Zhodani without Psi
 

Since it is being discussed in the Hard SF vs. Traveller threads, I figured I'd dredge up my old idea for how to have the Zhodani without supernatural psionics:

Earlier version here. (That was a repost of my idea, but the original was on the Pyramid boards. I think.)

By law all children in the Consulate have brain implants with wireless communication at birth. In theory, everyone should be able to use them for telepathy by radio, cyberpunk access to computer systems, etc. In practice, only a minority of people ever learn to use them effectively.

No one has ever found a way to get implants to work well if they are put in later in life, so other societies can't duplicate this without going far down the road to becoming just like the Zhodani.

Using them to spy on other Zhodani's brains is the most common skill, but others exist like being able "become" a spaceship, have 360 degree vision, a squad that fights as a hivemind, etc.

So you still have a noble psi class, thought police, elite warriors, and other people able to do stuff impossible for normal people.

You don't get precognition, teleporting commandos, telekinetics, or telepathic spying on foreigners. But there are rumors of all these things and they are the kind of urban legend stuff that just will not die regardless of the facts. And the Zhodani intelligence services are not above spreading such stories and faking evidence of them as misinformation. Or maybe the rumors are a Hiver plot.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Dragging advanced memetics from THS could allow for creepy social manipulation. THS uses it almost like mind control as is.

I can't see how one could really read minds with realistic technology. Stream of consciousness even when fully subvocalized is near gibberish to anyone else.
You would have to have an enormous amount of experience with my life to make heads or tails of my thoughts. Associations that make less sense that obscure puns, dropping trains of thought that never the less continue on in the subconscious only to pop back up fully formed later, holding both sides of a conversation in my head while irritating obsessive music plays in the background, sensory memories popping up and sometimes incorrectly with only a fraction of a second spent correcting them, etc.
It's amazing that this mess can ever be coordinated and organized long enough to communicate with language to another person for even a moment.
In my opinion at least.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

The problem is that psionics is the only area where the Zhodani are superior to the Imperium, and use it to good effect with their commandos. When you strip away psionics, they are inferior to the Imperium in every way ad, frankly, not very interesting anymore. Better to replace them with another race than nerf them.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Not really. The numbers of affected people produced by THS memetics are inferior to TL7-TL8 political campaigns.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It would be possible to replace the creepy psionics with creepy cyborgs and end up with the same basic relationship.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Turn them into the Borg?

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

To really work you would need implantable FTL communicators to stay linked to the hive.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It may be their only technological superiority, but technology isn't everything. They are supposed to have a unified culture and a more planned expansion and settlement plan even canonically. Give up on randomized system statistics for them, and maybe allow planned economies to work a bit better than they have so far, and something considerably smaller than the Imperium could be a pretty frightening power. Something as big as the Consulate on canonical maps that actually did expand rationally, and therefor is that big because they actually need that many worlds to spread their population and economy over, and in which the entire population can quickly embrace and cooperate toward a particular goal is *scary* even if they're barely Jump capable. If something like that ever adopted a goal like crush the Imperium....

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Overkill. After all, the Zhodani thought police don't have interstellar range either.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Then it just becomes a more realistic cell phone, just implanted. That's a bit boring in my opinion.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

You could add automatic functions to reproduce soem of the effects of psi in the consulate.

Something like the Neural Verifier from UT would be about right. Zhodani territory is a place where no one lies in court or commits crimes of fraud. That's one of the deliberate amibiguities about it that makes it more than a place run by a psionic gestapo.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

A more interesting model would be the Comprise, from Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers. Obviously the model for the Borg. Much more interesting is the character Winter (I think - been a long time since I read the book).

Where the Comprise was all of humanity on Earth linked in a hive mind, the light speed limit of communication did not allow it to leave the planet. Winter appeared to be an 'agent' of Earth - a group mind of several individuals in communication with the overall mind but not a part of it.

