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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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To me, the two first sentences are somewhat at odds, especially together with the last sentence. Using your definition, can't you gain their trust and then change their opinion?

The trusted people are often authority figures such as politicians, news anchors, or celebrities that they don't actually know in real life, and you are not and could never become. Though they can also be influenced by more close trusted people such as friends and family. Thus, if you befriend an NPC you can potentially change their mind on issues, but this is a package deal, you grind reputation which allows influence on all beliefs simultaneously, and requires an awful lot of effort if your goal was one particular idea. They aren't deciding on their beliefs based on the object level ideas of those beliefs, but on their relationships of the people espousing them.

I don't know that reputation copying is the only way an NPC can treat beliefs, The core characterization of the NPC is the ignoring of logic and object level facts about the beliefs because they're formed for completely unrelated reasons, so you could have different subclasses. And obviously pretty much no one in real life is literally a pure NPC to this extreme of a level, but the more similar someone comes to this archetype the more appropriate the label becomes.

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