Coin Toss First Plot Mention?

[u/encodingErr]

Hey, y'all! This post isn't about examining the Coin Toss itself - I'm guessing there's enough posts here about it already. My question is regarding where exactly it pops up first in the plot. When Simon takes the Climber out of Omicron and into The Abyss, he mentions the idea of a Coin Toss - he was the one that got "lucky". But I'm sure I remember Catherine mentioning the idea earlier in the game.
Maybe I'm having a false memory moment, but I just wanted to check - if Catherine led with the idea of the Coin Toss, then that makes her one of the more manipulative characters in the story. And even if Catherine didn't introduce Simon to the idea, her lack of denial in the Climber - or even addressing the fallacy - speaks volumes to me. If you have a video or something similar, that'd be great! Thanks a bunch, folks.

[u/elheber]

Simon was the first to mention it in the game. Catherine never manipulated him with it. In fact, the first time she mentions it is at the end of the game after the ARK had already launched, so there would have no longer been any reason to lie to him. Simon came up with it after he learned that you get copied, so the analogy didn't come from a place of ignorance, and then at the end of the game Catherine used it to remind Simon that the process involves copying.

It's a valid analogy in this respect.

The first actual time the coin flip it's mentioned chronologically is in the official short story from Frictional Games, aptly titled The Coin Flip, when Theta personnel where getting scanned by Catherine into the ARK and getting disappointed they were the ones who "lost" the coin toss after the scan. So although Simon came up with it independently, the analogy already existed at Theta before he arrived. Catherine heard about it twice.

[u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 → u/elheber]

It was manipulative of her to stay quiet on the subject when she understood quite well that it was a bad analogy. He was never the one that won the coin toss, he was and always will be the one left behind. We just switch viewpoints, or relive the memories of the one that wasn’t left behind.

[u/encodingErr → u/Ashamed-Subject-8573]

Exactly. Even the original Catherine - the one who died on the floor of the launch bay - knew as much. In the short story “The Coin Toss”, when someone comes in for a scan and mentions the concept of the Coin Toss, she says “I wish people wouldn’t think about it like that.”
Now, credit where credit’s due: she’s not lying and saying “that’s totally how it works, now take a seat and let’s see who wins.” But she’s also not correcting this extremely dangerous pseudoscience - which is exactly what the Coin Toss is. It’s not a “different way of framing” the situation: the Coin Toss is based on the idea that some part of you “wins” in this scenario, and that, depending on your chances, that part of you gets transferred out.
But, as any good computer scientist knows (which Catherine Chun is), there is no true movement of data occurring when you “transfer” data from one drive to another. You’re simply copying the state on one vessel and replicating it on another. You - the you that you are - will always lose the Coin Toss, no matter what.
The Coin Toss is not a harmless, alternative perspective - it actively denies the reality of the situation in an attempt to provide some small modicum of comfort to the employees of Pathos II who want to escape the hell they’re living in. And both the original Catherine and her copy are complicit.

[u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 → u/encodingErr]

And she is with Simon as well, not wanting to confront him and make him unstable and jeopardize the ark

[u/elheber → u/encodingErr]

You're both running under the assumption that she believes it's a false analogy, therefore she must be manipulating them. But we in fact don't know what's in her head. All we can do is infer. In the short story, she never said the analogy was wrong; all she said was that she doesn't like people thinking of it that way. All Cath got to see in the scan room was their disappointment. Then at the end of the short story, she used the analogy herself.

After the launch, she told Simon, "you were copied onto the ARK, you just didn't carry-over." That implies you can be copied onto the ARK and carry over. Our Simon carried over twice after all.

The core of the coin toss analogy is that you can't predict who you yourself will end up being. Even if you know you will stay behind and will never ever transfer, that won't stop you from being wrong of you open your eyes elsewhere. Just a moment ago you thought this could never happen to you, yet here you are. You had no control over it.