The aristocracy could be such group-mind beings. Maybe vast hive-minds are not tenable, but group-minds of several dozen, at most, individuals work. Not everyone has to be in a group mind, (its expensive? takes extensive training? is dangerious?), so proles have human-normal minds, and while they don't have their minds 'read', the nobility is smarter, faster, stronger than they are.
Intedants are those proles which are receiving training to enter the nobility. They learn to control their emotions, have been cleared of any psycological problems, etc. Like monks or some type of zen initiate.
The 'nobles' are group minds that replace members as the individuals age and die. The basic 'personality' survives centuries, with only gradual change as the components are replaced.

Then again - this isn't the Zho and I really don't see a need to replace them :)

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Implantable FTL communicators are a bit setting-breaking. No what I was thinking of was that commoners would have a baseline implant that could be used by them to access the net, but could also be used to monitor their activity, location, physical health, and emotions and incapacitate them as needed. Meanwhile the soldiers have massive and blatantly intimidating body replacement and the upper classes are chic would-be transhumanists with glowing LEDs just so you'll know they're upper-class. Although possibly, the planetary AIs are the ones really in charge. Or maybe upper classes graduate to having their brains added to a ruling immortal collective intelligence of networked brains that stand-in for true AI...

Even if you went full on Hive mind, it would be more interesting for different planets of the of the confederation to have distinct and different personalities. The Borg are fundamentally boring in their own right after all. That's why they were rewritten with every appearance.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Why do we need the Zhos to have a psi-like ability at all? If we're looking for "Zhos without Psi", then make it actually be without anything like psi too.

I think you can have an very effective 'bad guy' (and one that is much less morally ambiguous than the current Zhos) through extensive, invasive brainwashing and monitoring and ruthless 'efficiency' - combine Nazi Germany, North Korea and the worst elements of the Chinese and the USSR systems and add a dash of The Prisoner and 1984. Keep the Thought Police around (and they don't actually have to be psychic) and the population will stay cowed - Fear and paranoia has proven rather effective historically in "keeping the proles in line" without magic powers.

Plus it gives you opportunities for Resistance, guerilla warfare and memetic countermeasures too. It makes the Zhodani much darker than they are currently, but if you really want them to be the bad guy of the setting then why not go the whole hog?

OK, you lose the invisible teleporting commandos or whatever, but let's face it, those are game-breakingly stupid anyway.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

The reason I suggested creepy cyborgs was for contrast with the Empire, which certainly has the technology for such things but apparently not the social environment.

Apart from that the Zhos need to be a credible threat. A smaller state that expends most of it's energies on crushing it's own people doesn't qualify.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I wouldn't say that they're really a 'credible threat' as they are at the moment - all that's happened are the odd border skirmish and a few worlds swapping hands, which is no big deal really. They're more a 'bogeyman' for the Imperials - they're more feared because they use their psi and for how their society works than because they're an actual military threat.

Besides, a state can grow quite large despite spending a lot of energy crushing its own people. See Nazi Germany, China, and the USSR for examples.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

As a good source to steal ideas for this from, see CJ Cherryh's Cyteen, Cyteen: Regenesis, Serpent's Reach and other Union/Alliance stories featuring the azi. Union may not be quite as dark as above, but they easily could be, and probably most people in the Alliance think they are.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Makes sense to me.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I am not sure that I see the society you describe as being plausible on the physical scale of the Zhodani Consulate. Not in a universe where interstellar communications and travel works the way it does in default Traveller rules.
I just don't see how such tight control could possibly be maintained.
I could buy a single world, a system, maybe even a pocket empire. Anything bigger and I would expect rebellions and economic collapse to rip it apart in short order.


Of course, maybe the Consulate is falling apart?

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I like it.

If you add or play up a religious humanist element in the Imperium (IMO, a good way to explain the rejection of certain technologies, or restrictions placed on them), you get a nice ideological contrast.

Maybe add bootleg Zho computers, illegal cyberclinics, and so on to replace psi powers and the Psionics Institutes?

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Those states had virtually instantaneous communication and could transport troops from one end to the other in more than a not much more than a week. And they didn't last very long anyway.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

The only reason they have a unified culture is that they are a Psiocracy. It only worked with the Vilani because by the time they tried that they were so far militarily superior to everyone else that they could afford the weaknesses that come from a "unified culture". They could no longer do this when they met the Terrans and the Terrans could not copy them.

