Survival Of The Fittest

Posted: **Sun Mar 10, 2024 8:58 am**

Title stolen from Temple Grandin. Sometimes I have thoughts and feelings and observations about things fitting under SOTF as an umbrella topic. This thread is to serve as a bucket for me to throw these fragments into. They will likely be of varying length, usefulness, and cogency. Nonetheless, I am putting them here because in general it's important for RP/Writing/Anything Theory to be written down somewhere where people -- especially newbies -- can actually read it, instead of it becoming secret knowledge lost to the chaos and ephemerality of a Discord chat. Along these same lines, this thread is also open for anyone to post their own assorted & unrelated SOTF mumblings in. Essentially, this is just the SOTF Discussion Thread except there's a 95% chance it'll just be 17 pages of me talking to myself.

Important things, ground rules, legal disclaimers etc I'm gonna lay out for this thread:

Be respectful. Be civil. Be responsible. Do not drop a grenade just for the sake of dropping a grenade, no matter how tempting. Sorry, I know that's fun, I know.
No vagueposting. No passive-aggressive venting about things you don't like. No aggressive venting about them either. Don't say things just to make people angry. Don't be a jerk, don't be manipulative, don't act like an asshole. Leave your drama at the door.
Keep in mind that there is a difference between objective observations and subjective opinions. Be aware of the way you phrase yourself. Avoid soapboxing. Avoiding speaking in rhetoric. This is a niche internet RP forum; zoomed out, the actual stakes aren't that high, but emotional stakes will vary greatly by user. Keep Sayre's law in mind: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue."
No circular discourse in this house (when people run in circles it's a very very.... mad world.... mad world............). Any subjective opinions I express here are based on my own personal tastes. I do not hold them to any higher esteem than I do those of others, and my intent is not to dictate them to you and frame them as objective truths to be followed. If you choose to engage with this thread, I ask that you hold yourself to this same standard within it. Remember that all of us here on this site have different priorities, and that's alright. I think having a variety of approaches is something that there's strength in. If you disagree with a take that someone says in here, that is okay; just do not approach this thread like you live in a well, do not approach it like you're 48 pages into a game of mafia, and do not approach it as a debate (exceptions being if someone says something Capital P Problematic etc., burning pitchforks may sometimes be permitted in those cases). If you approach this thread as a debate, I reserve the right to act incredibly insufferably and to hold you accountable to the standards of a debate. I will go over your post with a fine-toothed comb and I will pick out every single logical fallacy you make regardless of whether or not I agree with you. Given the arbitrary manner of personal taste, your argument will probably be a bad one. Annoying twitter users with Greek philosopher profile pics tremble in fear at the power of my autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. I have wikipedia's page of logical fallacies bookmarked; that's how far gone I am.

Posted: **Sun Mar 10, 2024 9:00 am**

For the first actual Thing in this thread, I'd just like to do a quick little PSA for any newbies who may have stumbled across this thread but who haven't made a forum account yet, or who are waiting for their forum account to be activated. The best way to get your account activated is to pop into the Discord server and give a staffer a poke about it -- otherwise, because of the sheer volume of spambots we get who are also trying to register forum accounts, we may not actually ever realize you're here.

Posted: **Wed Mar 13, 2024 8:08 am**

Glossary of some general terminology that tends to get thrown around a lot in discussions. This will be updated whenever an entry occurs to me.

General RP terms

Offer
Basically, an "offer" is anything in a post that other characters can react to. Offers are absolutely vital to the RP process -- they are the hooks that allow your fellow RPers to engage with your posts. It is very difficult to write an interaction with someone if you have no way to react to them without GMing them. Offers can be anything ranging from dialogue, to actions/explicit lack of action, or even information about your character or their environment. Again, I cannot overstate how important it is for every post to contain clearly communicated, unambiguous, and comprehensive offers. You want to cover as much ground with them as possible. RP is just as much about communication as it is creativity.

Selling
Selling is what you do when you acknowledge an offer. As a skill, it's even more important than being good at making offers is -- you can do a lot of damage to a scene by selling things wrong and inadvertently misrepresenting offers. Always read everything in every post in every thread that you are in. Do not just skimread -- you will make mistakes that way. If you're reacting to posts, read them again to make sure you've read them right the first time. If you've read them and it's unclear what's going on, don't be afraid to ask your threadmates for clarification.

Posting Order
Fairly self-explanatory, this is the order that people in a thread post in. Generally, unless the handlers in a thread decide otherwise, expect it to follow a rotation where each handler posts once in the same order every cycle, with the order determined by when in the posting cycle each handler originally joined the thread. Please note that posting orders aren't a rigid, officially-enforced thing. Often, with the agreement of everyone in a thread, posting order gets broken or adjusted for scene pacing reasons. Other times, individual handlers will decide to break posting order when they need to exit a thread, and when it's necessary in order to meet a deadline or avoid inactivity.

Private Thread
These threads, usually denoted with a "Private" in their subtitle, are... threads that are private to join. Sometimes this is because people have plot beats they want to hit without risk of derailment, sometimes this is because people want to avoid others who might be inadvertently approaching the RP in a way they find disruptive or upstaging or personal-boundary-violating, sometimes this is just because people have generalized anxiety disorder. Though private threads aren't enforced officially by staff, joining one without permission is usually considered a fairly large breach of etiquette by much of the site, and will absolutely lead to people being upset with you. So try to avoid it!

Semi-Private Thread
Like a private thread, but less private, but still also not completely open. Typically these are "PM to join", which means.... if you want to join, you should PM the person who started the thread.

