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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28290 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]

This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.

In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.

The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.

If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of: || around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.

To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.

I think NPC-ness is characterized primarily as someone who contributes no cognitive work to a discussion or topic, and simply absorbs and regurgitates memorized lines that they heard from someone else. Not only can you not change their mind by talking to them, but you will not learn anything that you couldn't have learned by listening to pretty much any talking head on the same side of the issue. It's not so much that they're irrational or failing to be rational or even incapable of being rational: they're not even trying to be rational. They are not engaging the critical thinking part of their brain, at least with regard to the issue or set of issues at hand. X says Y, they trust X, therefore Y.

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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