I love a good conlang. This one feels like an interesting start, though I'll be upfront and say I don't think this is a bottleneck on anything AI related.

Some thoughts and questions, in no particular order:

• "Here's how words are made" is a start. What's the grammar like? I think that's where a lot of ambiguity creeps in to language.
• Am I allowed to stop an encoding partway? For instance, am I allowed to say kakasu meti su to just mean noun, it's a fruiting plant in the Rosaceae family, or do I have to keep going to be grammatically correct?
• I kind of like the idea of a tree structure that gets more specific as you go. Five phonemes seems too few though- I like what you're doing with the consonant/vowel setup, but extra options seem very useful for compactness and there's more options.
• Related- do you mind doing the IPA for the phonemes? I'm curious whether for instance "ti" is pronounced like "tired" (tɑɪəd) or like "tin" (tɪn) or "me" is pronounced like "meet" (mit) or "met" (mɛt)
• How do pronouns work?

It's reasonable not to have answers for these yet, I don't know what stage of conlang creation you're on.

Debbie's particular shape is arranged in part to isolate honesty and predictability as useful. If I'd just had her hiding bad things and confabulating good things I'd worry the takeaway would be solely that doing bad things or having a bad average was the problem, so I set her up such that the average stayed put and the curve just flattened out. I think the individual pieces do make sense though, if not in that particular combination.

Hiding good actions happens due to humbleness or status regulation or shyness or just because it's private. 

• A church needs unexpectedly expensive repairs, and an anonymous donor covers them.
• A new player on the sports team could honestly take credit for a win, but doesn't want to make enemies and emphasizes other people's work.
• A world class scientist gets asked what they do for work, and answers "I work for a university."
• That one person who reached out after a bad breakup and talked their friend through the worst few nights.

Some off-kilter weirdos do invent middle-of-the-distribution actions, trying to create a false consensus or just badly misunderstanding what's normal.

• "I have lots of friends here, ask Robin or Sean or Ted, they'll vouch for me!" "We asked them. We had to remind them who you were, they said they talked to you once or twice briefly."
• "I'm surprised to hear you say people are uncomfortable with me, they've never said so and I'm respectful of boundaries. Susan and I broke up, that's all." "According to Susan she politely said she'd rather you to leave her alone repeatedly, then eventually told you if you showed up at her dorm unannounced again she'd call the police, and she hasn't heard from you since." "Yeah, and? She set a boundary, I respected it. And that's not her saying she's uncomfortable is it?"
• "Alcohol? Eh, like I said I drink a normal amount, you know?" "This is the third time we've found you passed out on the lawn." "Yeah, doesn't everyone drink about that much? I'm not a real alcoholic, it's not like I do that unless it's the weekend."

(Also, people contain multitudes. The same person can donate generously to their local community, talk their friends through the long nights of despair, and also drink themselves insensate every week plus ignore a lot of romantic soft nos.)

And, yeah, sometimes there's just a very different outlook that's causing some blue and orange morality social norms. Ideally, you can talk to the person or get used to them and build up a custom bell curve for them, notice that while weird their behavior isn't actually hurting anyone, and everything's fine. You can even be a bit of an ambassador or on-ramp. "Oh yeah, that's Wanda, the Groucho Marx mustache is a bit weird but she's pretty friendly." I'm a big fan of spaces for the weird but harmless!

Frontpage is mostly what the admins and mods think is worth frontpaging, plus what users upvote. It's also a positional good, there can only be so many things on the front page. This is a more specific and useful question though! Yeah, if the LW team frontpaged more AI governance and less of everything else, and the average user upvoted more AI governance and less of everything else, the frontpage would have more AI governance on it. I wouldn't be a fan, but I'd understand the move that was the goal. My understanding is that's not the goal.

Not having a use for in-group signaling seems accurate but maybe overly cynical or something? I think it's that having lots of posts on LessWrong is not a constructive part of their plan. Look at Situational Awareness and ai-2027: great writing, great outreach, obviously applicable to governance. Would either of those have been better as LessWrong posts? I think no, they're more impactful as freestanding websites with a short url and a convenient PDF button.

What's the actual game plan, and what intervening steps benefit from the average LessWrong reader knowing the information you want to tell them or having a calling card that leads the right LessWrong readers to reach out to you? Look at the rash of posting around SB-1047, particularly the PauseAI leader's post. There's a game plan that benefited from a bunch of LessWrong readers knowing some extra information.