Public/Open Thread
These threads, usually denoted with a "Public" or "Open" in their subtitle, are threads that anyone is free to join! Please be aware that if it's unclear whether your thread is private, semi-private, or public, people will often assume that it's public.

Terms related to scene construction

Blocking
No, not "blocking" as in blocking attacks in a fight scene. When we talk about blocking in relation to RP, we're coopting a theatre term. Blocking refers to, essentially, the way characters are choreographed and communicated to exist within a scene's physical space. The importance of this varies by the kind of scene you're trying to do, but if you're writing something with a lot of physical presence, like a fight or a suspenseful death scene, it should usually be pretty high priority. In order to lock it down, it's pretty important to make sure you and your threadmates are all in communication and are on the same page when it comes to scene layout. Remember that the way you describe an area in a post might not always necessarily be interpreted by your threadmates the way it looks to you in your head. Language is not necessarily transparent, but diagrams poorly scribbled in MS paint usually are.

Writerspace

[+] A picture of writerspace.

Basically, writerspace is the shadowy nebulous blob of 5D geometry that characters, objects, and locations inhabit if it isn't clear how they relate to a scene spatially. Oftentimes, though not always, this happens accidentally or by necessity, as a result of a scene being blocked out poorly or in an ad-hoc way. Other times, it can be a conscious choice on the part of a handler (here is an example of how that looks in practice). If it's something you're doing on purpose, the other handlers in your thread may feel a little bit like they're doing a trust fall, so it's important to keep in close communication with your threadmates so that they know what's going on, and what to react to or anticipate from the scene. Or if you're an ontologically chaotic individual (like me!) you can also not do that, and instead terrorize your fellow handlers like some kind of post-Paranormal Activity (2007) horror movie ghost. However, not every handler is necessarily gonna be down for that stuff, so you should always be sure first that everyone in a thread is okay with it before you subject it to your mischief.

Things you shouldn't do!

Passive GMing
See here.

Meta terms!

Discourse
See here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Posted: **Mon May 20, 2024 12:17 am**

Kermit's critical thinking cheat sheet

There is a science to being wrong.

Hello SOTF. Sometimes you, or a character you are writing, may be required to make judgments about things in the moment. Sometimes, this involves making assumptions about these things without proof. Oftentimes, this results in what we in the non-solipsist business call "poor judgment calls". When these lead to escalations, it makes the situation worse for everyone involved, and much much more difficult to resolve peacefully. This is a good thing for fiction writing like sotf death scenes, and a very bad thing when actually interacting with other human beings!

"All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary." - Barbara Kruger
"Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference." - Barbara Kruger
"I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me." - Barbara Kruger
Et cetera!

[+] I have killed over pointless discourses and I am willing to kill again.

These bigass lists copy+pasted from wikipedia, with extra edits from me.

[+] Eponymous Laws and Adages: Benford's law of controversy: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement: a taxonomy of argument strategy, from refutations to base insults.

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law"

Lem's Law: "No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand, if he understands, he immediately forgets."

Meadow's law: A precept, now discredited, that since cot deaths are so rare, "One is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise." It was named for Roy Meadow, a discredited paediatrician prominent in the United Kingdom in the last quarter of the twentieth century, which means that it is bad and you shouldn't follow it.

Miller's law, in communication: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of."

Occam's razor: explanations should never multiply causes without necessity. ("Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.") When two or more explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable.

Hickam's dictum, in medicine, is commonly stated as "Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please" and is a counterargument to the use of Occam's razor.

Peltzman effect: Safety measures are offset by increased risk-taking.

Rothbard's law: Everyone specializes in their own area of weakness.

Sayre's law: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue." By way of corollary, the law adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."

Streisand effect: whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.

Wiio's laws:
1: Communication usually fails, except by accident.
1.1: If communication can fail, it will.
1.2: If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails.
1.3: If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there's a misunderstanding.
1.4: If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails.
2: If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.
3: There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message.
4: The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
4.1: The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate.
5: In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
6 (not relevant to sotf): The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
7: The more important the situation is, the more probable you had forgotten an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.

[+] Logical fallacies, AKA. bad arguments that will fail to resolve conflicts, and may perhaaaaaaaps lead to them escalating.: Argument to moderation (false compromise, middle ground, fallacy of the mean) – assuming that a compromise between two positions is always correct.

Continuum fallacy (fallacy of the beard, line-drawing fallacy, decision-point fallacy) – improperly rejecting a claim for being imprecise. ("Tell me, at what point do I become a villain? How can you prove it? You can't. Therefore, there is actually zero difference between good and bad things.")

Equivocation – using a term with more than one meaning in a statement without specifying which meaning is intended.

Suppressed correlative – a correlative is redefined so that one alternative is made impossible (e.g., "I killed 5 people, but it's okay because Brenticus killed 9 people").

Definist fallacy – defining a term used in an argument in a biased manner (e.g., using "loaded terms"). The person making the argument expects that the listener will accept the provided definition, making the argument difficult to refute.

False attribution – appealing to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument.

Fallacy of quoting out of context (contextotomy, contextomy; quotation mining) – selective excerpting of words from their original context to distort the intended meaning.

False authority (single authority) – using an expert of dubious credentials or using only one opinion to promote a product or idea. Related to the appeal to authority.

False dilemma (false dichotomy, fallacy of bifurcation, black-or-white fallacy) – two alternative statements are given as the only possible options when, in reality, there are more.

False equivalence – describing two or more statements as virtually equal when they are not.

Feedback fallacy – believing in the objectivity of an evaluation to be used as the basis for improvement without verifying that the source of the evaluation is a disinterested party.

