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Hm, not really I guess. (Oops, I guess I forgot to mention that part!)
It is a useful datapoint I try to look for :) If the activity is getting use and people are having fun that's positive and good to hear.
The first problem I wanted Meetup In A Box to solve was would-be organizers going "I would run something, but I coming up with content and describing it sounds like too much effort." Now they have something they can cut and paste from, and thus meetups happen that otherwise wouldn't.
The second problem I wanted Meetup In A Box to solve was organizers going "I run 'open social, come hang out and talk about whatever' meetups, but I kinda wish I had something more on-topic for a rationalist group." Now they have something with a bit more rationalist flavour.
The third problem I wanted Meetup In A Box to solve was the thing where someone can go to rationalist meetups for years and not learn or practice any rationalist technique or skill. That's a very Screwtape-flavoured goal, and it's one where the feedback loop is harder to measure.
Sounds like I'm succeeding at 1 and 2 here, but not 3?
I've found that a lot of exercises want a big list of questions. (Calibration Trivia, Dissent Collusion, Outrangeous, and Pastcasting off the top of my head.) I should crowdsource more of these or spend more time adding questions somehow.
I'm a bit confused on your proposed change- if you roll a 1 or a 2 you can say you looked up the answer, or you can lie and say you didn't. Whether you actually look up the answer seems irrelevant? Is it that misleading the Lonesome is easier if the Collective knows the answer?
Thank you for the report from OBNYC! It's good hear this has gone well :) Does it seem like it's working as practice?
From a conversation:
"What do you call each other in LessWrong? is it like, Brother, or Comrade, or Your Majesty?"
"Based on observation, I think it's 'You're Wrong.'"
TTRPG design and implementation is a topic I feel fairly knowledgeable on. I think the concept of the Chicanery tag is useful to them. I wouldn't expect including the tag literally in a game to improve most games, but I do think giving GMs and other players indications of how much Chicanery is recommended for different areas of rules would be useful. Let me try and dig into this difference of opinion.
Broadly, I think you're using the word comprehensive broadly, I think the GM world-model often has blank spots because keeping a consistent world-model is hard and not always necessary, and I think for some games the GM world-model should change if it disagrees with applications of the rules.
The line by line example
You went through my examples of questions for a hypothetical shapeshifting power, answering as though you were GMing a game I was in. That makes sense, but I want to point out that I wouldn't expect every GM to answer the same way.
And suppose we decide that this form of magic changes your external qualities, but not your substance; you’re still made of the same stuff, just rearranged somewhat. We also consider how our world works, and decide that people can’t use magic (that they are casting themselves—as distinct from, say, drinking an unidentified potion) to turn into something that they don’t know about or haven’t seen.
Reasonable suppositions! There's other interpretations someone could come up with though, and I want to flag that I think this answer quite probably involves the GM making up how this form of magic works and then interpreting how that interacts with rules. I have watched GMs forget significant rules or chunks of flavour text before. Often when that happens, I try to politely point out the section of the book they're forgetting ("Ah, yeah that's normally how Wild Shape works, but I'm a Circle of the Moon Druid so it works like this for me, see?") and the GM corrects themselves.
Can I change myself to look exactly like the queen?
The question here is “is this a sort of magic that gives you fine control over details”? That’s a designer’s question, not an interpreter’s question.
I mean, sometimes the designer didn't say. As a designer, sometimes I don't bother to say; pointing out how much fine control the ability gives, and every other unspecified question of similar importance that might come up, is one way to wind up with this ability taking up about a page of the rulebook instead of two sentences.
How much larger is “significantly” larger anyway, can I get tall enough for the extra reach to matter in a fight?
Since you’re just rearranging the stuff you’re made of—probably not. (Note that if the system we’re using has size categories, then “significantly larger or smaller” would mean “different size category”, and the ability would probably be written that way.)
Sure, seems reasonable if we keep the rearranging world-model. It could have gone the other way though. If I wasn't aware that 'different size category' is the kind of thing to be careful about letting people change, I might not spot that the system already has thresholds for when size matters, and intuitively a few extra inches or a dozen pounds can matter in a fight. (That's why MMA weight classes are set where they are!)
Can I change into someone much more attractive and get a charisma boost?
Charisma doesn’t come from appearance, so no.
While this depends on what TTRPG we're talking about, I think in most editions of D&D you're incorrect about Charisma not coming from appearance.
1e: "Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, and so forth." Charisma does partially come from appearance.
AD&D: "Charisma: Charisma is the measure of the character's combined physical attractiveness, persuasiveness, and personal magnetism." Charisma does partially come from appearance.
3rd edition: "Charisma measures a character’s force of personality, persuasiveness,
personal magnetism, ability to lead, and physical attractiveness." Charisma does partially come from appearance, or at least that's what I think 'physical attractiveness' implies.
I don't have a copy of 4th edition handy.
5th edition says: "Charisma measures your ability to interact effectively with others. It includes such factors as confidence and eloquence, and it can represent a charming or commanding personality." So that one doesn't come from appearance.
Granted, the exact count of how many editions of D&D there are is a little fuzzy.[1] Lets go with five, pretending for the moment that the current edition being called "5th edition" means everyone's been counting normally. You're wrong on three of them.
Except, wait, I was handwaving a bit because I didn't want to bog readers down in the details of tabletop rules, to the extent that I said "think Dungeons & Dragons" because that's more familiar to most people. But I did say this was from the Onyx Path forums, and they don't do D&D. They do (among other things) Exalted, where Charisma is an Attribute alongside Manipulation and Appearance. Offhand, the Lunar charm Perfect Symmetry is shapeshifting magic that changes the way you look and the way the Appearance attribute normally interacts with social combat.
Can I change into a humanoid creature with claws
Are there humanoid creatures with claws that you know about? If so, then yes, of course. Otherwise not.
and cut myself free of these ropes I’m tied with?
Can claws cut ropes? If so, then yes, of course. (And do the clawed humanoid creatures that you know about have the kinds of claws that can cut ropes? Not all claws are the same, after all…)
Can I change into a magic humanoid creature whose hair is on fire and have my hair be on fire, then light a match off it?
Are there magic humanoid creatures whose hair is on fire that you know about? If so, then yes, of course. Otherwise not.
Can I change into a humanoid creature with wings, then fly?
Are there humanoid creatures with wings that you know about? If so, then… etc.
So, you talk about the GM having "a consistent, coherent, and complete world-model" that they use to answer the players questions. I think that's often useful, but as a designer, it's also useful to emphasize to the GM what parts of the model aren't important that they can mess with easily and what parts are important that they should be wary of changing. For instance, I'd expect lots of new GMs to miss that "humanoid" is a usually a term of art in D&D, referring to a mechanical trait called a Creature Type. Angels aren't humanoid, but Aarakocra[2] (which do have wings!) and Merfolk (no wings, the wrong number of legs) are. Then again, maybe we want to interpret this as the colloquial definition of humanoid, e.g. stuff that looks human-like? In D&D there's a lot more stuff that looks human-like in the setting book than stuff that has the Humanoid creature type. I start getting suspicious a player is up to something unbalanced when they start trying to access magical abilities of creatures from that broad of a range and ask what's up...