I don't have the technical AI Safety skillset myself. My guess is to show up with specific questions if you need a technical answer, try and make a couple of specific contacts you can run big plans past or reach out to if you unexpectedly get traction, and use your LessWrong presence to establish a pointer to you and your work so people looking for what you're doing can find you. That seems worthwhile. After that, maybe crosspost when it's easy? Zvi might be a good example, where it's relatively easy to crosspost between LessWrong and Substack, though he's closer to keeping up with incoming news and less building resource posts for the long term. 

If I type "lawyer AI safety" into LessWrong's search, your post comes up, which I assume is something you want.

It might be useful for you to taboo "LessWrong" at least briefly.

I have a spiel that may turn into a post someday about how communities aren't people, the short version being that if you ask "why doesn't the community do X?" the answer is usually that no individual in the community took it upon themselves to be the hero. Other times, someone did, but the result didn't look like the community doing X it looks like individuals doing X.

Is the question "why does the average user on this website not put much more focus on AI Governance and outreach?" Half of LessWrong users don't make their own posts, just comment or lurk. Yes, they could do more, but I could say that of Twitter users too.

Is the question "why does the formal organization behind this website not put much more focus on AI Governance and outreach?" They just helped put out ai-2027.com. They run Alignment Forum. They host conferences like The Curve. Yes, they could do more, but at some point you look at the employee hours they have and what projects they've done and it balances out.

Is the question "why do the most prominent users on this website not put much more focus on AI Governance and outreach?" By karma, the top ten users are Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gwern, Raemon, John Wentworth, Kaj Sotala, Zvi, Scott Alexander, Wedrifrid, Habryka, and Vaniver. I think Eliezer, Scott, and Zvi do lots of outreach actually, and it's not like John and Vaniver do none. Yes, they could do more Governance and outreach, but- no, wait, I take it back, I don't think Zvi realistically has much more marginal AI outreach he can do, let the man rest I think his keyboard is smoking from all that typing, his children miss him while he's away in the posting mines.

I'm not exactly a disinterested observer here. I do a lot of rationality outreach, and I make a deliberate choice not to push an AI angle because I think that would be worse both for AI and for my sub-branch of the rationality community. If your argument is more people on the margin should do AI governance and outreach, especially if they have comparative advantage, sure, I'll agree with that. If you think the front page of LessWrong should be completely full of AI discussion, I disagree, with the core of my disagreement stemming from The Common Interest of Many Causes.

I'll speak up for notecards: I use binder clips to sort them by category or date once in a while. While they are a bit small for complex or detailed drawings, in a pinch you can lay them slightly overlapping (perhaps with a little tape on the back) and get as big a sheet as you want. They won't replace my sketchbook for doing portraiture anytime soon, but that's a minority of my paper time.

Overall, I love this post and I like hearing other people's approaches to paper!

This post feels like it may have been written in response to some specific interpersonal drama. If it was, then I'd like to make it clear that I have absolutely no idea what it was and therefore no opinion on it. I just think this is a useful concept in general. 

Thumbs up, I appreciate knowing it lands even for people with no idea of the specific cases.

Other than the murder thing, I'm talking about something I've seen more than once. Like I said in the post, part of what I'm supposed to do for ACX meetups is handle complaints, which creates some unusual selection effects around what I see.

I do have one minor nitpick:

I think that's a reasonable nitpick and I've updated it to be a bit clearer, thanks for the pointer!

Basically agreed.

Though also relevant is the degree of maliciousness required and what the subject might get out of it. In the "bobcat instead of office chair" example, this is pretty willful willingness to cause physical harm and the sender doesn't really get anything out of it other than sadistic kicks and making the world much weirder. If the sender sent a much cheaper chair model, there's a less weird motivation (they keep the change) and there's less extra work involved.

I'm going to note I'm having a little trouble parsing your sentences here.

Strong downvoted for not just saying what you're really thinking to the person you have a criticism about which is almost definitely wrong.

I think the thing you're saying is that you downvoted because you think instead of writing this essay, I should have told a specific person that I think they're being some kind of jerk (mailing metaphorical bobcats) to a small number of people while being nice to the majority of people. Further, that I'm incorrect about how bad the jerkishness is. Is that close?

Downvote as you will. But I'm trying to talk about a pattern I've noticed across multiple people, and I'm trying to share a tool because I can't be in every ACX meetup in the world. I want local organizers to be able to notice this faster. 

Also, speaking directly to the person I have a criticism about isn't always enough. Imagine Bob is at a meetup and is nice to nine other attendees, but punches the tenth in the face in a way only me and the victim can see. The victim leaves, never to return, and I tell Bob not to do that again. Next week, there's Bob, the nine from last time, and a newcomer. Bob punches the newcomer in the face where only me and the newcomer can see, the newcomer leaves, and I ban Bob. This is the situation I'm talking about in part IV but more-so because I saw the punching myself, and I'm still going to have to explain to the nine regulars why I banned someone who was only ever nice to them.