Historian's fallacy – assuming that decision-makers of the past had identical information as those subsequently analyzing the decision.

Historical fallacy – believing that certain results occurred only because a specific process was performed, though said process may actually be unrelated to the results.

Baconian fallacy – supposing that historians can obtain the "whole truth" via induction from individual pieces of historical evidence. The "whole truth" is defined as learning "something about everything", "everything about something", or "everything about everything". In reality, a historian "can only hope to know something about something".

If-by-whiskey – an argument that supports both sides of an issue by using terms that are emotionally sensitive and ambiguous.

Incomplete comparison – insufficient information is provided to make a complete comparison.

Intentionality fallacy – the insistence that the ultimate meaning of an expression must be consistent with the intention of the person from whom the communication originated (e.g. a work of fiction that is widely received as a blatant allegory must necessarily not be regarded as such if the author intended it not to be so).

Ludic fallacy – failing to take into account that non-regulated random occurrences can affect the probability of an event taking place.

Mind projection fallacy – assuming that a statement about an object describes an inherent property of the object, rather than a personal perception.

Moralistic fallacy – inferring factual conclusions from evaluative premises in violation of fact–value distinction (e.g.: inferring is from ought). Moralistic fallacy is the inverse of naturalistic fallacy.

Moving the goalposts (raising the bar) – argument in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded.

Nirvana fallacy (perfect-solution fallacy) – solutions to problems are rejected because they are not perfect.

Package deal – treating essentially dissimilar concepts as though they were essentially similar.

Proof by assertion – a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction; sometimes confused with argument from repetition (argumentum ad infinitum, argumentum ad nauseam). ("I'm not owned, I say as I slowly shrink and turn into a corn cob")

Prosecutor's fallacy – a low probability of false matches does not mean a low probability of some false match being found. ("Danya said Stevelynne killed Cairston, and Cairston was an angel who would never hurt anyone ;~;. The only explanation for this is that Stevelynne is an unrepentant murderer who must be stopped")

Proving too much – an argument that results in an overly generalized conclusion (e.g.: arguing that drinking alcohol is bad in all cases because in some instances it has led to spousal or child abuse).

Psychologist's fallacy – an observer presupposes the objectivity of their own perspective when analyzing a behavioral event.

Reification – treating an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it were a concrete, real event or physical entity.

Retrospective determinism – believing that, because an event has occurred under some circumstance, the circumstance must have made the event inevitable (e.g.: because Blaig won BKA while wearing his lucky socks, wearing those socks made him winning the BKA inevitable).

Slippery slope – asserting that a proposed, relatively small, first action will inevitably lead to a chain of related events resulting in a significant and negative event and, therefore, should not be permitted.

Special pleading – the arguer attempts to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule or principle without justifying the exemption. (Example, screenshot doctored and exaggerated for comedic effect.)

Begging the question – using the conclusion of the argument in support of itself in a premise (e.g.: saying that smoking cigarettes is deadly because cigarettes can kill you).

Circular reasoning – the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end up with (e.g.: all bachelors are unmarried males).

Fallacy of many questions (complex question, loaded question) – someone asks a question that presupposes something that has not been proven or accepted by all the people involved. This fallacy is often used rhetorically so that the question limits direct replies to those that serve the questioner's agenda. (E.g., "Have you or have you not stopped being a bad person?".)

Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence, argument by half-truth, fallacy of exclusion, card stacking, slanting) – using individual cases or data that confirm a particular position, while ignoring related cases or data that may contradict that position.

Nut-picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence) – using individual cases or data that falsify a particular position, while ignoring related cases or data that may support that position.

Survivorship bias – a small number of successes of a given process are actively promoted while completely ignoring a large number of failures.

Thought-terminating cliché – a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance, conceal lack of forethought, move on to other topics, etc. – but in any case, to end the debate with a cliché rather than a point. ("First we must define -" when used as an ironic meme at the sign of any disagreement)

Faulty cause/effect – a faulty assumption that, because there is a correlation between two variables, one caused the other.

Fallacy of the single cause (causal oversimplification) – it is assumed that there is one, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.

Furtive fallacy – outcomes are asserted to have been caused by the malfeasance of decision makers.

Appeal to the stone – dismissing a claim as absurd without demonstrating proof for its absurdity.

Invincible ignorance – where a person simply refuses to believe the argument, ignoring any evidence given.

Argument from ignorance (appeal to ignorance) – assuming that a claim is true because it has not been or cannot be proven false, or vice versa.

Argument from incredulity (appeal to common sense) – "I cannot imagine how this could be true; therefore, it must be false."

Argument from repetition (argumentum ad nauseam) – repeating an argument until nobody cares to discuss it any more and referencing that lack of objection as evidence of support for the truth of the conclusion; sometimes confused with proof by assertion.

Argument from silence – assuming that a claim is true based on the absence of textual or spoken evidence from an authoritative source, or vice versa.

Red herring – introducing a second argument in response to the first argument that is irrelevant and draws attention away from the original topic ("WELL ACTSHULLY ARIZONA, because you shot Garren, you CAN'T complain about me murdering your boyfriend.").

Ad hominem – attacking the arguer instead of the argument.

Circumstantial ad hominem – stating that the arguer's personal situation or perceived benefit from advancing a conclusion means that their conclusion is wrong. ("Oh, so you're saying that it's wrong to shoot people? HMM WELL, that just seems awfully convenient for you, don't you think...," Bronio said to Warrett, while holding the other boy at gunpoint because he insulted his Pokemon Card collection.)

