My idea was less about the specific values and more about the idea that you aren't necessarily going to know the consequences... right now, its more a mathematics challenge (albiet very fuzzy math) than an issue of ideology.

Well something needs to be doned, as for me, there seems to be no great consequences no matter which ethical choice I pick. Its more like a little mini game to distract you from the full game, I wish it had bigger impact.

Atleast the choices should be more sincere, IE. Good choice "save people" Evil choice "kill 1 billion people, gain 1000BC" or something like that. Gaining 200bc from evil ethical choise can hardly be called beneficial

No, ethical choices shouldn't be entirely predictable in their consequences. How many times throughout history has a bad decision come back to haunt the society that made it and assumed they could get away from it? How many times has a seemingly counterproductive decision had unexpected benefits? A good example is enforcing environmental standards actually having an INCREASE in an economy instead of the predicted decrease, since efficiency increased in the responsible industries and new spin off industries being created.

They could also, in the case of good aligned ones, be a lifesaver if they were coded to come in during a time of need. For example, if the player took the "save everyone, no matter the cost" in the "evacuate an exploding alien moon" event, there could be a chance that, when the player is getting attacked by a superior force, the aliens that had been saved would decide to return the favour and come to your aid in the form of a bunch of advanced warship that you recieve.

And, in the reverse, if you'd put them to work in your factories, they could start an armed rebellion that shuts down that planet's social and military production the moment you start a war someone.

If this gets done, it should also be possible for the player choosing the good choice to get further penalized or for the player choosing the evil choice to get a later bonus.

For example with the underwater domes, the inhabitant may have been on the verge of becoming a minor civ and a player that chose the good option may lose the planet. They may also have been hiding a precurser (sp?) artifact that could only be found by 'throwing out the pukes'.

Seriously, that's probably the biggest pile of cow dung I've ever heard.

Excuse me... do you realise were talking about a civilisations 'ethical' choices at a comparable level to choices presented in the game?
Because it dousn't sound like you realise that in your so called 'flame on' claptrap.

I don't agree with his tone (no reason to flame, folks), but I do agree with his reasoning. Even the mightiest civilisations can never predict events 100%. Its simple chaos theory... the further into the future you try to predict, the more your errors are compounded. On top of that, the "stupidity and arrogance" you mention is usually awarded after the fact by historians and pundits.

I think your trying to make a simple issur far more complicated than it is.

I am talking about much more basic 'black, white, neutral' ethical decisions. The game gives you 3 very basic options, this is what i am basing my argument on. So in other words in a historical sense, any civilisation that has made a clear cut non ambiguous evil chioce, should have been able to predict the results 100% correctly with the removal of arrogance and stupidity.

And I'm saying you are absolutely wrong, because any action has consequences down the road, and there is NO way, at all, in any context, EVER to be certain of what is coming to any degree

Now your just clutching at straws.


Isac newton would turn in his grave if he heard your statement. Imagine if 'what goes up must come down' was suddenly an 'uncertain' thing because according to you '

any action has consequences down the road, and there is NO way, at all, in any context, EVER to be certain of what is coming to any degree

Okay, dude. No offense, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about. Three things:

*Newton indeed stated the universe was entirely deterministic. Theoretically, if you knew about every tiny piece of matter and energy in the universe, and had a big enough computer, you'd be able to flawlessly predict the future. However, there is NO way to know every piece of the universe because a)observing something changes it, however minutely (and my next point shows why even a minute change can have huge effects) and the computer needed to store and process this information would have to be larger and more complex than the universe itself. You can't comprehend a larger system with a smaller one.

*Chaos theory. Any iterative system, ie, the world, compounds ANY error in the initial data increasingly. Even an incredibly tiny change can have a huge effect. If you were to place weather sensors on every square meter of the planet, and had a computer model to predict weather from that data, it'd be spot on... if it was measuring just a short while ahead. However, its predictions would become useless over time because the differences in between those sensors would throw off the system a little bit, at first, and then a WHOLE lot.

*We aren't talking about newtonian physics. The world is NOT strictly deterministic according to quantum theory (the prime reason that Einstein rejected it). Quantum mechanics has a whole lot of crazy stuff with probability... Neils Bohr, it's creator, famously said "If you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics".

Even if that probabilistic model ultimately ends up to have deterministic underpinnings, do you really think a system that complex could be modelled to any reasonable scale? Merely simulating a single living cell is something that we haven't managed to do, and even that simulation would require a lot of abstraction unless you wanted to also simulate the quarks, gluons, and other sub-sub-atomic particles. And there's probably a level below that, too...

So, for all practical purposes, physics is not certain or predictable and never will be. Arguing otherwise betrays a lack of knowledge of advanced physics.

And, finally, your deal with the ethical question: no, we wouldn't know the results. Maybe the US government would destroy itself to stop such a move, maybe the middle east would end up fighting viciously and turning the tables, maybe the rest of the world, the US's allies included, would move to counter it. And those are just SOME of the BIG possibilities. Can you predict which streets the president would be burned in effigy? Which fights the USMC would win or lose, and by how much? Which words would come from the tongue of a diplomat? How would those words be inflected? Would someone take offense? Would the translators mistranslate a crucial word?

Make all the predictions you want, you have no guarantees of accuracy. If you think you can predict all of that, then I would busy yourself with pyschiatric treatment, because its not possible.

Okay, dude. No offense, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about. Three things:

Normally starstriker gives me a good argument in other posts, normally respecting other peoples opinion. A bit of a let down to see this post.

