in a world where most condemn those who are different, rather than use reason and both biased and non-biased information to find out if their appearance, what they do and think or where they live mean they are dangerous to ones health and enjoyment of life.
Too much power is put in those in a position to govern others, with no organized reasonable way to discern if what they’re doing make people healthier and happier—which is, to me, the ideal everyone should strive for, along with making sure our race (and second to us; other races) continue to live and be as healthy and happy as possible; something I believe will be severely hindered if our people aren’t consistently educated to apply reason and rationality beyond scientific topics, to social topics.
A few months ago there was a poll in one of Sweden’s biggest online newspapers that asked the readers if they believed the Earth would ever cease to exist or be destroyed, and an astounding majority believed that it wouldn’t. A similar result is achieved if one asks: do you believe humanity will ever be extinct? If we weren’t all so ignorant, but rather rational people using reason to understand each other and the world, I believe all of humanity could live healthier and happier lives, and for many more generations to come than if we continued to be ignorant.
A few months ago there was a poll in one of Sweden’s biggest online newspapers that asked the readers if they believed the Earth would ever cease to exist or be destroyed, and an astounding majority believed that it wouldn’t. A similar result is achieved if one asks: do you believe humanity will ever be extinct?
Beware of overgeneralizing from results like this one. I’ve seen a lot of similar surveys, and none of them have distinguished explicitly between “infinite” and “unbounded for practical purposes”; however, people outside of mathy fields tend to conflate the two. I’d read the Swedish result not as describing an actual infinity but as rejection of Singularitarianism and the more extreme Malthusian doomsday scenarios, which strikes me as a fairly reasonable standpoint.
There hasn’t yet been, in my opinion, any I-WIN witchcraft that enables a witch to fight with anyone and everyone without caution, or making them unable or unwilling to fight.
This is true, and suggests to me we’re using different standards. You’re happy there’s no one so strong they can win with their mind shut off; I’m unhappy that Bella entered a fight that she shouldn’t be able to win. It’s not so much a question of the Volturi out-strategizing Bella so much as it is her throwing herself against a wall. Yes, the Volturi needed some strategy to build the wall, but there’s not much on Bella’s part.
I like that this story is based on rationality and strategy and not my-awesome-control-the-world-witchcraft-is-better-than-yours one uppance, but—after reading the horrible actions of the Volturi from a first person perspective—if, say, Bella suddenly developed the ability to erase all effects of witchcraft on the mind, past and present, in a very large EMP-.like attack—making possible the destruction of the Volturi by the overwhelming mass of unwilling manpower they’ve recruited - , my first reaction would be to cheer.
As it is, I find the likelihood of that or something similar happening very slim. I wouldn’t like such an anticlimax after my first initial reaction to the just demise of the Volturi, either. The Volturi are however looking more and more insurmountable to me, both from outside attack and anything Elspeth can currently do; key word being currently, as her witchcraft may develop in a surprisingly useful way neither she or Adelaide anticipated; Adelaide did say it had much potential for further development, and may even trump Aro’s success in that regard.
I’d like to see Bella again, but with all the witches recaptured (with the exception of the teleporter) and all of them except Edward working for the Volturi, I don’t see what she can do with those remaining of the Cullen family and a few of their known acquaintances, if they are even allied to her still. Maybe she’ll act out of desperation and somehow manage to drop a really big bomb on the Volturi complex, with the hope that it kills as many enemies as possible, while sparing her family and allies. ;)
If I were the Volturi, and had complete knowledge of everything the readers know (or even everything Adelaide knows) I would be very concerned about the fact that a supernaturally effective communicator who was also an Alpha’s imprint was working on a way to subvert the influence of my primary mechanism for ensuring the loyalty of a mass of other witches and werewolves.
That is, I don’t think it would be at all implausible for Elspeth to work out a heuristic for neutralizing Chelsea’s ability—not by supernaturally negating it, but by developing her self-awareness via the exercise of explicitly formalizing the interactions among her cognitive subagents; by prioritizing what she knows about her values over what she experiences about them (or, to use Alicorn’s terminology: by choosing to endorse the parts of her psyche that align with her pre-Chelsea values and repudiate the parts that don’t) and consequently behaving in ways consistent with what she believes to be most importantly true of her, rather than consistent with how she feels).
And if Elspeth does develop a heuristic for doing that, she can communicate that heuristic to others very effectively. That’s what she does, after all: she is a supernaturally powerful outbound communicator.
And, well, if she communicates that heuristic to the newly Chelseaed witches effectively enough, then some of them may well manage to do the same thing. And if she does the same to Jake, he is pretty much immediately on her side, and presumably a sizable chunk of wolves go along with him (especially since the wolves’ telepathic network will propagate her heuristic like a virus through Windows).
And the Volturi suddenly have a collection of powerful enemies right in their midst, and for every “turned” vampire there are another half dozen who haven’t turned but they can’t necessarily trust. Their power structure doesn’t collapse, but it certainly gets wounded, which can easily give Elspeth, Jake, and whoever ends up turned a chance to get away.
And after that, well, it’s basically a magical propaganda war.
Yes, this is probably (and hopefully) what will happen if there’s to be an escape for Elspeth and potential vampires and wolves. I wonder how much Aro knows about Adelaide’s interactions with Elspeth. Her judgement on the risk Elspeth poses may be clouded by her interest in developing the usefulness of a witch’s power, but I doubt Aro has enough interest in that or enough tolerance for Adelaide to permit this huge risk. I think it’s very unlikely that with all his wisdom and experience he wouldn’t realize the risk, if he knew what Adelaide currently knows of Elspeth. If he did, he would probably order her and Jacob killed, immediately.