Poisoning the well – a subtype of ad hominem presenting adverse information about a target person with the intention of discrediting everything that the target person says. ("I heard that Staraoone said Kimberson wasn't a villain... so can you really trust anything he believes......")

Appeal to motive – dismissing an idea by questioning the motives of its proposer.

Tone policing – focusing on emotion behind (or resulting from) a message rather than the message itself as a discrediting tactic.

Traitorous critic fallacy – a critic's perceived affiliation is portrayed as the underlying reason for the criticism and the critic is asked to stay away from the issue altogether.

Appeal to authority (argument from authority) – an assertion is deemed true because of the position or authority of the person asserting it. ("The morning announcements said -")

Appeal to accomplishment – an assertion is deemed true or false based on the accomplishments of the proposer. This may often also have elements of appeal to emotion.

Courtier's reply – a criticism is dismissed by claiming that the critic lacks sufficient knowledge, credentials, or training to credibly comment on the subject matter.

Appeal to consequences – the conclusion is supported by a premise that asserts positive or negative consequences from some course of action in an attempt to distract from the initial discussion.

Appeal to emotion – manipulating the emotions of the listener rather than using valid reasoning to obtain common agreement.

Appeal to fear – generating distress, anxiety, cynicism, or prejudice towards the opponent in an argument.

Appeal to flattery – using excessive or insincere praise to obtain common agreement.

Appeal to pity – generating feelings of sympathy or mercy in the listener to obtain common agreement.

Appeal to ridicule (ad absurdum) – mocking or stating that the opponent's position is laughable to deflect from the merits of the opponent's argument.

Appeal to spite – generating bitterness or hostility in the listener toward an opponent in an argument.

Judgmental language – using insulting or pejorative language in an argument.

Style over substance – embellishing an argument with compelling language, exploiting a bias towards the esthetic qualities of an argument, e.g. the rhyme-as-reason effect.

Wishful thinking – arguing for a course of action by the listener according to what might be pleasing to imagine rather than according to evidence or reason.

Appeal to nature – judgment is based solely on whether the subject of judgment is 'natural' or 'unnatural'. ("As evidenced by millennia of violence through human history, murdering people is natural and therefore there are no ethical problems with it")

Appeal to novelty – a proposal is claimed to be superior or better solely because it is new or modern.

Appeal to tradition – a conclusion supported solely because it has long been held to be true.

Argumentum ad baculum (appeal to force, appeal to threat) – an argument made through coercion or threats of force to support position. ("See, I'm correct!" Jimothy said, after shooting his debate opponent in the face.)

Argumentum ad populum (appeal to widespread belief, bandwagon argument, appeal to the people) – a proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because a majority or many people believe it to be so.

Association fallacy (guilt by association and honor by association) – arguing that because two things share (or are implied to share) some property, they are the same.

Logic chopping fallacy (nit-picking, trivial objections) – Focusing on trivial details of an argument, rather than the main point of the argumentation.

Ipse dixit (bare assertion fallacy) – a claim that is presented as true without support, as self-evidently true, or as dogmatically true. This fallacy relies on the implied expertise of the speaker or on an unstated truism.

Bulverism (psychogenetic fallacy) – inferring why an argument is being used, associating it to some psychological reason, then assuming it is invalid as a result. The assumption that if the origin of an idea comes from a biased mind, then the idea itself must also be a falsehood.

Chronological snobbery – a thesis is deemed incorrect because it was commonly held when something else, known to be false, was also commonly held.

Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems. First World problems are a subset of this fallacy.

Genetic fallacy – a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context.

I'm entitled to my opinion – a person discredits any opposition by claiming that they are entitled to their opinion.

Straw man fallacy – refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.

Tu quoque ('you too' – appeal to hypocrisy, whataboutism) – stating that a position is false, wrong, or should be disregarded because its proponent fails to act consistently in accordance with it.

Two wrongs make a right – assuming that, if one wrong is committed, another wrong will rectify it.

[+] Cognitive biases, AKA. the assumptions that make an ass out of you and me.: Behavioral and Decision Making Biases!

Anchoring bias
The anchoring bias, or focalism, is the tendency to rely too heavily—to "anchor"—on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject). Anchoring bias includes or involves the following:

Conservatism bias, the tendency to insufficiently revise one's belief when presented with new evidence.

Functional fixedness, a tendency limiting a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.

Law of the instrument, an over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Apophenia
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The following are types of apophenia:

Clustering illusion, the tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).

Illusory correlation, a tendency to inaccurately perceive a relationship between two unrelated events.

Pareidolia, a tendency to perceive a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the Moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Availability heuristic: The availability heuristic (also known as the availability bias) is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be. The availability heuristic includes or involves the following:

Anthropomorphism is characterization of animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human traits, emotions, or intentions. The opposite bias, of not attributing feelings or thoughts to another person, is dehumanised perception, a type of objectification.

Attentional bias, the tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.

Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence (a form of selection bias). The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards. It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned.

Salience bias, the tendency to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable, even though this difference is often irrelevant by objective standards.

Selection bias, which happens when the members of a statistical sample are not chosen completely at random, which leads to the sample not being representative of the population.

Survivorship bias, which is concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility.

Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it:

Normalcy bias, a form of cognitive dissonance, is the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.

Effort justification is a person's tendency to attribute greater value to an outcome if they had to put effort into achieving it. This can result in more value being applied to an outcome than it actually has. An example of this is the IKEA effect, the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end product.

Ben Franklin effect, where a person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.

Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. There are multiple cognitive biases which involve or are types of confirmation bias:

Backfire effect, a tendency to react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.