...Which isn't to say you can't run your games differently, especially if you're using 5th edition! Most of the time players aren't up to anything that would be a problem. I've been on both sides of the table when a player sits down with six different splat books for a level five character though.
Hey, I just got stabbed- can I change into me, but without the open wound?
This would be another instance of that “fine control over details” question above.
If so, does that heal me?
Well, it could hardly put the blood you already lost back inside you, but (if sufficiently fine control is allowed) it could stop bleeding. (Is there bleeding in the system we’re imagining?) Does that translate into “healing”? Depends on other implementation details of the system. (“What do hit points represent” is a much larger discussion.)
I mean, yeah! What do hit points represent is a large discussion in D&D and related systems. Generally I treat healing as a Chicanery: Very Little topic, with things that don't say they heal HP not being able to HP, in part because HP is such a weird topic. In your suggested world-model, I'd be tempted to say that it can't heal Piercing or Slashing damage, but could heal Bludgeoning- except if I realized I was about to oblige players to track what kind of damage they'd taken for longer than the turn the damage happened on, I'd notice I was about to add extra paperwork and ask if I actually wanted to do that.
What we’ve learned from this exercise is that the description of the ability, as given, is insufficient to unambiguously specify a model specific enough that further details may be extrapolated from, but that the amount of additional specificity required for that is not very large.
I disagree that's what we've learned from this exercise. What I take away from this exercise is that if you try to unambiguously specify a model sufficient for multiple GMs to rule consistently, this power winds up being multiple pages long. On the other hand, if you give a short description and the details aren't important or load bearing, a GM can make up a world-model that seems consistent to them and tell the players when they get stuck.
Assuming the GM isn't new or uncertain and looking to the rulebook for guidance. The rulebook is often the teaching tool, after all.
It seems a bit like you narrowed in on one kind of TTRPG and one way to play that RPG, and assumed that's how they all ought to work?
Comprehensive
In a well-designed TTRPG of comprehensive scope (such as most editions of D&D, and Pathfinder), the optimal amount of “chicanery”, as you define it, is simultaneously “absolutely none whatsoever” and “the maximum possible amount”, in all circumstances. Obviously, this cannot be true unless “chicanery” is a nonsensical, contradictory, or otherwise useless concept.
(bold emphasis is mine.)
I think you're using the word "comprehensive" differently than I would. Most editions of D&D have a focus on dungeon delving and fighting bad guys. They aren't hyper-specialized like say, Young At Heart or Good Society, but they have gaps that come up even within their milieu. An example I often go to: A Song of Ice and Fire looks at first like it should be a good fit for D&D 5e, but the siege weapon rules imply trebuchets can reliably hit specific people in a swordfight, there's no useful suggestion of how much food an acre of farmland produces, and there's not really a guide to how angry the peasants get about taxes or religious changes.
I think the counter argument to this is that the GM should have a world-model and make house rulings to cover stuff like this. That's fine, but I wanted to flag that D&D is only getting away with being comprehensive by tossing the ball to the GM and hoping the GM can solve it.
Does a fireball do more damage or go further if it's in a confined space? The answer used to be Yes back in ~D&D 2e. The answer is No in D&D3.5. What changed, all of the GM's world-models? Nah, the rules did, and while some GMs probably kept house-ruling it to work the old way some switched over and many newcomers probably didn't think about it. My world-model doesn't really give me a principled answer either way.
My world-model isn't great though. I don't have a gut understanding of how D&D magic works, and I don't really care to. I pretty strongly suspect the designers didn't put too much effort into having a model of why magic in D&D works the way it does in-universe. The rules cover the 80% to make sure stuff mostly lands in the right neighborhood, and ad-hoc GMs making stuff up can cover the other 20%.
(To give a pointer from the RPG examples to the rest of the world - American laws have judges to interpret them and fine tune sentencing, but we still have minimum and maximum sentencing.)
The GM's world-model has blank spots, and that's okay
There are some TTRPGs where the style of the game, or my personal interest, means that I do have a decent world-model of what's going on. I got really into Ars Magica and ran a ~6 year campaign in it, a campaign whose pitch was basically HP:MoR meets The Silmarillion. We had an associated[3] mechanic for doing novel research on the laws of magic, which encouraged players to poke at the edge cases and only worked if I could model the behavior of magic well enough that they could use it to clue in on the 'real' underlying rules. Similarly, my Exalted GM had a concrete enough model of the physics and metaphysics of Creation that we had a lot of late night discussions of the philosophy behind it all.
And still there's blank spots. In my Ars Magica game I declined to use the rules for taking a few days off from studies in a Season or to do more than one adventure in a Season, because I didn't want to track per-day activities for the ~50 odd characters in the Covenant. I explicitly said that we weren't going to specify how many new students were enrolled each year, because if we did that then it would make it hard to retcon new characters if a new player joined. (It was Troupe-style.) Don't get me started on the economic simulation. I basically said they could have any reasonable and unexceptional gear but anything interesting had to be crafted by them or found on adventures, because even though it made total sense that they could productively trade with the peasantry and the precursors to the merchant class I did not want to figure out the market price of making a horse[4] fly for a month.
I've found the Chicanery concept useful in my own games. Clever shenanigans to learn the secret laws of magic or to travel the wilds of Prydain/Britannia? Highly in favour, please do it. Interesting ways to make money by selling magic to peasants or nobility? Please no, your GM doesn't want to model this.
Some TTRPGs lean into this. Blades In The Dark has a whole mechanic (Flashbacks) for pulling plans out of blank spots in the GM's mental model, and the inventory is explicitly a question mark the player can define later. FATE Core allows players to Declare A Story Detail like that a friendly NPC shows up or that their character already knows an obscure foreign language, and while the GM can veto a particular detail this still implies massive blank spots in the GM's world-model. Brindlewood Bay is a mystery game where the GM doesn't know who did it until around the time the players figure it out. Microscope has no central GM, and in the course of play the whole table will fill in the blanks on what's going on.
While I'm talking about other games, Blood Red Sands has a shifting GM role, with the other players and their characters explicitly set as antagonistic to you and yours. It would fall apart if a single GM's world-model was given priority over the rules of play. The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Wisher Theurgist Fatalist have very vaguely similar competitive elements, though WTF is at least half a shitpost so maybe we shouldn't count that.
The DM’s world-model is the ground truth. Answers to all questions flow from it.
Please go read Baron Munchausen, come back, and tell me if that sentence makes any sense as a global statement about tabletops. There's a lot of fluff, go ahead and skip it. If you aren't trying to talk about all RPGs but just the subset that structurally resemble recent editions of D&D, that's fine, but admit you're talking about a much smaller subset of games.
