/tg/Station 13

yes, i know the new chems cause harm. currently, it is a violation of asimov to inject people with the new healing chems without explicit permission from the person beforehand.

for the sake of all individuals involved, i think it would be fine to allow medborgs to heal people with them so long as they're using the chems properly, despite the minor harm caused by injecting the chems.

this is not a discussion about whether or not the chems being injected currently violate asimov, because they do. this is more of a request to have an exception for them to avoid further headaches and dumb arguments.

And this is why the new chems needed a bit more time to brew before being merged.

Aaaaanyway, yeah, we should add yet another law in the silicon policy to fix this for now.

retard borgs will just click the medicine button and pump people full of them

that is why i said used properly. using it improperly shows that you arent experienced enough with medical chems to play medborg.

I'll be honest, maybe I'm just not the type to enjoy the rule-lawyering part of silicon gameplay but these kind of definitions of what constitutes as harm are as artificial as our artificial medical system allows

Is flashing harm? Is serving alcohol as serviceborg harm? They both do organ damage, but you don't get that immediate visual feedback from your HUD that tells you damage has occurred, so we pretend it doesn't exist. Is causing bleeding with surgery harm? It doesn't do any damage, not immediately, not anymore than feeding someone alcohol until their liver fails. Why are all of these things not equal? Is the AI required to stop all surgeries unless they hear explicit consent from the patient? Not really, I'm sure.

TL;DR common sense would dictate that if asimov mediborgs come equipped with something they are allowed to use it in good faith, whether those chems would be better replaced with something more appropriate is a different matter entirely

Yes. I would argue that under normal circumstances everyone should be considered to be consenting to the medicine needed to heal their wounds unless they say otherwise.

Borgs shouldn't even be in this absurd situation in the first place. This is like giving peacekeeper borgs chloral hydrate instead of tirizene.

That is what I personally wanted. If I'm jabbing people with chemicals (if they're injured enough to require more than one hypo jab), I always double-check to make sure I've not ballsed anything up. With the new chems and their harmful effects, I've been doing this more often. I've tried very hard to do the tend wounds surgery, but the crux of the matter is that players do not want to lie down and have a borg operate on them for however long it takes to stitch up their injuries when they can be ambulatory and just use a bruise pack/ointment/spray/patch instead. At this point, if I'm Asimov - I just drag medkits to them and tell them to use those.

"Just do the tends wounds surgery" IMO is not a fun or engaging healing alternative for the borg player or their patient, and I do not see why they have to do this. Yes, the improved beaker PR that zxaber's made for mediborgs (I am hoping this will be merged soon) will mean that I can make my own healing chems that comply with Asimov, but that doesn't fix the underlying issue that Asimov is the default lawset. A human's health and well-being is prioritised under that lawset. Giving a borg a hypospray with chemicals that are cannot adhere to that lawset makes absolutely no sense. It also is very unfriendly to newer players who want to try borg out. I've already had to tell some players that they can't use their hypo on humans while Asimov (they've ahelped because they don't know what these new chemicals are) and they don't understand why.

I didn't really understand why this needed to be done in the first place, but that's neither here nor there. Mediborgs already had dexalin which was a weaker salbutamol. Peacekeeper borgs have synth-pax, which IIRC is the same as pax but it metabolises faster? Couldn't mediborg chems have just stayed the same, but instead could've been similar to synth-pax?

Should just let mediborgs keep the trek chems.

this is a policy discussion not a code discussion

imsxz wrote:this is a policy discussion not a code discussion

You are allowed to suggest potential code solutions in policy threads

imsxz wrote:this is a policy discussion not a code discussion

If a code solution works, 90% of the time it's better than a policy solution. That's why it's a good idea to inject code solutions into policy discussions- why make the list of rules bigger if we can just mechanically fix it?