Semmelweis reflex, the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.

Egocentric bias
Egocentric bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective and/or have a different perception of oneself relative to others. The following are forms of egocentric bias:

Bias blind spot, the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.

False consensus effect, the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.

False uniqueness bias, the tendency of people to see their projects and themselves as more singular than they actually are.

Forer effect or Barnum effect, the tendency for individuals to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests. (and AI chat assistants!)

Illusion of asymmetric insight, where people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.

Illusion of control, the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.

Illusion of transparency, the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others, and to overestimate how well they understand others' personal mental states.

Illusion of validity, the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one's judgments, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.

Illusory superiority, the tendency to overestimate one's desirable qualities, and underestimate undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as "Lake Wobegon effect", "better-than-average effect", or "superiority bias".)

Naïve cynicism, expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.

Naïve realism, the belief that we see reality as it really is—objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who do not are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.

Overconfidence effect, a tendency to have excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.

Planning fallacy, the tendency for people to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a given task.

Restraint bias, the tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.

Trait ascription bias, the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.

Third-person effect, a tendency for people to believe that mass-communicated messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.

Extension neglect
Extension neglect occurs where the quantity of the sample size is not sufficiently taken into consideration when assessing the outcome, relevance or judgement.

Base rate fallacy or base rate neglect, the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important.

Compassion fade, the tendency to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.

Conjunction fallacy, the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions.

Duration neglect, the neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.

Hyperbolic discounting, where discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time—people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.

Less-is-better effect, the tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.

Neglect of probability, the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

Scope neglect or scope insensitivity, the tendency to be insensitive to the size of a problem when evaluating it. For example, being willing to pay as much to save 2,000 children or 20,000 children.

False priors
False priors are initial beliefs and knowledge which interfere with the unbiased evaluation of factual evidence and lead to incorrect conclusions. Biases based on false priors include:

Agent detection bias, the inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent.

Automation bias, the tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions. (i love ai)

Gender bias, a widespread set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender. For example, the assumption that women are less suited to jobs requiring high intellectual ability, or the assumption that people or animals are male in the absence of any indicators of gender.

Sexual overperception bias, the tendency to overestimate sexual interest of another person in oneself, and sexual underperception bias, the tendency to underestimate it.

Stereotyping, expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.

Framing effect
The framing effect is the tendency to draw different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented. Forms of the framing effect include:

Decoy effect, where preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.

Default effect, the tendency to favor the default option when given a choice between several options.

Distinction bias, the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.

Logical fallacy / cognitive bias tag teams:

Escalation of commitment, irrational escalation, or sunk cost fallacy, where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.

G. I. Joe fallacy, the tendency to think that knowing about cognitive bias is enough to overcome it.

Gambler's fallacy, the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."

Hot-hand fallacy (also known as "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand"), the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.

Plan continuation bias, failure to recognize that the original plan of action is no longer appropriate for a changing situation or for a situation that is different from anticipated.

Subadditivity effect, the tendency to judge the probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.

Zero-sum bias, where a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another).

Risk aversion:

Ambiguity effect, the tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.

Dread aversion, just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring.

Loss aversion, where the perceived disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.

Pseudocertainty effect, the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.

Status quo bias, the tendency to prefer things to stay relatively the same.

System justification, the tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.

Self-assessment:

Hot-cold empathy gap, the tendency to underestimate the influence of visceral drives on one's attitudes, preferences, and behaviors.

Hard–easy effect, the tendency to overestimate one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one's ability to accomplish easy tasks.

Illusion of explanatory depth, the tendency to believe that one understands a topic much better than one actually does. The effect is strongest for explanatory knowledge, whereas people tend to be better at self-assessments for procedural, narrative, or factual knowledge.

Impostor Syndrome, a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. Also known as impostor phenomenon.

Objectivity illusion, the phenomena where people tend to believe that they are more objective and unbiased than others. This bias can apply to itself – where people are able to see when others are affected by the objectivity illusion, but unable to see it in themselves. See also bias blind spot.

Truth judgment:

Belief bias, an effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.

Subjective validation, where statements are perceived as true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.

Other behavioral biases:

Action bias, the tendency for someone to act when faced with a problem even when inaction would be more effective, or to act when no evident problem exists.

Additive bias, the tendency to solve problems through addition, even when subtraction is a better approach.

Curse of knowledge, when better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.

Declinism, the predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.

End-of-history illusion, the age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past.

Exaggerated expectation, the tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen.

Fundamental pain bias, the tendency for people to believe they accurately report their own pain levels while holding the paradoxical belief that others exaggerate it.

Hindsight bias, sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, or the "Hindsight is 20/20" effect, is the tendency to see past events as having been predictable before they happened.

Impact bias, the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.

Information bias, the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.

Interoceptive bias or Hungry judge effect, the tendency for sensory input about the body itself to affect one's judgement about external, unrelated circumstances. (As for example, in parole judges who are more lenient when fed and rested.)

Moral credential effect, occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.

Non-adaptive choice switching. After experiencing a bad outcome with a decision problem, the tendency to avoid the choice previously made when faced with the same decision problem again, even though the choice was optimal. Also known as "once bitten, twice shy" or "hot stove effect".

Mere exposure effect, the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.

Omission bias, the tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions).

Optimism bias, the tendency to be over-optimistic, underestimating greatly the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias, and compare pessimism bias).

Ostrich effect, ignoring an obvious negative situation.

Outcome bias, the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Pessimism bias, the tendency for some people, especially those with depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.

Present bias, the tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments.