While I'm on the subject, there wasn't a better place to put this-
You also write:
(This approach—which has some overlap with what is sometimes called “simulationism”, but is not identical thereto—also creates the maximum amount of player engagement and satisfaction, is the best at allowing newcomers to engage with the game, permits flexible switching between adventure and campaign styles, allows relatively easy reuse of old material even across editions, and has various other desirable qualities besides.)
"...Maximum amount of player engagement and satisfaction"
"...The best at allowing newcomers to engage with the game..."
Those are confident and broad claims. Charitably, you're accurately describing the players you've happened to game with, and the players you've gamed with are subject to some selection effect which explains the limited variety.
My own experience has had a lot of players who light up when offered the chance to take the narrator spotlight, or who report they bounced off of games when they brought up that the GM wasn't following the rules and the GM leaned too hard on Rule Zero. It's a big hobby.
I like lots of game styles, this one included. Some players like other styles more, including new players.
In some games, the GM's world-model should lose if it disagrees with applications of the rules
...those being the exactly two ways in which players of a traditional roleplaying game—i.e. one with no or almost no dissociated mechanics—may interact with the game world...
In terms of personal preference, I often lean towards mechanics that are strongly associated. However, if your claim is that a TTRPG must have no or almost no dissociated mechanics in order to be well-designed and of comprehensive scope, that seems overbroad. FATE Core has them, Blades in the Dark has them, D&D 4e has them, Agon has them, Paranoia has them, Exalted 3e has them (or is doing unusually weird things with its physics, Jenna Moran was involved after all.) Other games sort of have associated mechanics but attempting to improvise using the world-model they imply is basically doomed. I'll use Lancer as my exhibit A there, though I believe this also applies to some versions of D&D (specifically 4th Edition.)
Lancer is a game of giant robots and far future technology. The game states that the main characters (called Pilots) can 3d print their mechs to repair any damage or to swap around components, and get access to the components via licenses. However, I can't 3d print a part and hand it to my teammate to put on their mech. Some of the future tech implies much more interesting usage than the strict mechanical abilities, and in Lancer, the GM world-model shouldn't try to allow those uses. I'll point at the Lich apparently has time travel via Soul Vessel and Anti linear Time but mostly uses this for clearing status effects instead of killing the villains' great great grandmothers, or how the ground isn't considered a piece of terrain for things like Xiaoli's Tenacity.
Why am I picking on Lancer instead of D&D? I think D&D is fuzzy about how it should actually be played[5] and wouldn't 'fess up if its design was actually narrower than people thought. Lancer has a much clearer ethos and design. If I showed up to a Lancer table and the GM was letting the Lich's player do complicated and improvised time travel tricks in mech combat because it fit the GM's world-model of how that power operated in-universe, I would assume that Lancer GM was straightforwardly making mistakes.
That GM and the table of other players are, of course, free to say nope that's not a mistake, we prefer playing this way. A local chess club is free to say nope, actually we think the queen should be able to move like a knight does, they can move like any other piece right? It's totally physically possible for them to do that, it's not against the law for them to do that, the game probably still works and is fun to play if they do that. Someone's in for a confusing explanation if they go to an official USCF tournament though.
I think TTRPGs vary quite a lot in how much weight they give to the GM, the other players, and the rulebooks. I think TTRPGs vary, both between rulesets and within a given ruleset, on how much room for interpretation it makes sense to have.
In conclusion
Why did I write all that?
Partially because I love TTRPGs and got nerd sniped. Someone was wrong on the internet. It happens.
Mostly I did it because of this:
I think that this is a bad concept.
I think this primarily for anti-Gell-mann-amnesia reasons, i.e. I am very sure that this is a very bad concept as applied to TTRPG design/implementation (a topic on which I am quite knowledgeable), so I conjecture, even before thinking about it directly, that it is also a bad concept as applied to the other things that you are applying it to (in which I would not claim as much expertise).
I wrote all the above because I take the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect moderately seriously. I habitually vote for politicians based on their voting records for tech policy, since I have a lot of experience in the tech industry and feel better qualified to spot bad tech policy than I do bad medical or foreign policy. I frequently talk to people who've deeply specialized in fields I know very little about and who are just dipping a toe into topics I spend most of my working days focused on, and I try to track what I do and don't expect them to be good at.
You're claiming TTRPG design and implementation as a topic on which you are quite knowledgeable. Based on what you've written here about TTRPG rules, my observation is that you have a narrow view of the field and where other players might be coming from, and you don't even seem aware of that. From my perspective, you're confidently describing what birds are like, and you've managed to make scope so narrow that not only have you excluded penguins and ostriches, you've ruled out chickens, seagulls, and hummingbirds, and I'm starting to think an osprey wouldn't count.
I've found your commentary helpful in other places. This one was a miss.
- ^
For anyone unfamiliar with why that might be fuzzy, here's the Wikipedia version history for Dungeons and Dragons at the time of this writing:
Notice that the maximally simple count still goes Original, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, which kinda seems like it means the answer ought to be six? Yeah. The answer is not getting any simpler than that.
- ^
"Wait a moment," you might be thinking, "Said established for this exercise that a player can't turn into 'something that they don’t know about or haven’t seen.' Surely the character hasn't seen an Arakocra?" "What do you mean, I haven't seen an Arakocra?" the player asks, "Didn't you read my backstory? I grew up in the Icewind Mountains. The Arakocra mostly live in mountains. I met some there."
Is the player saying this because they read some tie-in novels you haven't and just assumed it was obvious? Is the player saying this because they really, really like birds and want to turn into a bird person? Is the player saying this because they have some twelve step plan that ends in a Candle of Invocation and your campaign final boss dead from six towns away with no saving throw? Good question! It might be nice to have a conceptual handle for 'I'm fine if you want to be a bird person, but if it's the twelve step plan I'm going to go over this like it's Al Capone's tax records.'
- ^
in The Alexandrian sense
- ^
Actually it was pigs, not horses. They made pigs giant and gave them wings.
- ^
mostly as a consequence of trying to position itself as the Everything RPG for business reasons despite a design that isn't nearly as general as its public perception sometimes suggests
You are correct, that should be fixed. That's a straightforward mistake on my part, thank you for pointing it out!
(In case that came across as sarcastic, I sincerely appreciate your stating the position clearly and think lots of other people probably hold that position. I'm being a little silly with paraphrasing a meme, but I mean it in a friendly kind of silly way.)
Your preferences are reasonable preferences, and also I disagree with them and plan to push the weird fanfiction and cognitive self-improvement angles on LessWrong. May I offer you a nice AlignmentForum in this trying time?
Yeah, I don't know how typical that frontpage full of AI is, I just checked as I was writing the review. It seems like if you don't de-emphasize AI content at this point though, it's easy for AI to overwhelm everything else.