Starstriker... the rest of your post is too long! apologies but i cannot read ALL that.
Well not today anyhow. I will see if i can find time next week to come and have a good read... seriously though, that is a BIG post.

I don't think that could be considered a flame, or disrespectful of an opinion.

What planet are you on?? uh, um you said...

Okay, dude. No offense, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about.

sure you put in the lame disclaimer 'no offence' but that just dousn't stack up when you tell somone they don't know what their talking about.

If on the other hand you had said it like this... "Okay, dude. No offense, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about, in my opinion". then that would be completely acceptable.

Aside from that, you give good logical arguments which are fun and challenging to debate, a shame you dissrespect my arguments while you do it.

I look forward to reading your large post more carefully next week

(Coincidentally, those are all things almost exclusively said by retarded people)

@starstriker1
Now why in the world would you single out the mentally challenged in a discussion about the long term effects of ethical decisions?

Okay, dude. No offense, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about.

@Mystikmind
After reading his posts, the above quote is a given opinion.

As for the OP...

However, it might be more interesting (and perhaps more rewarding) if your ethical decisions occasionally came back to reward you or bite you in the ass for good and evil choices, respectively. Mini-events that are not guaranteed to happen, but can vindicate or make you regret your past decisions.

I agree it would be rather interesting. Coding this would be the real pain in the ass. Since we would not know the future, the possibilities of how a decision would affect us would be endless. For game purposes and to add variety, maybe only incorporate 5 different ways it could affect the game. In effect, you would add 5 more (ethical bonuses / negatives) per ethical event in the game. Then, on top of that, you would have to have some way of 1.) randomizing the event and 2.) randomizing the timing of said event. A good idea that I do like very much. Just very doubtful whether it will ever be added due to the complexities and size issues that would be encountered during programming.

Human nature is notoriously UNpredictable, and still doesn't account for the impossible problem of predicting the future to any useful extent... certainly not for predicting the consequence of an action several years down the road! Lets take the "solar slammer" event (thats what it's called, right?) If you were to cover the sky with them, the geographical, political, and humanitarian consequences could not be guessed at. Do they cause a previously unknown environmental phenomena? Do small, grassroots political groups support the research they bring about or worry about the potential for disaster? In the case of a disaster, who gets killed? Some beggar, or the guy who would have brought around universal peace?

Human nature is only one of the factors involved, but even that is hopelessly unpredictable. One of the things my Psychology 104 class taught me is to be wary of "common sense" pyschology. Consider: a man is away from his wife. How will this effect his relationship? Two pieces of common wisdom may come to mind: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "Out of sight, out of mind". Common sense is giving two entirely contradictory answers to the question! Any attempted system of predicting human behaviour is doomed to fail... humans are complex organisms notoriously capable of stirring things up with little effort. Do you think anyone could have predicted that that person would Assassinate Franz Ferdinand and kick off the first world war? No... at least, no one who wasn't close to the person involved.

For the sake of argument, though, lets assume the impossible task of creating a perfectly accurate model of human behaviour is completed. Every action of a person, regardless of their personality, past experiences, age, ethnic group, opinions, friends, location, or political allegiance, can be accounted for. That still doesn't cover enough variables. Leaving aside the incredible number of different, minute inputs that are tossed into the human brain every second, you have the movement of individual air molecules, light coming from the chaotic fusion reaction of the local star, quantum uncertainty in vacuum energy...

Even your simplistic decision->carry out decision->predictable effect hypothesis has too much margin of error to be predictable. Consider this very simple scenario: you want to launch a rock 3 kilometers to hit a 1x1m target. The rock is roughyl spherical, wind in the trajectory is low, and your launching device is the (theoretical) perfect catapult, that will launch the rock at a very specific velocity at a very specific angle... no margin for error. Given all that, it's simple newtonian physics, right?

Nope.

Newtonian physics ALWAYS rely on assumptions. That rock is "roughly" a sphere, so it is assumed to have the properties of a sphere, and the corresponding air resistance effects, even though the slight discrepencies in that description will have an effect on how it collides with air molecules. The wind is "low", so wind effects are assumed to be nonexistent, when in fact the air is a mix of tiny, slowmoving crossbreezes. No matter HOW small the margin of error is, it's there, and by chaos theory, it will have large effects given sufficient time. You could very well miss that shot.

Now, given that: if we cannot predict the effects, down to the molecule, quark, neuron, and photon, of our tiniest actions and even our decisions, how are we supposed to predict them for larger ones? Cities? Continents? Civilisations? The margin of error and lack of information gets worse at each step, and as I've already explained, even the smallest error will have HUGE consequences. That stray photon could mean the life or death of a person, eventually...

Bottom line: NO system could be created that could perfectly predict all actions and consequences. No system can reasonably approximate it. The closest one would get is the ethical version of the weather forecast: accurate for a short while, but after a week, its utterly useless. Even that trivial thing would require an immense expenditure of time, energy, and an incredibly complex system for taking input, processing it, and producing an output, which no one would realistically do for such a small payoff.

That leaves us with a horribly inaccurate system based on statistics, averages, past experience, and intuition.

Given that, it is entirely reasonable that a massive, spacefarring civilisation consisting of billions of individuals and with a rapidly changing internal economy, politics, culture, as well as an extremely complex foreign affairs portfolio, would not be able to perfectly predict the consequences of it's actions. It could only base its decisions on idealogy and best guesses.