Projection bias, the tendency to overestimate how much one's future selves will share one's current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.

Proportionality bias, our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories.

Recency illusion, the illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent.

Risk compensation or Peltzman effect, the tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.

Unconscious bias or implicit bias, the underlying attitudes and stereotypes that people unconsciously attribute to another person or group of people that affect how they understand and engage with them. Many researchers suggest that unconscious bias occurs automatically as the brain makes quick judgments based on past experiences and background.

Social Biases!

Association fallacies:
Authority bias, the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.

Cheerleader effect, the tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.

Halo effect, the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one personality area to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).

Attribution biases:
Actor-observer bias, the tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one's own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).

Defensive attribution hypothesis, a tendency to attribute more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases.

Extrinsic incentives bias, an exception to the fundamental attribution error, where people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself.

Fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to overemphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.

Group attribution error, the biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.

Hostile attribution bias, the tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.

Intentionality bias, the tendency to judge human action to be intentional rather than accidental.

Just-world hypothesis, the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).

Moral luck, the tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.

Puritanical bias, the tendency to attribute cause of an undesirable outcome or wrongdoing by an individual to a moral deficiency or lack of self-control rather than taking into account the impact of broader societal determinants.

Self-serving bias, the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.

Conformity:

Availability cascade, a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").

Bandwagon effect, the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

Courtesy bias, the tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.

Groupthink, the psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.

Groupshift, the tendency for decisions to be more risk-seeking or risk-averse than the group as a whole, if the group is already biased in that direction.

Social desirability bias, the tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.

Truth bias is people's inclination towards believing, to some degree, the communication of another person, regardless of whether or not that person is actually lying or being untruthful.

Ingroup bias, the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.

Outgroup homogeneity bias, where individuals see members of other groups as being relatively less varied than members of their own group.

Other social biases:

Assumed similarity bias, where an individual assumes that others have more traits in common with them than those others actually do.

Outgroup favoritism, when some socially disadvantaged groups will express favorable attitudes (and even preferences) toward social, cultural, or ethnic groups other than their own.

Pygmalion effect, the phenomenon whereby others' expectations of a target person affect the target person's performance.

Reactance, the urge to do the opposite of what someone wants one to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain one's freedom of choice.

Reactive devaluation, devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.

Social comparison bias, the tendency, when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who do not compete with one's own particular strengths.

Shared information bias, the tendency for group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information), and less time and energy discussing information that only some members are aware of (i.e., unshared information).

Worse-than-average effect, a tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult.

Memory Biases!

Misattribution of memory
In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattributions include:

Cryptomnesia, where a memory is mistaken for novel thought or imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.

False memory, where imagination is mistaken for a memory.

Social cryptomnesia, a failure by people and society in general to remember the origin of a change, in which people know that a change has occurred in society, but forget how this change occurred; that is, the steps that were taken to bring this change about, and who took these steps. This has led to reduced social credit towards the minorities who made major sacrifices that led to a change in societal values.

Source confusion, where episodic memories are confused with other information, creating distorted memories.

Suggestibility, where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.

The Perky effect, where real images can influence imagined images, or be misremembered as imagined rather than real.

Other memory biases:
Bizarreness effect. Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.

Choice-supportive bias, the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.

Consistency bias, incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.

Continued influence effect. Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected.

Euphoric recall, the tendency of people to remember past experiences in a positive light, while overlooking negative experiences associated with that event.

Fading affect bias, a bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.

Generation effect (Self-generation effect) That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.

Gender differences in eyewitness memory, the tendency for a witness to remember more details about someone of the same gender.

Humor effect, that humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.

List-length effect, a smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well.

Modality effect, that memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.

Mood-congruent memory bias, the improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.

Negativity bias or Negativity effect, a psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.

Peak–end rule, that people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.

Persistence, the unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event.

Picture superiority effect, the notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.

Positivity effect (Socioemotional selectivity theory), that older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.

Primacy effect, here an item at the beginning of a list is more easily recalled. A form of serial position effect. See also recency effect and suffix effect.

Rosy retrospection, the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.

Saying is believing effect, communicating a socially tuned message to an audience can lead to a bias of identifying the tuned message as one's own thoughts.

Self-relevance effect, that memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.

Serial position effect, that items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.

Spacing effect, that information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one.

Spotlight effect, the tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice one's appearance or behavior.

Tachypsychia, when time perceived by the individual either lengthens, making events appear to slow down, or contracts.

Telescoping effect, the tendency to displace recent events backwards in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.

Testing effect, the fact that one more easily recall information one has read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.

Tip of the tongue phenomenon, when a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.

Travis syndrome, overestimating the significance of the present. It is related to chronological snobbery with possibly an appeal to novelty logical fallacy being part of the bias.

Verbatim effect , that the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording. This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.

von Restorff effect, that an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.

Zeigarnik effect, that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

Posted: **Wed May 29, 2024 2:15 am**

Some unported RP Discussion threads from the Tapatalk board that, while old, may still be helpful, or at least vaguely interesting

Weasel Words, which is on this board, but also if you haven't read it yet, you should read it

Worst Cliches, a discussion about some fairly widespread v4-isms that were less than spectacular, and which have since become entrenched in infamy in the site's culture (though they do still sometimes crop up today).

Establishing your characters and writing good opening posts, a thread about doing that.

How To Write Southerners, in case you're a person from not-the-Southern-US planning on writing a southerner (idk your life). Also touches on the general issue of writing characters who are first-and-foremost geographical/cultural stereotypes instead of people, which is something you want to avoid. Do your research (and watching TV shows set in the location isn't "research", nor is looking at Twitter. Seek out actual lived experiences told by the people you're writing about). [Jumping up and down] Remember that this is V9's pregame location, not this!!!!