One idea if you want like, a minimal change (as opposed to a more radical archipelago approach) is to penalize each extra post of the same tag on the frontpage? I don't know how complicated that would be under the hood. I'd be happy to see the one or two hottest AI posts, I just don't want to see 3/4ths AI and have to search for the other posts.
To be clear, I think there's a bunch of AI posts on the front page because that's what's getting upvoted, and also if LessWrong does want to show mostly AI posts then especially given the state of the world that's a reasonable priority. It's not what I usually write or usually read, but LessWrong doesn't have to be set up for me- I'm just going to keep reviewing it from my perspective.
I will cheerfully bet at 1:1 odds that half the people who show up on LessWrong do not know how to filter posts on the frontpage. Last time I asked that on a survey it was close to 50% and I'm pretty sure selection effects for who takes the LW Census pushed that number up.
Yep, in what's possibly an excess of charity/politeness I sure was glossing "exploiting loopholes and don't want their valuable loopholes removed" as one example of where someone was having an unusual benefit.
I guess other forums don't literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they're told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.
I feel like I have encountered fora that had genuinely more active moderation norms. There's a lot of personal discord servers I can think of with the same rough approach as a dinner party. There are reddit threads
Also, uh, I notice the juxtaposition of "I've been banned from other places, hence this attitude" and "in practice [other forums] mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they're told about, or personally insult others repeatedly" implies you either refuse to follow rules/advice or that you insult others repeatedly. Obviously you said most cases, not all cases.
In the basketball practice example, if it was magically possible to let the lousy shots continue playing with each other at very low cost, almost every coach would allow it. They would only remove people who have bad faith.
Well, yes, and I've never heard of a coach saying someone wasn't allowed to play basketball anywhere. At least where I live, there's a public court about a ten minute bike ride away and basketballs are cheap. If, say, I'm a student on a college basketball team whose coach asked me to stop doing layups during his practices, I can even use the exact same court later when the team isn't practicing. The equivalent for LessWrong is, I believe, saying you're welcome to continue communicating on the internet but that it will happen on some other forum.
Your average basketball coach doesn't only remove people with bad faith, they also bench people or cut them from the team for not being good at basketball. That's quite common.
Mhm, I do think that sometimes happens and I wish more of those places would say "The rule is the moderator shall do whatever they think reasonable." That's basically my moderation rule for like, my dinner parties, or the ~30 person discord I mostly use to advertise D&D games.
But uh, I also suspect "The moderators shall do whatever they want" (and the insinuation that the moderators are capricious and tyrannical) is a common criticism leveled when clearness is sacrificed and the user disagrees with a moderation call.
Imagine a forum with two rules. "1. Don't say false things, 2. don't be a jerk." It would not surprise me at all to hear Bob the user saying that he was being perfectly reasonable and accurate, the other user Carla was lying and being a jerk, and the mod just did whatever they wanted and banned Bob. Maybe the rule was secretly "The moderators shall do whatever they want." But maybe the rule wasn't clear, the moderator made a judgement call, and the correct tradeoff is happening. It's really, really hard to legislate clear rules against being a jerk. Even the 'false things' line has a surprising amount of edge cases!
Eh, I think unclear rules and high standards are fine for some purposes. Take a fiction magazine. Good ones have a high standard for what they publish, and (apart from some formatting and wordcount rules) the main rule is it has to fit the editor's taste. The same is true for scientific publications.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works.
I mildly disagree with this. The New Users Guide says
LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that's uncommon for web forums[1] and to stay true to our values. Recently, many more people have been finding their way here, so I (lead admin and moderator) put together this intro to what we're about.
My hope is that if LessWrong resonates with your values and interests, this guide will help you become a valued member of community. And if LessWrong isn't the place for you, this guide will help you have a good "visit" or simply seek other pastures.
On the margin, is there room for improvement? Seems likely, but doesn't seem bad. If I was in charge I'd be tempted to open the New Users Guide with like, four bullet points that said 'This place is for aspiring rationalists, don't say false things, don't be a jerk, for examples of what we mean by that read on.' That's somewhat stylistic though.
There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn't sufficient
Wait, now I'm confused. Most forums I'm aware of don't have much of a Good Faith defense. I looked up the rules for the first one I thought of, Giant In The Playground, and while it's leaning a bit more Comprehensive and Clear I don't see a place where it says if you break a rule in good faith you're fine.
In general, someone trying to contribute to a thing who but doing so badly doesn't get that much of a pass? Like, I've been politely ejected from a singing group before because I was badly off-key. Nobody doubted I was trying to sing well! It doesn't change the fact that the group wanted to have everyone singing the right notes.
I suggest that instead of making rate-limited users (who used up their rate) unable to comment at all, their additional comments should be invisible, but still visible to other rate-limited users (and users who choose to see them).
Meh. The internet is big. If the kind of thing that got someone rate-limited on LessWrong got them rate-limited or banned everywhere else, I'd be supportive of having somewhere they were allowed to post. Reddit's right over there, you know?
I think giving special emphasis to rate-limited users for rate-limited users is straightforwardly a bad idea. If someone got rate-limited, in general I assume it's because they were writing in ways the mods and/or other users thought they shouldn't do. If someone is going to stick around, I want their attention on people doing well, not doing badly. Imagine a basketball practice; if I'm a lousy shot, the coach might tell me to sit out the drill and watch a couple of the good players for few minutes. If I'm really bad, I get cut from the team. No coach is going to say, "hey, you're a lousy shot, so pay special attention to these other players who are just as bad as you."
A big component of this is I tend to think of LessWrong as a place I go to get better at a kind of mental skill, hence analogies to choir or basketball practice. You may have other goals here.
Yeah, it's easy to not be on the pareto frontier. Sometimes you can just make things better, and most people aren't going to argue much against doing that. They might argue a little, because change is a cost. A few people will argue a lot, because they have some unusual benefit. If lots of people argue a lot, that suggests a tradeoff is happening.
My observation is that some people do not prioritize one of the three corners of this triangle, and are confused when others argue about tradeoffs they don't see as important.
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Do you mean, what do I suggest doing when it's equally easy to add something new to the list vs fixing a ball that's been dropped?
I think this approach is best used when fixing a dropped ball is costly. Consider the example of taking fifteen children on a hike. Fixing the situation if you have fourteen children at the end of the hike is stressful.
I don't think it's (mostly) a question of fame, I think whether it works is a question of how weird/hard to pronounce it is, how hard you stick to it, and the local norms. "Screwtape" works passably well for me, but I also don't use it in the more ~white collar professional circles.
. . . Actually, I should add clothing to this list.
I laughed, thank you for the excellent example.
I've swapped to calling this Anvil Shortages, which doesn't seem taken.
Work ticket systems are one of the main examples of this I've worked with, that's the right track! Early in my career I worked IT for a university, and the ticket system was core to how the IT department operated. Every user report should create a new ticket or be attached to an existing ticket. Every ticket should be touched ideally once a day unless it was scheduled for a future date, and if a ticket went untouched for a whole week then that indicated something had gone horribly wrong. That's because the failure we really wanted to avoid was something like "the projector in room 417 hasn't been working for two weeks, the professors can't show slides, and nobody in IT knows about this." It's pretty easy for that to happen.