Mickyan wrote:I'll be honest, maybe I'm just not the type to enjoy the rule-lawyering part of silicon gameplay but these kind of definitions of what constitutes as harm are as artificial as our artificial medical system allows

Is flashing harm? Is serving alcohol as serviceborg harm? They both do organ damage, but you don't get that immediate visual feedback from your HUD that tells you damage has occurred, so we pretend it doesn't exist. Is causing bleeding with surgery harm? It doesn't do any damage, not immediately, not anymore than feeding someone alcohol until their liver fails. Why are all of these things not equal? Is the AI required to stop all surgeries unless they hear explicit consent from the patient? Not really, I'm sure.

TL;DR common sense would dictate that if asimov mediborgs come equipped with something they are allowed to use it in good faith, whether those chems would be better replaced with something more appropriate is a different matter entirely

honestly this is the only sensible comment in this thread.

Secborgs used to get a special message reminding them that they're supposed to follow Asimov above Space Law when they chose the secborg module. Maybe we could add a message that'd be displayed when you choose the mediborg module that'd explain what your weird borg chems do, warn you against just blindly injecting them into people, and remind you that healing humans with chems that cause damage as a side effect doesn't count as a breach of an Asimov borg's lawset?

Side question that's tangentially related to this: If a dying human (like, say, a human on low health who's in a low pressure area with no space suit on) tells you that they do NOT want you to inject them with these chems, can you still inject them with these chems in the name of law 1/saving their life (or does them dying due to refusing your healing count as "consensual harm")?

In my current WIP chem changes, Category 2's will be typed as such which will consequently flag on the borg hypo that it will cause side effects.

In a perfect world borgs should just be doing the med-less healing until their laws coincide with using side-effect inducing chems, but I also think there's a sound argument that the category twos are, by design,compliant with asimov in relation to our silicon policy: They fix immediate harm at the cost of longer-term harm. Borgs are permitted to prioritize lesser harm over greater future harm as explicitly stated in the rules.

Cobby wrote:In my current WIP chem changes, Category 2's will be typed as such which will consequently flag on the borg hypo that it will cause side effects.

In a perfect world borgs should just be doing the med-less healing until their laws coincide with using side-effect inducing chems, but I also think there's a sound argument that the category twos are, by design,compliant with asimov in relation to our silicon policy: They fix immediate harm at the cost of longer-term harm. Borgs are permitted to prioritize lesser harm over greater future harm as explicitly stated in the rules.

However cyborgs arent allowed to cause harm to stop harm. With the chemical you are doing just that - causing harm to stop harm, even if its lesser and later.

Hippocratic form of harm, doctors take the Hippocratic oath but are still allowed to administer chemotherapy, so harm in whatever sense that means

If it's literally the only healing chem a borg has access to without using chemistry and you're using it in good faith, an admin would have to have a serious stick up their ass to bwoink you for it.

Why would nanotrasen equip their medical cyborgs with healing chems they're not allowed to use because muh harmies. The point of the chem is quite clearly to heal. Yes it technically causes damage, but don't think of it like its dealing damage, think of it has reducing their damage.

SkeletalElite wrote:If it's literally the only healing chem a borg has access to without using chemistry and you're using it in good faith, an admin would have to have a serious stick up their ass to bwoink you for it.

Why would nanotrasen equip their medical cyborgs with healing chems they're not allowed to use because muh harmies. The point of the chem is quite clearly to heal. Yes it technically causes damage, but don't think of it like its dealing damage, think of it has reducing their damage.

the problem is not just the admins though, even if no OOC punishment befalls you, you're still open to IC consequences that may or may not be excessive (matter of oppinion)
that borg that just injected you a side-effect laden chem? he's rogue!! time to blow all borgs and card the AI
that's why this needs a clearing up asap, as funny as it may be to shit on silicons, current code is baiting them into falling into these kinds of situations and it would be nice to clear up wether the scenario I presented is valid emergent gameplay, plain old grief, or if a code solution should be applied to avoid the issue altogether

the chemicals are flawed not the rules, there will always be the one dude who will inject those chemicals on critically injured people causing their death

teepeepee wrote:

SkeletalElite wrote:If it's literally the only healing chem a borg has access to without using chemistry and you're using it in good faith, an admin would have to have a serious stick up their ass to bwoink you for it.