Posted: **Sat Sep 21, 2024 7:28 pm**

SOTF as Emotional Self-Harm; or how I learned to stop caring about BDA and just have fun

CW: this post is about Heavy Stuff like self-harm, suicidality, depression, mental health, et cetera

[+] this post brought to you by the process of writing michael froese in v7 being so stressful for me long term that a doctor noticed it in my blood sugar numbers.

TLDR sotf is a site that, due to its themes, tends to attract people dealing with mental illness / trauma / disruptions in identity formation etc. oftentimes, we will write this into our characters. These characters tend to be real raw and emotionally messy in a way that gets positive attention from chat. And when you’re writing that, that attention can feel good. It can make you feel like people understand your pain. It can make you feel like you’ve found meaning. But i will be real here, speaking from experience, it can create a feedback loop where that feeling of social acceptance becomes mentally linked to how deep and raw and low you’re willing to cut and stare into the abyss of your own psyche in a narrative environment defined by its unpredictability and violence.

When that continued pressure is keeping your scars from healing, it isn’t a healthy coping mechanism.

The thing with trauma is that it’s not something you can really… understand healthily alone by yourself from a perspective deep within it (I mean, it's possible. but it's something that takes a lot of self-discipline and self-awareness, which aren't things most people are gonna be great at in the middle of a mental health crisis). When you have nothing to think about but your own thoughts, it creates kind of an echo chamber in your brain. You can immerse yourself in it your whole life, but you will never find any sort of truth or stability from that. Like with any wound, it’s something that can only heal if you give it the time, space, and stable, nurturing environment to do so. You will be writing these characters for potentially longer than a year. Do not force yourself to maintain your traumatized state like that if the only reason you're doing it is because of this site. At the end of the day, we're just a silly little RP forum. If it genuinely helps you to write about your trauma here, by all means, do so. But please, please, you do not owe us self-torture.

ADDITIONALLY

"Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag. Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes." - Barbara Kruger

"It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity." - Alan Watts, just to complete the Kermit quotation bingo sheet.

SOTF, as a plot setting, is incredibly bleak and unfair. This is reflected in the game's mechanics. Rolls do not care about planned character arcs. Roughly 94% of all characters, both Mini and Main, did not survive their games. There is... very little chance for meaningful, lasting positive character growth -- your character *will* be going through additional trauma. Your character *will* be culpable on some level for bad things happening. Things are not going to work out for them. You know your own limits. We are not trained therapists. Do not put yourself (and your fellow handlers) in a position where your mental wellbeing becomes contingent on this boat going a specific direction. Chances are that, given the huge size of the ensemble cast, number of moving parts at play, and the sheer influence of luck, it won't.

Posted: **Fri Nov 01, 2024 10:14 pm**

Notes about profiles, character realism, and sensitive content.

cw: mentions of racism, ableism, abuse, suicide, SA, etc. I mean, "sensitive content" is literally in the title, so

Note: This post isn't me speaking in any official capacity on behalf of the staff team. I am but one of six people who may be critiquing your profiles. However, this is a rodeo that gets danced every version, and so this is something I figured it'd be a good idea to throw together as we get closer to v9 pregame's launch.

[+] from the profile writing discord: KERMIT — 09/23/2023 4:09 PM
I think... you've always got to tread veeeery carefully with super dramatic backstories, and if you do choose to include it in your profile, don't get too attached to it as being an integral part of your character. Because, though you won't get permadenied (very few things get you permadenied) if it ends up coming off as being unrealistic or badly handled or Way Extra, you're proooobably going to be asked to make adjustments to it or potentially change it entirely during the critique process
hold on ima head into the tapatalk wastelands to find a relatively-recent-in-terms-of-site-history illustration

KERMIT — 09/23/2023 4:37 PM
[telephone hold music], taking more time than expected because i'm trying to find a good, regularly publicly discussed example from after v4 who actually made it to the profile stage
oh actually i suppose there's me
though my profile got through without me changing the Questionable Content BUT that was half a decade ago and probably should not have happened and it wouldn't go the same if the profile was submitted for v9 instead
but i digress
anyways, so.
Valerija Bogdanovic...
her profile is very short (some may say too short) so i'll put it in here in full.

Name: Valerija Bogdanovic
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Activism, debate club, volunteering club, current affairs

Appearance: Valerija stands at 5’7’’, and weighs in at 145 lbs. An ethnic Croat, she has pale skin, blonde hair, brown eyes, a long, prominent nose, and high cheekbones leading down to a pointed chin. Her hair is usually kept up in a ponytail. For her clothes, she usually wears a tanktop or t-shirt underneath a hoodie or sweater, along with sneakers and either jeans or yoga-pants. On the day of the abduction, she was wearing a yellowish-orange hoodie over a blue tanktop, black Adidas track pants, and a pair of red Converse.

Though she moved to America at a somewhat young age, Valerija consciously maintains her vaguely Eastern-European accent, seeing it as part of her identity. She is fluent in both English and Croatian.

Biography: Valerija was born February 20th, 2000 to Darko, a baker, and Marija Bogdanovic, then a nurse, in the city of Zagreb, Croatia. As a small child, Valerija spent much of her time with her father at the bakery, as the family would not be able to afford it if Marija quit her job and raised a child full time. Once she was old enough, Darko began allowing Valerija to help out with simple tasks around the bakery. While not exactly enough to make it a hobby, Valerija still enjoys baking as a way to stay close to her roots, and bakes a batch of fritulis for her family every Christmas.