Bug tracking can be a little different, as software is a bit more likely to say 'eh, we don't care about that bug, mark it as Won't Fix/leave it on the backlog indefinitely.' My guess is this is a matter of asymmetric payoffs/counting up vs counting down. Or a matter of department. Some departments are going to weigh new features equally against fixing bugs, while your Q&A team is going to have a different institutional view.
how do these two different approaches differ in their approach to delegation? My hunch is that Never Drop A Ball delegates by finding someone who can do "Never Drop A Ball" and then assign them to some "zone" and basically play "zone defense"...
Yeah, Never Drop A Ball delegation is often by category. To use the school field trip example, it's straightforward to say the first grade teacher is in charge of getting all the first graders back safe, the second grade teacher is in charge of getting all the second graders back safe, and so on. A convention might have a treasurer (in charge of never dropping a reimbursement request or payment that needs to be made) and a tech lead (in charge of never losing a projector or microphone) and a community safety contact (in charge of never dropping a harassment complaint.) And like you said about higher management, the principal or convention chair are the people who catch problems that don't cleanly fit a category and operates as the fallback for lower levels. The main fail case here is when a problem is doesn't have someone obviously on that zone. One way to try and fix that is to say all unhandled problems are the domain of the organization President/CEO/Director, though this comes with its own problems.
From what I've observed, delegating One Day Sooner works best with tasks.
Examples:
- The CTO of a company picks a software engineer or team lead, and says "We don't currently have a mobile version of the website. I'm assigning that to you; get it done ASAP. Use the desktop version for copy and as a style guide. Tell me what resources you need and I'll make sure you get them."
- As a convention is opening up, the organizer realizes they don't have any lanyards. They ask the organizer group chat whether anyone is free, someone volunteers, and then the organizer says "awesome, we need at least five hundred, ideally they're mostly black but with a couple hundred of other colours."
- The overall commander of a military operation picks a military company, and says "I want a base established in this area. I'm assigning it to you, get it done by next week. Tell my staff if you need any special equipment, here's your liaison with the air force if you need them."
(I have way more experience with software engineering and convention running than military exercises, if someone shows up and says that's not at all how the military works then probably I'm just wrong.)
It occurs to me that a small for-profit might plan to have the CEO apply One Day Sooner and then the COO Never Drops A Ball...By contrast, once a giant source of profit has been found ... I would guess that the CEO should be doing this Never Drop A Ball thing, while some other person (the CSO? the CTO? the CFO? all of them aimed at different projects the CEO thinks are important?) does One Day Sooner.
If the small for-profit is sufficiently small, I expect everyone in the organization is in One Day Sooner mode almost all of the time. Someone should have their eye on some important paperwork that must get filed, but most of the energy should be on the mission goal. (It would not surprise me at all if there are otherwise successful startups that, sometime in year 3, had to ask "wait, who filed the taxes for this last year?" followed by a quiet expletive.) This is going to vary based on the purpose and scale though. Like, I think a community hospital is generally in Never Drop A Ball mode. There just isn't a way to sprint really fast, work super hard, and fix all the broken bones before taking a rest. Someone's going to walk in ten minutes after you sent the last patient home with a new broken bone.
I currently don't think there's a generic answer here, it's going to vary based on what you're trying to do and how big you're organization is. If I had to guess, I'd guess an ideal division is the CEO in One Day Sooner mode, and their executive assistant in Never Drop A Ball mode.
What about CEOs that aren't in either mode?
I mean, I'm cheerfully willing to call these two modes a false but useful dichotomy, and there's other ways to work. Off the top of my head, Maker vs Manager Schedules; and like Maker vs Manager, sometimes making the distinction clear to people helps them understand.
That got a bit long, but I hope it helps! Thank you for the commentary :)
Also having the four suits each having a different multiplier might be fun?
Yeah, setups where (for instance) Clubs are worth 2x, Hearts and Diamonds are worth 1x, and Spades are worth 1/2x would (I expect) accelerate the effect. The example in Planecrash talks about multipliers like 1.3 or 1.1 where the evaluation is closer, which I turned to an integer multiplier to make the math doable in an average person's head.
I have a more complicated and playtested version of Jellychip I mean to publish in a few days :)
Yep, that seems right and that does seem suboptimal.
I think checking for escaping the island at the end of game would fix that since people still need to survive ten turns. Alternately, raising the amount of Boat needed would stretch that out, and more playtesting could figure out what the right target is.
. . . Hrm. What if escaped players still need food and water for the duration of the game, and then have to save up if they want to escape early? Not needing shelter gives a gentle encouragement to go as soon as they can.
(Self review) I stand by this essay, and in particular I like having this essay to point to as an example of why some organizations are not holding the idiot ball quite as much as people might assume. This essay is somewhat self defense? I work like this most of the time these days.
Followup work on how to better juggle balls is useful, and basically leads into an existing field of management. If One Day Sooner is unusual startup mode, Never Drop A Ball is a very normal middle and end stage of many organizations, and for good reasons. It's also a genuinely superior way for many groups to work. (Consider a hospital emergency room. Dr. House going deep into one patient's medical minutia is not as good as making sure that zero people have unsterilized and unbandaged bleeding wounds.) Having a shorter pointer is useful, though probably this could be made shorter and serve as a somewhat better pointer.
Followup on when and how to set balls down would be useful. Someone else should write that, I'm rubbish at it =P
(Self review) I stand by this essay and think more people should read it, though they don't need to read it deeply.
I think some people knew this kind of work and so this serves as a pointer to "yeah, that thing we did at my last company" and some people did not realize this was an option. Making people aware of potentially exciting options they could choose in life is (in my opinion) a good use of an essay. In my ideal world everyone would read something describing the One Day Sooner mindset as they were choosing their first careers so they could have it in mind as a possible trait jobs could have. Is that trait positive or negative? Depends on the person!
I don't know if it's LessWrong Best Of material, but given the number of people who work in this manner that work in the community I think it's good to have some term for it in the water supply.
Best when paired with Never Drop A Ball.
(Self review) I stand by this post, I think it's an important idea, I think not enough people are using this technique, and this adds nothing but a different way of writing something that was already in the rationalist canon.
If you do not sometimes stop, start a timer, think for five minutes, come to a conclusion and then move on, I believe you are missing an important mental skill and you should fix that. This skill helps me. I have observed some of the most effective people I know personally use this skill. You should at least try it.
You know what followup work I want? I want a dozen different modes of this idea. A youtube video. The audio version is great. The fictional version in HPMOR is great. Can we get a goofy videogame that makes you use the pause button well? (I tried to get at this with Troll Timers. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fCg3pLZqthXsGznHP/troll-timers) I should try rewriting this as a rousing speech. It'd be cool to have it as a catchy tune. Maybe someone should tiktok the sucker.