Having a unified culture on that level is simply impossible among humans as we know them. The Zho manage it because they are not, in fact, humans as we know them. They are aliens that happen to have human DNA. Aslan are more like the Viliani-Solomani mainstream then Zho are.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Why do we need Traveller at all? Why do we need Science fiction at all? Heck, why do we need to do anything but get up eat, work enough to eat, work enough to satisfy prospective mates, reproduce, begin process over? Why not just live like Really Smart Apes? We don't NEED a lot of the things that are worth doing. Since when has that had anything to do with it?

But as for why we need Psionics, it is because psionics are a basic science fiction trope, and having a ideological contest between a Psiocracy and an Imperium that persecutes Psis is interesting. It is a good way to create an ideological quarrel that is not just a copy of Earth.

Zho are not really meant to be just "bad guys". If that is how they came out then they weren't played to their full potential. Zho are a sophisticated civilization, that is based in some ways on inherant features that are repugnant to our notions of human rights, specifically the right to freedom of thought. However they are not vicious monsters and they are no more likely to engage in atrocities then anyone else; less so in some ways. The purpose of the Zho is to find a rival empire that is different from the Imperium, and is specifically not a Nazis In Space. For that purpose the Zho do nicely. They provide a regime that sounds extremely frightening to live under, without making them cardboard villains.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I have no idea - you're the one who's going off on a rant for no reason here.

The question in the OP asked is "what would the Zhodani be without supernatural psi?". I just took it further and asked why people were still trying to have them with any "psi-like abilities" at all (whether technological or otherwise) - why not just go the whole hog and have them without anything like that? There are plenty of ways to control a populace without psychic powers after all.

I don't think we "need" them to have psionics at all. As you point out, they'ree an interesting enough race without them - just in having a civilisation where freedom of thought is so controlled yet apparently so harmonious is a good scifi issue to explore. Is it better to be miserable and free or happy and restricted? Is Zho society really so morally repugnant? It's like the episode of Angel where they avert the "apocalypse" only to find that actually most people would have been quite happy and content if it came to pass. Were they right or wrong?

That's a great 'what if' to explore and scifi is all about the 'what if', after all.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

The answer is simply that having a Psiocracy is a distinctive enough idea to be worth playing with. We surely don't "need" it, though it is hard to picture the Zho as the Zho without it. But it is interesting, and being interesting is good enough of a reason. Having a Psiocracy is also a great "what-if"

As for "supernatural" psi, the proper term is "preternatural". Supernatural must come from a source outside the universe(which is why even Greek gods are not "supernatural"). That is neither here nor there.

Part of the reason I sounded irritated is that I suspect, like several people here apparently, that you have a prejudice against soft sci-fi as a genre. Traveller is soft sci-fi and Psi belongs in it. Admittedly you dislike the use of the term "science" fiction for settings that accept questionable science. Which is understandable, although I am a history buff and don't really mind having Sidhe in Sevenwaters and calling it "historical" fantasy. I do get irritated by Britons having names like Richard, Hugh, and Simon, which were as far as I can remember not current in that era. I don't think however that this stops Sevenwaters from being a Historical Fantasy and a darn good one. Likewise I don't think soft science stops Traveller from being "sci-fi". Perhaps you prefer the term Space Saga? That relieves the need for terms that imply scientific accuracy. Traveller is certainly a Space Saga and a darn good one, just as Sevenwaters is a darn good historical fantasy.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

yeah, but it's an unnecessary one. The Psi is one means to get the interesting society, but there are otherr more mundane ways to still have a similar kind of society. I think the meat of the 'what if' concerns the nature of the society itself, not the means in which it got there.

Well that's the word the OP used. Though in the OTU isn't psi supposed to have something to do with jumpspace? So technically it IS supernatural...


That is "neither here nor there" for this discussion though. This has nothing to do with my "prejudices" - I'm just asking "why not just remove all the supernatural/preternatural/magic/whatever you want to call it powers" because I think that's an interesting angle to take (and it's in line with the title of the thread). Merely replacing the Psi with some other form of technological mind control doesn't really that change much in broad terms.

