Anime of the Week: Psycho-Pass

For one thing, the one does not follow from the other: experts don't make perfect decisions in their fields.

No, but an aggregation of experts does -- at least as perfect as is actually possible, and therefore perfect by the standards of making a decision.

But more importantly it still ignores the fact that a judgement requires a system of values to evaluate outcomes, and the Sybil system (as the population seems to understand it) ignores that.

I think it's legitimate to assume that Sybil has its own evaluation criteria. It does not ignore evaluation of its enforcement. I thought it was fairly clear that Sybil held itself suspect and used Akane as an independent medium for evaluation and interpretation of its results.

You can claim that the people are just too dumb to notice. Fine.

They're not too dumb to notice: they are brainwashed to be ignorant of the metacognitive knowledge required to understand what they see or notice. How can a person say what is right or wrong if they don't know what it means to be right or wrong? How can someone learn what right and wrong mean if every action is directly demanded by perfect authority? Your "right" and "wrong" are then just copies of lawful and unlawful, and you have no developed them at all -- they are just a copy.

Much like Idiocracy it's cynical, snobbish sneering about "sheeple". It's an intellectual showing contempt for the general public they see as beneath them.

I have contept for a thinking human being who fails to understand. The people in PP I have sympathy for because they know no other way.

All I can say is that I don't agree this is at all possible without invasive modification of the human brain. People have "bad" thoughts however they're educated. I don't believe Sybil can stop that.

Sybil doesn't stop that directly -- it warns them that they are getting cloudy when they go down that line of thought, so they stop and think about other stuff or do other things. If they develop that line of thought to the extent that a criminal outcome is actually possible, they become a latent criminal.

In any case, I found PP1 entertaining as all hell because it raised all these questions for me and portrayed a world that I felt was believable for the most part as long as you went with it (pretty much any work of fiction).

/r/TrueAnime Thread Parent