I'm not saying it's the most important idea! Just, you know, it's broadly applicable and any mistake you make by not thinking for five minutes when you are not actually under time pressure is a stupid mistake that makes beisutsukai-san disappointed in you.
If the Best Of LessWrong collection is just for things that add to the conversation, this post doesn't belong there. I'd give it a small positive vote if I could vote on it. On the other hand if nobody else has gotten a post about this concept into the Best Of LessWrong collection yet, and some newcomers might just read the Best Of LessWrong posts, then I do kinda want something on this topic to get in there.
(Self review) Do I stand by this post? Eh. Kinda sorta but I think it's incomplete.
I think there's something important in truth-telling, and getting everyone on the same page about what we mean by the truth. Since everyone will not just start telling the literal truth all the time and I don't even particularly want them to, we're going to need to have some norms and social lubricant around how to handle the things people say that aren't literal truth.
The first thing I disagree with when rereading it is sometimes even if someone is obviously and straightforwardly feeding me bullshit, I keep trying to tell the truth. Sometimes I try even harder to be precise and truthful. In a conversation with friends, I might say "that game's no fun" when the true and accurate statement is "I don't find that game fun." In a heated internet argument, I think it's useful to check my stance and use the latter kind of statement, even if the other person is saying things like "everyone who doesn't like that game is a moron."
Short of a complete guide to Truth, I'd settle for a practical "Here's how Screwtape regards the truth, read it and you'll understand when he'd say false things." This essay falls short of that.
I'd love more things in this genre. Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge Cases and The Onion Test For Personal And Institutional Honesty are both good examples of the genre. Even personal versions seem useful.
I think that makes this a replaceable essay. It would be fine in a Best Of collection, but it's not adding too much other than a few intuition pumps.
I think this essay is worth including in the Best Of LessWrong collection for introducing a good conceptual handle for a phenomenon it convinced me exists in a more general form than I'd thought.
It's talking about a phenomenon that's easy to overlook. I think the phenomenon is real; for a trivial example, look at any self reported graph of height and look at the conspicuous shortage at 5'11". It comes with lots of examples. Testing this is maddeningly tricky (it's hiding from you!) but doable, especially if you're willing to generalize from one or two examples you may have an unusually good vantage point on.
I've taken to thinking of this as paired with Dark Forest Theories (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xDNyXGCDephBuNF8c/dark-forest-theories). If you look around and notice a gap in the world, is that because there's nothing there, or because what would be there is concealed from you?
If there's a followup post I'd love to see, that post would be on how to observe or detect the dark matter. That would be an anti-inductive game in many ways, but I expect general principles might exist- I've taken to looking at survey data with an eye towards "hrm, there's a dip or break in that line there- would I expect that spot to be Social Dark Matter?"
If someone was involved more directly working with dark matter subjects, this post would be more material to them I think. For me, it's mostly overkill, but a concept I keep in my back pocket for when it's needed.
I might be a niche example, but the Dark Forest Theory as applied to meetups was novel to me and affects how I approach helping rationality meetups.
Sometimes they're not advertised for good reasons, even if those reasons aren't articulated. It sure does seem to make accurate claims about meetups from my observation, where when I notice an odd dearth of meetups in an area where it seems like there should be more meetups, sometimes I find out they exist they're just not as public and also nobody seems to have told the more frustrating quarter of the local community.
It's a counterintuitive sort of evidence, but it is evidence, and this essay helped me see it clearer. It feels related to Social Dark Matter (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter) if not exactly the same point and while Social Dark Matter is the more thorough explanation, Dark Forest Theories is more concise.
The followup work I'd like to see is on how to spot these lacuna, and to distinguish "there's nothing visible here because something is 'hunting' the visible examples" and "there's nothing visible here because there's actually nothing here."
Overall, I'd be happy to have this in the Best Of LessWrong collection. A short, well written essay that introduces a new idea you can keep in your back pocket to make sense of the world is a worthwhile addition in my book.
I love Fatebook as a user, and also this feels like an odd fit for the Best Of LessWrong collection.
I usually think of the Best Of LessWrong collection as being the best posts from a given year. The collection used to be physical books, printed on paper, which I could physically hand to someone. By that standard, this isn't very good. What exactly would someone do with this post if they read it in a book? It's kind of just a (well written) advertisement. The magic happens if they go to the website.
But man, the last few years have been a giant leap forward in prediction tools, haven't they? Polymarket and Kalshi showing up in news broadcasts and respectable journalism, Manifold Markets having honest to goodness conferences, and here, quietly announced in a LessWrong post, is a tool that's starting to feel as much a reflex and habit to me as Google Search and my pomodoro timer. It's exactly what it says on the tin, a clean, fast, simple prediction tool, and the thought of going back to the google form I used to use makes me sad.
Take your +4 vote. It's a very well written advertisement for a product more people should use. If the LW team does print more Best Of LessWrong books, may I suggest having one page that literally just says "THESE PEOPLE USE FATEBOOK AND YOU SHOULD TOO" with a bunch of signatures underneath? (Half joking- but only half.)
I continue to be a fan of people trying to accomplish something in the world and reporting back on what happened. This is a good example of the genre, and on a subject near and dear to (part of) LessWrong's collective heart.
I confidently expect somebody will read a bunch of things on LessWrong, get excited about AI, and try to get the American government to Do Something. By default this attempt will not be particularly well aimed or effective, and every piece of information we can give on the obstacles will be useful. There have been updates since 2023 on government awareness and response to AI, though I suspect the core information in this post about how to get in contact with people remains unchanged. It might even be cause area agnostic; if I wanted to talk to congress people about education or biosecurity, my guess is having draft proposals ready would be useful.
As novel is as the Dialogue feature was, I'd be interested in a tightened up version of this that cut to the key points and takeaways. I'd also be interested in hearing from people who've done policy work whether this seems accurate and whether it leaves anything important out- better yet from people who tried using this as a guide! Overall, yeah, I weakly think this is worth including in a Best Of LessWrong collection.
(Self review.) Bystander effect is fairly well known in the rationalist community. Quietly fading is not as widely recognized. Since writing this post, two people have told me and other people about projects they were dropping, specifically citing this post as the reason they said that aloud instead of just showing up less.
Mission (partially) accomplished.
Since crystalizing this concept, I've started paying more attention to 1. who owns a project and 2. when I last saw motion on that project. I stand by this post: it spotlights a real problem and makes a couple useful suggestions.
I wish more people 1. tried practicing the skills and techniques they think are important as rationalists and 2. reported back on how it went. Thank you Olli for doing so and writing up what happened!