The Psi angle makes the whole thing feel 'telegraphed' IMO - the imperium hates psi, the zhos use psi, therefore the imperium hates the zhos. It's too obvious for my taste, and I don't think the psi is even necessary to make the zhos an interesting 'bad guy'.

And we've been told not to restart the discussion of what genre Traveller is supposed to be, so I won't answer that part.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Ok, sure, why not. I happen to like the Zho the way they are. But hey!

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

In any case Psi is not vulnerable to criticism as "bad science" because the author neither believed it nor expected readers to. It was not bad science because it was not science nor portrayed as such(as a discipline it seems closer to Oriental martial arts in flavor). It is however, a common trope in "space saga" to use a new term, and a fairly useful one at times.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Whether Psi is "good science" or bad science" isn't relevant to this discussion. I certainly didn't raise that aspect of the topic here, and it's not why I raised the 'no psi-like ability at all' angle either.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Psi / mind magic isn't science of any sort. It's simply a back door from which to squeeze in magic super powers. It can be fun, but I usually prefer science fiction further removed from comic books.

But to be Zho, they must have some form of populace control and creepy uniformity.
How can that be done without invoking magic? That's the point of this thread, I believe, not why do it at all.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Yes, which is why I was pointing out several societies in earth's history that have had various degrees of controlling their populace and being creepily uniform, and they haven't needed any special powers to do it (North Korea in particular springs to mind). Judicious use of fear, terror, paranoia, and propaganda can accomplish that quite nicely on their own.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Wasn't part of the point also not to make them so obviously the bad guys? Iron-fisted dictatorships are kind of hard to justify as worthy of continued existence.

I like the idea of advanced pharmaceuticals. Distress and feelings of not being part of the wonderful society is a disorder and can be easily fixed with the right drugs.... and the horror is that it can. The same "dystopia" that many today fear the drug companies are pushing, but pushed to 11.

There was an episode of "Sliders" in which the hippies were counter culture rebels for refusing to take any psychoactive drugs.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

But that would turn the Zho into Space Nazis. The Zho aren't Space Nazis because their regime has some objective benefits rather than just negative differences.

That is the feature that needs to be retained:ambiguity. There's nothing to be said in favor of North Korea.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I suppose making them a Cyborg empire rather then a Psiocracy has it's advantages. Imperials would have just as much atavistic horror at the idea, would develop a fanatical prejudice against robotics etc.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Sure it is. It took a lot of scientific investigation to establish it wasn't real.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Except for the minor problem that there's no way to produce that situation without the psi or some other fantastic technology.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Using that broad of a definition would make everything, including dragons and magic spells, science. That's a bit silly, isn't it?

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Again, look at North Korea.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

No, the same kind of scientific investigation never occurred for those things.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I look at North Korea and I am unimpressed. North Korea isn't harmonious. It's just overbearing, heavy handed tyranny. Also it can't even feed itself.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I shouldn't really have to point this out, but being "disproven by science" does not ever make something "science" - these are two different things. There is no scientific methodology in which psychic powers have been shown to operate, and they have not been shown to even exist on a reliable, repeatable level - therefore it is not "science".

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It took a lot of careful work by biologists and paleontologists and experts in myth to discover that there is no evidence for dragons (even in far away and hard-to-reach places), that they are biologically implausible, and that subtly different versions crop up in myths all over the world. The process to convince many people that magic does not work was broadly the same as for psi and spiritualism, just spread over a long time because magic is an older idea.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It is news to me that the existence of dragons was ever seriously considered. Psi was for a while so I class it more with the jungles of Venus.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Psychohistory.

Now, granted, its probably also a "cant be true in a real world" thing, but one could have Psi replaced by a very fine grained completely understood science of predicting and manipulating human behavior. The dream world of Asimov's second foundation....quite scary to any who want or value the fact of free will.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It looks like, as someone pointed out, that any alternative to psi powers is going to be just as 'magical' as psi.

