Roamer wrote: ↑Fri Aug 28, 2020 3:33 am
The north star was useful because it was a fixed reference point for navigation.
The important point is that it gave information about the external world, as opposed to "Whatever direction I am facing must be north, because my nose and my gut never steer me wrong."
And in the past, Teddy was right in that Miho was at that time the clear and present danger. Given that she just destroyed most of a wing of a hospital,
[...] she is still a potential danger
Lots of people would be "right" to call Miho a "potential danger". I would never argue against calling her a potential danger. Miho being a "potential danger" is not a specific prediction of TWB's model, but rather that is she is intrinsically and irredeemably evil, that all of the events of "danger and destruction" around her are deliberate and of malicious intent.
Pointing to a particular incident in which destruction took place and singling TWB out as being "right" in such a case is ignoring the core elements of what TWB himself is claiming to be right about: not the destruction per se but the evil and malicious intent behind it. This is actually worse than a "stopped clock is right twice a day" fallacy: not only should the model be considered to make a failed prediction every time Miho is _not_ involved in a destructive (or otherwise "evil") event, it should fail in a case like this
if she was motivated not by desire to destroy, but by panic and terror and (assuming she was telling the truth to Kimiko about her backstory) a desire to reduce the threat to surrounding people (i.e. cause superficial damage to a hospital corridor as opposed to sticking around and watching people who "love" her get hurt or killed).
Am I 100% sure that she was telling the truth to Kimiko, and that she was terrified rather than malicious in the hospital? Of course not, I'd say 85% - 95% or thereabouts. But the situation isn't symmetric; I
don't have a model that claims Miho is "intrinsically and incorruptibly good", so I don't
need the numbers to be 100%. More important (at least in my opinion), my assessment of her is
subject to being updated as new events unfold in the comic; there are lots and lots and lots of things that could easily make me realize, "Hmm, this would suggest Miho is worse than I had been giving her credit for." Is the same true of TWB's "model"? It's fine to have a "schtick", but if the schtick is independent of anything Fred himself could do in the comic, then personally I don't get it.