So I think it’s safe to assume Adelaide hasn’t shared her information on Elspeth with him since she learned of her ability to start behaving like she did before Chelsea affected her relationships, at will. If I remember correctly, we haven’t learned much of Adelaide’s life before she joined the Volturi, and so we can’t know for sure how much of her behavior is caused by the effect Chelsea may have had on her. Perhaps she isn’t loyal to the Volturi by her original values, and now that Chelsea may be concentrating more on Elspeth and the newly seeded witches, those are starting to come through, allowing her to refrain from reporting to Aro.
I imagine Aro would be worried enough to take action if he knew of Chelsea’s continuously failed attempts to keep Elspeth’s values of her relationships in check, too. Maybe she’s too busy being afraid of what he may do if there’s reason to believe her witchcraft isn’t as infallible as previously believed, to consider whether Elspeth can pass the ability onto others or not. Just recently they learned of Bella, who she can’t affect at all, and now Elspeth is, to Chelsea’s knowledge, seemingly somehow able to restore much of her previous values, despite increased maintenance. She’s probably scared out of wits of being deemed dispensable, irrational though it is, as neither Bella or Elspeth has any means to spread their immunities to others, yet.
If Elspeth is to do this, she will have to do it all very quickly at the right opportunity, and before Aro or anyone who would think the risk not worth anything she contributes gains the knowledge Adelaide and Chelsea posses. The Volturi have ways to detect what she is doing or about to do if she takes her time spreading her heuristic; Alice will for example likely see many vampires fleeing or rebelling—unless there are wolves or half-kinds nearby her or the subjects of her visions—when she makes the decision to spread it, or even as a result of her sessions with Adelaide, before she makes the final decision. Alice may however think about this before she informs Aro or anyone else in the Volturi, and decide to avoid doing that and instead flee together with Jasper when the others do, especially if she sees herself and Jasper flee in her initial visions.
Well, even if I’m right, it’s not clear that Aro is likely to believe it. It is quite an inferential jump from “can talk to herself” to “can undo the effects of Chelsea’s magic,” after all, and we are not always aware of the implications of what we know.
Unrelatedly, but for example: it occurred to me the other day that if someone had told me a few months ago that we would soon be receiving the first confirmed signals from a technological artifact outside the solar system, I would not have believed them, despite that fact being trivially derivable as the highest-probability outcome of things I knew about.
Isn’t that how the Volturi are winning? They are using strategy, of course, but the captive witch archive (probably their main tactical innovation) is only a good plan because of Adelaide. The loyalty of their army is only because of Chelsea.
It’s true that without certain witches like Adelaide and especially Chelsea, the Volturi would have nowhere near the same amount of power and control they have now. Their witchcraft isn’t so powerful that they got where they are simply because they exist though; they’ve been using them intelligently, and creating situations in which they can be used most effectively, by other means.
There hasn’t yet been, in my opinion, any I-WIN witchcraft that enables a witch to fight with anyone and everyone without caution, or making them unable or unwilling to fight. They’ve all had flaws and counters, and the Volturi are winning because they’ve been doing a good job of covering those for a very long time. They’ve been simultaneously killing off opposition and potential threats—by destroying the people responsible for it, or capturing them and making use of their talents—and painting themselves as good, necessary vampires. All this make Adelaide and Chelsea’s witchcraft more powerful, as both are more useful the more people the Volturi surround themselves with.
They seem to me to never be overly overconfident; they’re always trying to be conscious of their own weaknesses and try to cover them as fast and effectively as possible, while also trying to be as informed of potential threats as possible, so they may use their weaknesses to eliminate the threat they pose as fast and effectively as possible. That’s very rational behavior in a conflict, in my opinion. I also think it’s a very healthy mindset to have in everyday life, because not all threats to your well-being and over all happiness with life has to be an armed person directly threatening yours or your beloveds’ lives; often it’s someone in a position of power who either intently or obliviously negatively affects you and others everyday lives through laws, economy, educational systems, judicial systems, health systems etcetera.
Sadly today’s societies have little to no insight to this problem, beyond those who sit in these positions—who may be corrupt, or ignorant that their actions cause other people harm, and that they can stop this. I believe this is why we live in a world where most condemn those who are different, rather than use reason and both biased and non-biased information to find out if their appearance, what they do and think or where they live mean they are dangerous to ones health and enjoyment of life.
Too much power is put in those in a position to govern others, with no organized reasonable way to discern if what they’re doing make people healthier and happier—which is, to me, the ideal everyone should strive for, along with making sure our race (and second to us; other races) continue to live and be as healthy and happy as possible; something I believe will be severely hindered if our people aren’t consistently educated to apply reason and rationality beyond scientific topics, to social topics.
A few months ago there was a poll in one of Sweden’s biggest online newspapers that asked the readers if they believed the Earth would ever cease to exist or be destroyed, and an astounding majority believed that it wouldn’t. A similar result is achieved if one asks: do you believe humanity will ever be extinct? If we weren’t all so ignorant, but rather rational people using reason to understand each other and the world, I believe all of humanity could live healthier and happier lives, and for many more generations to come than if we continued to be ignorant.
Beware of overgeneralizing from results like this one. I’ve seen a lot of similar surveys, and none of them have distinguished explicitly between “infinite” and “unbounded for practical purposes”; however, people outside of mathy fields tend to conflate the two. I’d read the Swedish result not as describing an actual infinity but as rejection of Singularitarianism and the more extreme Malthusian doomsday scenarios, which strikes me as a fairly reasonable standpoint.
This is true, and suggests to me we’re using different standards. You’re happy there’s no one so strong they can win with their mind shut off; I’m unhappy that Bella entered a fight that she shouldn’t be able to win. It’s not so much a question of the Volturi out-strategizing Bella so much as it is her throwing herself against a wall. Yes, the Volturi needed some strategy to build the wall, but there’s not much on Bella’s part.