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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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They do have seduction. They just never managed to use it successfully. Mostly because people quickly started wearing tinfoil hats. That doesn't stop it completely, but if everyone can see that you're a demon, all the pheromones will do is make them stop being uncomfortable with you.
They can read the hearts of men to know their dark secrets and embarrassing desires, but they've never used it for more than sorting souls into the nine circles of hell, for no adequately explained reason.
So the humans win because the demons are incompetent at using their abilities.
It's more because of counters. I don't think that was even the main reason tinfoil hats became popular.
Although the demons could have made much better use of their portals. Emptying volcanoes onto cities isn't easy, but heaven later showed that a pile of rocks can do major damage, if you drop them from high enough.
I got the impression that heaven would have won had Lemuel actually thought they could, instead of figuring out how he could come out on top when they lose.
Tinfoil hats and air vents to blow away the pheromones, as I recall. But there's certainly some incompetence involved when the demons use highly outdated military intelligence in their choice of targets, resulting in a devastating attack on the Arsenal of Democracy.
As I recall, the justification for this in the story is that the demons are really long-lived, and human civilization has historically been very slow to change, so by demon standards decades-old intelligence on humans is recent and it's reasonable to expect that Detroit would still be a very important target. I have difficulty buying this - partly because it feels like a post hoc excuse for incompetence rather than the incompetence being logically extrapolated from the lifespan, partly because of the amount of secondary incompetence involved in not noticing that things have changed, and partly because rapid massive change in the power distribution of human societies isn't even all that new: e.g. Alexander the Great conquered his way from Greece to India in about fifteen years.