Being well calibrated is something I aspire to, and so the advice on particular places where one might stumble (pointing out the >90% region is difficult, pointing out that ones gut may get anchored on a particular percentage for no good reason, pointing out switching domains threw things off for a little) is helpful. I'm a little nervous about how changing question category apparently lead to poorer calibration for a while. It makes sense why that would be the case, but my ideal art of rationality would work well across domains. Otherwise, why not study that particular domain more? I do like the application to day-to-day problems; "do I have peanut butter at home or did I run out?" is the kind of thing I run into on at least a daily basis.
I'd love to have a dozen such reports from a dozen people's attempts, both to see if a pattern stood out of where common mistakes are ("Be cautious, Laplace's Rule works a bit differently when there can be multiple outcomes") and to get more datapoints that practice works. That's not a knock against what Olli's written here, that's a wish for more people to follow up and do this! Without feedback on what techniques work and what it looks like to improve, building a martial art of rationality gets much harder. With feedback like this, other people can better understand what's worth practicing and what's realistic to expect.
That's the most important takeaway I had from this takeaway. The repeated practice worked, and Olli got more calibrated as they practiced.
I'm inclined to think the Best Of LessWrong posts should include, not just the big insights or the shiny new techniques, but the dutiful reports years later about how those techniques have impacts on normal life. I'd like to lightly recommend Takeaways From Calibration Training for inclusion in the Best Of LessWrong Posts.
Updated this post itself.
The structure did change. I've gone ahead and added a SFLW file to reflect the new structure, using the description Andrew had for the First Saturday SFLW group. @Andrew Gaul if you want to tweak that description look for /_posts/2025-01-05-SFLW.md and change it as you need.
Well, thank you for filling the survey out. If you used to be around and aren't any more, I'm happy to have you in the dataset.
I hope you get unsubscribed successfully, and best of luck in whatever you're up to now!
Thank you for taking it! It's designed to let people skip lots of questions if they want.
The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists. Therefore, posts that are actually trying to build a real art of rationality (or warn of failed approaches) are the kind of thing I'm going to pay attention to, and if they look like they actually might work I'm going to strongly vote for including them in the Best Of LessWrong collection.
Feedbackloop-first Rationality sure looks like an actual attempt at solving the problem. It lays out a strategy, the plan seems like it plausibly might work, and there's followup workshops that suggest some people are actually willing to spend money on this; that's not a clear indicator that it works (people spend money on all kinds of things) but it is significantly more than armchair theorizing.
If Raemon keeps working on this and is successful, I expect we'll see some testable results. If, say, the graduates or regular practitioners turn out to be able to confidently one-shot Thinking Physics style problems while demographically matched people stumble around, that'll be a Hot Dang Look At That Chart result at least in the toy problems. If they go on to solve novel, real world problems, then that's a clear suggestion this works.
There's two branches of followup I'd like to see. One, Raemon's already been doing; running more workshops teaching this, teasing out useful subskills to teach, and writing up how how to run exercises and what the subskills are. The second is evaluations. If Raemon's keeping track of students and people who considered going but didn't, I'd love to see a report on how both sets are doing in a year or two. I'm also tempted to ask on future community censuses whether people have done Feedbackloop-first Rationality workshops (["Yes under Raemon", "Yes by other people based on this", "no"] and then throw a timed Thinking Physics-style problem at them, see if there's any signal to pick up.
Mostly, I really want people to keep trying things in this genre of finding techniques and trainings to make better decisions. I want them to keep writing up what they're trying, what works, and what doesn't. If LessWrong stops having space for that in our Best Of collection, or has nobody in the community trying things like that, then I think something somewhere went badly wrong.
Thank you for your work Raemon!
(Self review)
Basically I stand by this post and I think it makes a useful addition to the conversation.
"Motte and bailey" is one of the pieces of rationalist lexicon that has wound up fairly widespread. It's also easy to misuse, because "America" or "Catholics" or "The military industrial complex" are made up of lots of different people who might legitimately different views. The countercharm is recognizing that, and talking to specific people. "Here's a way to be wrong, here's a way to be less wrong" seems a worthwhile addition to LessWrong.
Does it make accurate claims, and is there a subclaim I can test? Not easily. There aren't going to be molecules of bailey or atoms of motte I can get under a microscope, and while I think if I took half an hour on twitter/x I'd be able to find a bunch of examples of people making the Mob and Bailey mistake they'd be fuzzy or arguable examples. Consider the original Motte and Bailey: lots of people seem to find it useful, but I'm not sure I'd get more than 70% agreement on any particular example in the wild.
For followup work, I'd like ideas for how to convince large organizations to change directions. My current best idea is to identify who makes the decisions and to change their minds, and this is pretty well represented by business or sales guides for identifying decisionmakers. There's also something I'd like more answers in how, as an individual level, to stay on target and not get distracted into arguing with a crowd while simultaneously not making the crowd extra mad at you for ignoring them.
If I could vote on it, I'd give this a small vote for inclusion in the Best Of LessWrong collection.
. . . Okay, I'll bite.
Edit: And-
Thank you all for coming to Solstice! If you'd like to give any feedback, we have a form for that here: https://tinyurl.com/bos-solstice-survey.
Hello! I'm running the Unofficial LessWrong Community Survey this year, and we're down to the last week it's open. If you're reading this open thread, I think you're in the target audience.
I'd appreciate if you took the survey.
If you're wondering what happens with the answers, it gets used for big analysis posts like this one, the data gets published so you can use it to answer questions about the community, and it sometimes guides the decision-making of people who work or run things in the community. (Including me!)
Bounded Distrust is an important addition to my personal lexicon, and this is a decent explanation of how to use it with news organizations. Zvi is perhaps a bit cynical, but the thesis is in part that this level of cynicism is warranted.
I haven't been using Bounded Distrust as much when thinking about news organizations, but I do use it when thinking about other vectors for information. (Including people.) That's a bit odd, since the original essays (both Scott's and Zvi's) are very much about news agencies. The general lesson is something like, what ways do you expect an information source to drift from ground truth or mislead?
I'd like to recommend some essay on Bounded Distrust for the Best Of LessWrong collection for adding a useful term to my vocabulary and a checklist of how to use it for the news.
Welcome to LessWrong! You might be interested in the Toyko Astral Codex Ten meetups, a group of rationalists who meet about once a month. I believe there's a branch that primarily uses Japanese as well as an English-speaking group.
Where are you in Japan? I don't know of any community like this outside of Tokyo, but I know a few ways to find out.
One of the stated purposes of the LessWrong Review is to decide what posts stood the test of time, looking back at the last year. We have yet to do a LessWrong Review that looked back at the last decade, but wouldn't it be awesome if we did?
That's what this essay offers. It's short! I wish it had a little more data, or went into details like what nervous system training was tried (what about Yoga works?) but if the biggest complaint I have about an essay is 'I wish it was longer' that's a really good problem to have!
I'd like to encourage people to write more followups to plans they laid a decade ago. I wish LessWrong had more feedback loops that did look at we were all excited about a decade ago. For both those reasons, I'd like this to be in the Best Of Review. I want Romeostevensit to get a really nice cookie for the followup.