Psionics was a standard idea in sf. Today an equivelant idea is metahuman/cyberpunk implants. Either is as real as the other and just as plausible. To continue to berate one or the other on their 'reality' is pointless.

Several long lasting, stable cutlures come to mind. Egypt. Basques. Korea before communism - they were known as the Hermit Kingdom centuries before the DMZ. Isolation from outside ideas and economics is probably the key.

Cybernetic zhos probably have AI, to help control the proles. I still like my idea that the ruling class is a hive-mind, or group of hive minds, connected by radio. The masses are controlled by them not by mind-reading/etc., but by the superior intellect and speed that AI and hive minds bring.

Their stable, long lasting culture is enforced on them, not exactly through gun toting force, but through the isolation of the masses from new ideas. New ideas are easy to spot - an uptick in economic output in an area is a great sign. And those AIs and hive minds are pretty sensative to anything out of the ordinary, like an uptick in economic output. If a few subtle sabotages, disappearances and re-educations don't do the trick - out come the gun toting thugs.

And this is why they are so truculent when it comes to the Imperium. The Imperium IS a new idea, something the Zho nobles do not want their masses to know even exist. Any non-Zho human culture is, by its very existance, a threat to the Zho way of life.

An Imperial dealing with Zhos would be kept isolated from the masses, dealing only with nobles, AIs and robots. Any evidence of such interaction would be carefully barred from the Zho public. If an Imperial did get into the contact with non-noble zhos, both the Imperial AND the proles would be in considerable danger.
On the other hand the nobles and AIs would not have the detailed information they are used to when working with an Imperial. Their isolationism would probably put them at a significant disadvantage, at least for a while. A fast talking Imperial might get away, repeatedly, with good sized swindles - as long as they didn't upset Zho cultural, isolation and military.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

You could push the idea further to have the proles simply being ordinary humans, constantly monitored

Intendents are mobile robots with AI though limited by the size of the processors in their head/housing

Nobles are true AIs on massive dispersed servers

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Not necessarily. In a way it´s just statistics. That life insurance companies can make serious money by successfully predicting how long people will live on average doesn´t affect my individual ability to live a lot longer or die a lot earlier at all. I can participate in free elections, even if pollsters can often predict the overall outcome.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

But if your movements, choices, votes can be statistically predicted, is that still free will? And the ability to manipulate these trends on a micro level, that is a lot of power.

The thought that free will is an illusion, that is scary.

However, to me this is more in Hiver territory than altered Zhos, scary and/or effective as it may be.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Both are true.

The psyhohistory posited as the outcome of the foundation's success was an invisible hand that guided everything, and swept everyone up in it- your only free choice was in what the plan allowed -and you had no way of knowing.

There's a great pastishe/followup called Psychohistorical crisis that adress the consequences of a fully realized Seldon (psychohistory) plan. (I forget the author). Its not an action packed car crash and space battle yarn, but pretty damn good as an immersion piece.

I've found that the key to presenting Zhos and Bad guys who aren't nazis is to choose one that creeps you (the GM) out -that will translate to your players, believe me.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Yes. Statistical predictions only say what will probably happen, not what will happen.

Uh-hunh. THe goal is not to remove variety from the universe.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

"your" being the important word. My individual actions or time of death cannot be predicted, only how a large body of humans will act on average or average life expectancy.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It's like how unpredictable single molecules of water are, yet we can be pretty sure when the pot of water as a whole boils.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I'm thinking in the game/future/super science sense. I don't believe we can or will be able to predict with absolute certainty the action of anything (Heisenberg), but we can get pretty close.

In a game sense this can be a) scary for characters, and if handled correctly, for players, and b) boring and frustrating, if not handled correctly.

Spending time on crowded freeways I often think about how fluid dynamics probably predicts where some unlucky shmuck is going to rear-end someone else and cause a backup for miles. Just try not to be the unlucky schmuck.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Quantum physics doesn't matter that much for macroscopic reality. That's why it's so counter intuitive.
The real problem with predicting say the behavior of a human being isn't in the physics. It's in knowing every aspect of thier past and present.
How will I vote in a jury on a cop accused of a crime? You may learn that my father was a police officer. But you don't know that I met far too many of his bad coworkers to assume either way.
Or a priest accused of a crime? I'm very vocal about my distaste for religion. But my father and my best friend of over 14 years were Christian.

