The Council of Cognition
Optimization is the engineer, and almost perfectly fits the popular caricature of economists, except that Optimization also knows the value of everything and not just the price as well. Or at least Optimization is the only one with an actual explicit numeric guess. With error bars. Whenever Optimization speaks, math is at least strongly implied. With verbal italics. Its strong personality usually de facto runs the council but it almost always consults everyone else, because not doing so would be a shamefully sub-optimal way of neglecting useful sources of information.
Gregariousness tends to prefer talking to people. Sometimes to the extent of transforming that “to” to something more resebling an “over”. Gregariousness is Optimization’s valued ally in what they call “The Comparative Advantage Coalition”.
Troll is all about The Aesthetic. The Aesthetic usually involves doing the least likely thing which synergizes surprisingly often with Optimization’s goals which also include doing some things that have a low prior, and Gregariousness sometimes bands together with Troll to make other people do the least likely thing as well, because that is even more The Aesthetic.
Slytherin wears a fake goatee, which looks ridiculous on someone who always gets read as a woman. When this is pointed out to it, Slytherin just smiles mysteriously. Slytherin smiles mysteriously at everything else too, because doing something differently would leak information on Slytherin’s inside workings. Nobody ever admits to taking Slytherin’s advice, unless “admit to being advised by Slytherin” is a part of said advice, as it sometimes is. Troll finds it hilarious.
Because every UN is apparently contractually obligated to have its own North Korea, Anxiety is too a recurring member of the Council. Nobody knows who allowed Anxiety in, because it usually just wastes everyone else’s time. There are two things Anxiety wants: to do that thing with Ritalin and Valium, or to curl into a ball. This is inconvenient as the rest of the Council wants to do something useful instead. Gregariousness hates Anxiety with a rage that could fuel a thousand suns, according to Optimization’s calculations, but harnessing that power has so far been deemed “unlikely to work in its initially suggested inplementation”.
Nerd is an occasional member, whose presence is most conspicuously marked by Optimization’s absence which has led everyone else to suspect that Nerd is just Optimization taking a day off.
Cat is a mysterious one. It’s only ever been present when Anxiety is absent and it votes in favour of relaxing alone which makes Gregariousness intensely suspicious of it. The only thing known of its origins is that before its appearance Optimization received a call from Slytherin and then called a manufacturer of cat ears and prosthetic tails for cognitive constructs.
The One That Watches The Watchers is the senior member in position and respect, if not in age. It seldom intervenes directly, mostly just mumbling ominous things about “corrupted hardware” and making snarky comments at the others about how some things would be quite unbelievably convenient indeed, but whenever it votes it has absolute veto powers. It’s biased against biases and arrests thought-arresting cliches on sight but somehow this isn’t hypocritical, and others wonder why exactly it treats motivation as such a bad thing, but it wields some unknown power over all the other cognitive constructs. When questioned about the nature of this power, it simply says “I have an outside view from the level above you”. The day it appeared, it immediately proceeded to install extremely conspicuous cameras and pictures of eyes absolutely everywhere except Slytherin’s room which only has extremely inconspicuous cameras.
This bunch is tasked with implementing the Utility Function. For some reason, claiming to actually know what the Utility Function is is absolutely forbidden and The One That Watches The Watchers has promised to utterly destroy anyone who does it (and immediately told Slytherin that no, it can’t get rid of Anxiety by manipulating it to do so), so everyone is just taking their best guesses at what it might really be. Optimization’s guesses involve calculations and the others wonder why this isn’t forbidden; they suspect that The One That Watches The Watchers doesn’t err on the side of barring Optimization from doing so because it brings its own error bars which sometimes require many more sheets of paper than the numbers themselves.
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