(Self review) Does this essay belong in the Best Of collection? That's a good question. Do people go back and read all the Best Of posts? Do they read the Best Of posts from previous years? Speaking as the person who wrote this, if there was a collection of posts everyone on LessWrong read when they joined, I might not need this essay included in that collection because the essay would have already succeeded. I'd want basically any other essay that taught an object-level thing.
Then again, this essay is a useful pointer to why a group might repeat information that most people already know. If I imagine a Five Books Of Moses for the Rationality Community, I actually do think it would be good to include one chapter that said essentially "make a copy of this book and read it every year, because that's how you make sure everyone in the community actually knows this stuff." If you left out that chapter, eventually someone would forget why they were supposed to have that habit of rereading the thing as a group every year, they wouldn't do it, and then years later the community would have a bunch of people who didn't know the basics.
(Amusingly, I plan to create a different version of this essay every couple of years and post it somewhere. This is because I don't want people to forget about it, and it's easy to forget about, and I think newcomers read new stuff more than they reliably dig into old stuff. This information isn't especially important on the object level, but I stand by my argument that if there isn't something that teaches new people the things you want everyone in a space to know, new people won't know it. )
I don't think the Best Of posts are actually intended to be the collection of common knowledge everyone is expected to eventually know. Absent that, this is just a good essay about how common knowledge works. It's my essay so I can't vote on it, but if I could I'd have given it a 1 upvote for the Best Of collection- a serviceable addition, but probably replaceable.
Most LessWrong readers do not attend meetups, and this is basically useless to them. Some readers do attend meetups, which Ziz will not attend because the organizers are aware of this and are will keep Ziz out. Some organizers aren't aware, and this is a useful thing to be able to point to in that case, though since this was written describing a developing situation it would be kind of nice to have a conclusion or update somewhere near the top.
Overall, I wouldn't want this in the Best Of collection, but I do expect to link people to it in the future.
A year ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bF353RHmuzFQcsokF/cohabitive-games-so-far This post introduces the idea, motivation, and a bit of information about the game itself.
Four months ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xY3A8xy6ox5jzmCAm/release-optimal-weave-p1-a-prototype-cohabitive-game A playable version is released, with rules.
(Apologies for link formatting, I'm on mobile at the moment.)
My recommendation for this essay's inclusion in the Best Of LessWrong collection comes down to two questions.
- Are the places decorated like this actually that nice?
- Is this a useful guide for creating those spaces?
Having been to Lighthaven (Lightcone's venue) a lot over the last year, I think the answer to 1. is a straightforward yes. Lots of other people love Lighthaven. It's possible that this style doesn't work if you're putting less oomph into it than Lightcone put into Lighthaven. I've visited a couple of homes decorated like this and think the style works pretty well.
As for 2, yeah, I think this is useful. It points out things people might not think of (colour! I didn't think about colour when decorating a space, because I hadn't sat down and thought about it or done much research. Light! Luminators are great and pointing people at them is helpful) and is organized neatly by sections.
I like this essay. I am not a paladin and do not particularly plan to become one. I do not think all the people setting out to maximize utility would stand behind this particular version of the rallying cry.
But I do think paladins exist, I want them to have a rallying cry, and when it works — when they do manage to point themselves at the right target, and are capable of making a dent, then I appreciate that they exist and chose to do that. I also appreciate the "if you want to save the world, then here's how" framing.
I don't quite think someone could follow this essay to paladinhood so I'm mixed as to whether it succeeds at what it's setting out to do. I've given this a small upward vote in the review, with the intent to say yeah, hey paladins, I'm glad you're around LessWrong and I think something would be lost if you all left.
In contrast, your article meandering for 11 paragraphs defining concepts that basically everyone already has installed before dropping the definition of cohabitive game in a paragraph that looks just like any of the others.
This is an excellent point and I've added a summary at the start, plus some headers. Thank you!
I want to take a moment and note that I'm currently approaching this cooperatively. (Yes, ironic given the subject.) I want the idea of cohabitive games to be in the LessWrong lexicon, I think you also want this, those are the articles we have the chance to put in a higher profile Best Of list, so anything that strengthens either is good.
I don't think that's a good criticism, those sections are well labelled, the reader is able to skip them if they're not going to be interested in the contents
Plausible this is a stylistic thing and you should feel free to ignore me. I found that I lost track of the flow in the bullet points. For a specific example, the area that starts "Instead of P1's omniscient contract enforcement system..." has a mix of long and short bullets that go like this-
- Instead of P1's omniscient contract enforcement system...
- Let us build a strand-type board game...
- I've heard it suggested that if we got world leaders...
- But I'll make an attempt...
- If you initially score for forests...
- If you want your friends to be happy...
- Taken to an extreme...
- But I'll make an attempt...
- Give some players a binary...
- and when I get to "Give some players a binary..." I've sort of lost track of which level it's on and what thought it's continuing from, in part because "I've heard it suggested..." is long enough to take up most of the screen on my laptop.
The rules of OW.1 aren't in a zip file
Now they aren't :) This is a case where I think the review's sort of caught the development process in amber. Release: Optimal Weave (P1) has the clean game links up front and easy to find; it's the answer to my second part basically. I am still a little worried about those links going dead sometime down the line, though I also think it's quite reasonable to want to keep a prototype where it's easier to update for you and in a format that's best for the standalone game.
I think this, or something like this, should be in a place of prominence on LessWrong. The Best Of collection might not be the place, but it's the place I can vote on, so I'd like to vote for it here.
I used "or something like this" above intentionally. The format of this post — an introduction of why these guidelines exist, short one or two sentence explanations of the guideline, and then expanded explanations with "ways you might feel when you're about to break the X Guideline" — is excellent. It turns each guideline into a mini-lesson, which can be broken out and referenced independently. The introduction gives context for them all to hang together. The format is A+, fighting for S tier.
Why "something like this" instead of "this, exactly this" then? Each individual guideline is good, but they don't feel like they're the only set. I can imagine swapping basically any of them other than 0 and 1 out for something different and having something I liked just as much. I still look at 5 ("Aim for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth") and internally wince. I imagine lots of people read it, mostly agreed with it, but wanted to replace or quibble with one or two of the guidelines, and from reading the comments there wasn't a consensus on which line was out of place.
That seems like a good sign.
It's interesting to me to contrast it with Elements Of Rationalist Discourse. Elements doesn't resonate as much with me, and while some of that is Elements is not laid out as cleanly I also don't agree with the list the same way. And yet, Elements was also upvoted highly. The people yearn for guidelines, and there wasn't a clear favourite. Someday I might try my own hand at the genre, and I still consider myself to owe an expansion on my issues with 5.
I'm voting for this to be in the Best Of LessWrong collection. If there was a process to vote to make this or at least the introduction and Guidelines, In Brief into a sitewide default recommendation I would vote for that.