Unkowable in a practical sense is not random or unknowable in the philosophical sense.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Actually, there's a problem that prevents accurate prediction even if you know: the person you're trying to predict may have information about the prediction mechanism, which tends to create examples of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Any predictative program complex enough to deal with human behavior must be far too complex for any individuals to understand and predict.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I am not even able to predict my own behaviour in all situations with absolute
certainty, there are just too many conscious and subconscious variables which
influence my decisions at any moment, and unless the situation in question is
a routine one, I am quite able to surprise myself and to wonder afterwards why
I did what I did. Attempting to predict the behaviour of another person in all
situations with any degree of certainty seems completely impossible to me.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Well, dragons would be kinda, well, big. And visible. Not to mention hungry.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Thus the super science 'ooo aaaah' aspect of this sort of game situation.

Then again a lot of human behavior is instinctual and ultimately predicatable. The million billion variables that effect it can be accounted for - by a AI wtih the motivation.

So AI assisted predictions to a individual level would be pretty close to mind reading and prognostication, if the AI didn't bother to tell you how it does it. Clarks Law has been noticable in its absence in these threads - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

And leave big piles of dragon poop.

Beyond the mystic aspect nobody took dragons seriously.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

And there's that too. But aside from that aspect, dragons are Cool.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I doubt it, mainly because I have no idea how the AI could get that part of
the informations required to predict my behaviour which I am myself not awa-
re of.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

This is not quite true, there have been respected biologists who assumed
that the very similar reports from cultures all over the world, the discovery
of reptile bones of the right size and the various eyewitness reports about
sightings of dragons could only be explained with the existence of such a
creature. Today we know that similar myths do not have to be based on
reality, that the bones are those of dinosaurs, and that eyewitnesses exist
for everything including the Virgin Mary, aliens and dragons, but a century
ago even scientists were not so sure.

Edit.:
Besides, dragons are mentioned in the Bible, so for many people including
some scientists there was no doubt that they had to exist ... :)
(Job 41:19-21)

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Aelian, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, and several later writers would have been surprised to hear that. I think you are greatly overestimating the skepticism of people about traveller's tales from distant lands. After all, in 13th century England, nobody had seen a dragon, but nobody had seen an Indian elephant either. And if someone had confined himself to believing in things which a living person had seen, he would have missed out on a lot of things which we believe in.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

However science wasn't really a thing, yet. (Of course to be sure, it's not like you _couldn't_ write science fiction with the premise that dragons were a real cryptozoological life form around as recently as the early medieval period.)

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Certainly. The thing about the Zho nobles is that they really aren't evil. Most proles under them have good, happy lives with little discontent. Its doubtful many of them want anything different than what they have thought police not withstanding.

The methods creep us out but the results are pretty good and in that role, the Zho serve as foils to allow us to explore some aspects of the philosophy of power,

Using some kind of Juche analog kind of defeats that point.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

I should have clarified - nobody took dragons seriously after we discovered research. I know my Pliny and Strabo, they did genius work with the tools they had.
If somebody drew a picture of an elephant and a dragon, and brought you the carcass of an elephant, you might believe them when they said the dragon carcass dissolved. The elephant and the dragon go in your book of animals. You don't have the methodology to question the tale, you don't have the resources to followup.

To get this back to topic - Zhos would believe in dragons. At least the proles. That is, if they were kept isolated by the nobility for sake of cultural stability. They couldn't have much of a scientific method, they couldn't cross reference data, or have much data to work with in any case, not if the nobles wanted to keep them in the dark. So dragons, and fortune tellers, and mystacism and psionics.