Why would nanotrasen equip their medical cyborgs with healing chems they're not allowed to use because muh harmies. The point of the chem is quite clearly to heal. Yes it technically causes damage, but don't think of it like its dealing damage, think of it has reducing their damage.

the problem is not just the admins though, even if no OOC punishment befalls you, you're still open to IC consequences that may or may not be excessive (matter of oppinion)
that borg that just injected you a side-effect laden chem? he's rogue!! time to blow all borgs and card the AI
that's why this needs a clearing up asap, as funny as it may be to shit on silicons, current code is baiting them into falling into these kinds of situations and it would be nice to clear up wether the scenario I presented is valid emergent gameplay, plain old grief, or if a code solution should be applied to avoid the issue altogether

you know we have rules that say don't be a dick, this is rediculous

I still don’t understand why oranges is so fanatical about defending a set of chems that were literally designed by a shithead to be bad and create as many problems as awful in order to make people hate him and his maintainers

Not-Dorsidarf wrote:I still don’t understand why oranges is so fanatical about defending a set of chems that were literally designed by a shithead to be bad and create as many problems as awful in order to make people hate him and his maintainers

They were fully functional except for the borg law issue and way more elegantly designed than this interim implementation we have now until Cobby redoes all the healing chems.

NoxVS wrote:

Cobby wrote:In my current WIP chem changes, Category 2's will be typed as such which will consequently flag on the borg hypo that it will cause side effects.

In a perfect world borgs should just be doing the med-less healing until their laws coincide with using side-effect inducing chems, but I also think there's a sound argument that the category twos are, by design,compliant with asimov in relation to our silicon policy: They fix immediate harm at the cost of longer-term harm. Borgs are permitted to prioritize lesser harm over greater future harm as explicitly stated in the rules.

However cyborgs arent allowed to cause harm to stop harm. With the chemical you are doing just that - causing harm to stop harm, even if its lesser and later.

By that logic Medborgs shouldn't be allowed to surgery as the incision is by definition harm.

Why is it so hard to allow a borg to assume that a human consents to medical treatment to heal them unless they are told otherwise?

I think this issue is mostly resolved now because the new chems were changed (in a fantastic manner, might I add), yeah?

I don't think temporary blinding, deafening or fattening constitute harm so I think so. The only thing wonky that is left is that someone needs to adjust medibot injection rates since at the moment they are too liable to overdose.

This is also more/less a nonissue since if they had harmful chems, they should just use the recently reworked beaker module to make a non-harmful chem.

I think this could be solved by simply ruling that any action which leaves all affected parties at a net positive or net neutral is not harmful. That is, even if an action causes harm, if the harmed individual is overall better off than before, it shouldn't be considered harm.

If a borg is attempting to drag a spaced and unsuited human back into the station, and the only possible entrance is blocked by a plasma fire, I wouldn't hold it against the borg for dragging the human through the fire if they then extinguished the human and brought them to safety. The human is a bit crispier than normal, but no longer in space and thus in a net positive over their prior situation. In the same way, if a mediborg injects a chem that heals a burn, but damages lungs for less, it's a net positive change. This would also more fully support borgs doing surgery, which is currently sorta hand-waved as "implied consensual harm".

Specifically saying "all affected parties" counters any attempt to rule lawyer it into allowing asimov borgs to kill human traitors with the argument of the crew as a whole being in a net positive.

Yeah, I would still appreciate a headmin ruling on this to put things to rest. Given that cobbychems are here to stay, I think having a clearly defined ruling on whether using these chems is kosher under Asimov would be ideal. I am still seeing players ask if the chems are allowed/informing others that they shouldn't use them. The beaker upgrade is very nice, but given that chem dispensers are a hot commodity - it is not a foolproof solution. There have been many times where I've attempted to make Asimov-compliant medicine and both dispensers are drained/stolen/in use by the chemists.

I agree with zxaber in the sense that if the Asimov borg takes steps to reasonably counter the damage caused by these chemicals, it should be permissible for them to use them on a human because they are doing things in good faith. Given that these chemical changes were made before a policy discussion was even proposed for this, I only think it's fair to keep to the status quo.

I'm assuming they're ok to use unless anyone cares to state otherwise.