At age six, Valerija entered elementary school. While at first she was uncomfortable with being separated from her father during the school-day, she soon adjusted and found herself with a small, but close group of friends. She began learning English as part of school, and showed proficiency in it along with in most other subjects (the exception being visual art).

When Valerija was nine, tragedy struck the Bogdanovic family. Darko, while working at the bakery, was killed by two teenagers in what they later admitted was an ethnically motivated attack. Valerija was devastated, and the family, deprived a major source of income, struggled financially for the next year, though they didn't go without help. Marija reached out to extended family living in America, and they offered to assist the family financially as well as help them immigrate to the US, if so needed. Marija graciously accepted, and by the time Valerija was eleven, the family moved to Chattanooga.

Living with Marija's family, Valerija at first had a rough time adjusting to life in America. Though she could speak passable English, she had a heavy accent, and this combined with her new peers' heavy American accents led to Valerija preferring to stay quiet at school as opposed to risk miscommunication. As she adjusted to her new environment, her accent gradually began to fade (though she still maintains one, seeing it as part of her heritage) and she grew more skilled at interpreting the twangy southern accent possessed by many in Tennessee. Soon, as she became more comfortable, she found herself excelling academically (particularly in the humanities), regularly being in the top twenty percent of her class.

As she entered high school, Val soon found a group of friends with ethnic backgrounds similar to hers. Val sees this group of people - informally known as the Slav Squad - as a way to both cope with her father's death and demonstrate her political beliefs. As the squad is composed of many different ethnic groups that have historically been at odds with one another, it contradicts the beliefs of Darko's murderers and is used by Val to reinforce her confidence in multiculturalism.

As a way to cope with her father's death, Valerija is politically active, believing in a generally left-wing ideology, and expresses her views through debate club and extra-curricular activist work. Valerija believes in a strictly diplomatic approach to political matters, thinking that being belligerent to one-another is just a surefire way to create further political division. In addition to being active in politics, Val is also active in her local community, volunteering for various charitable organizations - the cause varying based on whatever she believes to be pertinent to current events. After her high-school education, Val wishes to attend the University of Tennessee, and wants to pursue a career in politics, hoping to change the world for the better.

Advantages: Valerija's intelligence and diplomatic nature may provide to be a boon if she needs ally herself with someone or finds herself in a tough situation. Additionally, she has a strong pre-existing network of potential allies in the Slav Squad.
Disadvantages: Valerija's diplomatic approach maybe end up being a double-edged sword for her, as it is likely that in a kill-or-be-killed situation, some may not be willing to listen to reason. She is very close to her friends, and may be exceptionally affected if they are hurt or killed.
KERMIT — 09/23/2023 5:00 PM
now. I would like to highlight, specifically, how little of her profile is dedicated to explaining and grasping the ramifications her father being Literally murdered in a hatecrime that happened in the aftermath of Multiple Real-Life Genocides
this is the kind of thing where circa today, we would veeerrry likely ask for expansion on that part of the profile, just so we can ensure the handler isn't about to fumble some real serious shit
because traumatic backstories generally involve stuff that also effects people in real life, and it's absolutely imperative that people really grok what they're dealing with and writing about, because otherwise, even if they're well-intentioned about everything, it is incredibly, incredibly easy to trip and fall into inadvertently writing something that's offensive or harmful
im starting to sound like a chatbot lecturing about ai ethics so i'll cut myself off here, but real quick I remembered about another example, so if you want to see an example of how we tend to critique profiles that involve shaky handling of Real Heavy Serious Topics, you can see it here.

[+] Things you should generally expect to be treated with extra scrutiny: Sorry to the Gamer community

- In general, any subject matter that people may consider content-warning-able; examples include abuse, sexual violence, racial violence, gendered violence, all the other kinds of violence, self-harm & suicide, et cetera. If your profile includes it in a way that comes off as exploitative, over-the-top, unnecessary, or in bad taste, you will likely be asked to tone it down or remove it. These are things that need to be handled with a high level of intentionality. Ask yourself "Is this absolutely necessary to the story I am trying to tell, or is this something that could be replaced just as effectively with something less dire?"

- Race. If you're writing about a race or culture other than your own, it's literally vital that you stop and ask yourself "Am I writing something racist?" If the answer is yes, stop writing it. Do your research.

- ^ The above also applies to gender, disability, sexuality, religion, social class, and allllll that stuff. Remember that you are not infallible, and that things can still read as problematic or insensitive even if it isn't your intent. Write characters as people, not just their labels.

- Mental illnesses. Pop psychology is not psychology (pop psychology is worse!), and psychology as a field just generally has a pretty rough history. Are you writing someone with a mental illness, or are you writing someone who acts like they were authored by a network TV writer?

- ^ the above principle also applies to most social issues.

- Realism. If something atypical happens in your character's backstory, you need to be able to logically answer the question "how?" without dancing around multiple contrivances that would have needed to happen for things to end up that way. Remember that these are high school students.

- More to be added as I think of them. However, expect these to mostly boil down to "nuance is important", "do research", "color within the lines of canon", and "remember that your character has to function as part of an ensemble cast". Read the final profiles of v8 characters to get a clearer idea of what you should be aiming for.

Survival Of The Fittest

An Anthropologist on Mars

An Anthropologist on Mars

Re: An Anthropologist on Mars

Re: An Anthropologist on Mars

Re: An Anthropologist on Mars

Re: An Anthropologist on Mars

Re: An Anthropologist on Mars

Re: An Anthropologist on Mars