And when I saw
I immediatley thought of The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth by Zelazny. Now that is a nice SF twist on dragons, and a fishing trip.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

They aren't, however: the Consulate has considerable upward social mobility. The proles support the nobility in part because that class literally includes some of their children and grandchildren. In canon, this is based on universal testing for psionic ability. Any replacement should incorporate similar meritocratic promotion for suitable talent, whether that is aptitude for controlling robots or particularly facile cybernetic connections.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It would surprise me though if there was no hereditary component to psionic aptitude, so that would be kind of like getting rich by winning the lottery.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Again, I failed to preface my rant. Non-psi Zhos, ruled by either AI or hive-mind-radio-controlled nobles, who have to keep their base line humans passive. Ala North Korea, the population is kept in the dark regarding just about everything, so they come up with their own explanations and justifications for the world around them.

I rather like the Zhos in canon, but they can be boring if not handled just right.. They are too content, except for the Expansionists maybe (if I remember that right).

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Perfect example, though: how many people still play the lottery hoping to get rich, when typically 50% of all receipts are skimmed off the top to fund state budgets? A few, well-publicized cases of talented prole children elevated to the intendency are really all it takes.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Lotteries, or a tax on those incapable of doing math as many of us call it. That mentality works best for the poorly educated and desperate.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

FWIW, according to Mega Traveller, and possibly the Zho module for classic, there is explicitly no hereditary component that has ever been identified. *
While bizarre, I decided two things about this: one, Psi itself is one of the impossible things about our universe regardless of whether it seems "Hardish SF", so its cause might well be based in some non-IRL phenomenon

2.Even better, consider how long Zho society has known, benefited and trained Psionics as a society. if it did have an identified hereditary component, no matter how complex, given even a part of the thousands of years of Zho history, one could easily have all Zho to be bred for psionics, even using tech 2 genomics..... or at least much larger percentages if there are social constraints


I did some whatiffing at MGP forums about how this would work for Zho Society; I'll post it here if there is interest.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Which is true for statistics and actuary; however (FWIW) psychohistory is neither (and also fiction, I hasten to point out). It is explicitly a method of manipulating society via prediction of the behavior of huge masses of individuals.

The manipulation of the individual occurs entirely as a result of the constraints and conditions of the altered society. The individuals behavior is free only to vary within the freedom allowed by the intervention on the society, and is entirely irrelevant. It's ultimately dehumanizing and deceptive, and somewhere (I think) between Space Nazi's and the sincere Zhodanis.

I'll also point out that lets not fuss about its nature in an SF troped RPG - my position is that psycho history is equally as impossible as Psi; so if we can use one, we should be able to use the other, if we want.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Why is predicting and willfully manipulating human behavior statistically impossible? It's really what society is all about just done intentionally rather than haphazardly.
We all manipulate each other on a daily basis, whether we like to acknowledge it or not.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Not quite what I said, but a fair question: my position is that Psychohistory as defined by SF is impossible, not that stats or successful manipulation is impossible. Psychohistory goes beyond probability statements such as "if insulted, most people become angry, and thus often become irrational, say on an online forum " and presents a unified math based science of behavior that says "if A then absolutely 100% B".

As to the impossible part, a more detailed and more complicated explanation is available offline for those who wish it, but here would be TL; so the TL:DR version is this: as a professional in both Stats and Psychology, I just don't think that that level of reductionism is possible with our universe's makeup and limits on knowlege/information.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It depends on what the buyer believes he is buying. Lotteries are poor investments, but may be cheap purchases of exitement.


Hans

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Yeah, just about 100% anything predictive to do with complex life forms is rubbish. But the first couple of sentences on psychohistory from Wikipedia write that it's able to make general predictions about groups of people.
While incredibly complex and requiring enormous amounts of real time data on huge populations and super computers, I don't see how it's impossible. Unlikely due to competing organizations and agendas and increased individual control via that same advanced technology, but impossible seems a bit harsh.
And I'm a very pessimistic guy with regards to ultra tech physical and social.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

Doesn't matter whether humans can understand it -- just matters whether they have access to it. If such a program exists, someone will try to use it to achieve some goal or another, or worse, 2+ people will do so independently, and then the entire house of cards falls down.

Re: Zhodani without Psi
 

It's not necessarily all that bizarre; Traveller biotech is pretty bad. It probably just means some combination of environmental (rather than genetic) causes, and the genetic influences being extremely complex.