(I believe targeting dynamics do happen sometimes - see part V where I at least touch on this -  but I also think the basic pattern of “nice to most people but terrible to a few” does happen sometimes.)

Yep, and also as things scale you just get less information about everyone. 

An random local meetup might fit in one room, sometimes splitting into two rooms so it's easier to have multiple conversations. I can have line of sight to everyone at once and hear it if voices start getting raised. With meetups in ten cities, I can at least wave at most attendees, and have had a couple hours of conversation with the organizers.  With meetups in a hundred cities, I have only demographic guesses about who the attendees are, and it takes time and effort to get to meet the organizers in a way where I'd notice an "I Eat Puppies" tattoo on their face.

Weirder things can happen, and also you have less bandwidth to notice it.

Edit: There's an essay that's shaped some of my thinking here called Default Blind. I recommend it.

Somewhat agreed. 

I'm trying to point at something loosely in this vicinity in section V, about hunting in packs - replace "one of them has three good friends" with "one of them paid three people" - where sometimes a bunch of negative reports are happening because someone is making up or deeply exaggerating accusations and routing them to you through different sources. I don't know that it's my first assumption; I currently think "Erin is mailing metaphorical bobcats to a small number of people" happens more often than "Frank is coordinating a bunch of fake or exaggerated accusations about Erin." I do think the latter happens sometimes though.

Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying "instead of office chair, package contained bobcat" my odds they're sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat. How much depends on things like how outlandish the actual accusation is and how coordinated the reviews look.

I strongly agree that adversarial optimization exists and is an important factor in these kinds of social situations. I've been thinking about and writing about social conflict a lot lately in large part because the sometimes adversarial nature of it makes this harder in many ways than most parts of running good meetups. Many (most?) problems you can fix and they stay fixed, and if you're stuck you can ask the people around you. That doesn't work as well for social conflict.

Huh. That article does not have as much information as I want on how that election process works, but I'll swap to William The Conqueror as an example. Thanks for pointing it out.

It's the second example I've had to swap which probably should dock me some kind of points here, though I still feel pretty good about the overall thesis.

Even if a skill isn't as useful if you're the only one to know it, if the skill is still somewhat useful that can work. I like literacy as an example; crazy good if most people have it, still useful if only you have it, usually obvious pretty quickly if other people don't have it.

Individual and group rationality are pretty relevant here. In a sense, one thing I'm pointing at is a way to bootstrap (some) rationality skills from the easier individual domain in to the harder group domain; focus on places where the same skill is relevant in both arenas. It's also a small argument in favour of following a textbook; mandatory education is one of society's big shots on putting skills in everyone's heads and it might not be worth (making numbers up) a 50% boost to this one classroom overall if it means they happen to miss a particular skill that the rest of society is going to expect everyone to have. Still, that side of things is more tentative. 

(One of my favourite questions to ask rationalists is "if you could pick one rationalist skill and make it as common as literacy, what do you pick?")

If I try this again next year I plan to use the exact same text and values on both sides, which hopefully will clear up most of that kind of issue. It doesn't really fix marginal value, but I'm not sure that's fatal to this kind of analysis- I can quote a reasonable price for an apple even though my marginal value of apples drops very fast by the time I hit three digits of apples. I could try and fix this by picking things I think people value vaguely the same but then we miss out on catching scope insensitivity. 

11.2% is if I remove the CFAR attendees. 36.8% is if I remove the non-attendees. Possibly this is a backwards way of setting things up but I think it's right?

Say I have a general population and I know how many pushups they can do on average (call this Everyone Average), and I remove everyone who goes to the gym and see how many pushups those remaining can do on average  (Call this Gym-Removed Average) and then I go back to the general population again this time removing everyone who doesn't go to the gym (Call this No-Gym-Removed Average.) 

This is a confusing label scheme but I don't immediately know what the better one is.

If No-Gym-Removed Average < Gym-Removed Average, then it looks like the gym helps.

(Totally possible I'm screwing something up here still)

No, I think I'm actually just wrong here and River is correct. I don't know how I wound up with the clockwise rule in my head but I just checked the new driver's pamphlet and it's first to the intersection. Updated.

but predicted that it was instead about sensitivity to subtle changes in the wording of questions.

If I try this again next year I'm inclined to keep the wording the same instead of trying to be subtle.

Regarding the dutch book numbers: it seems like, for each of the individual-question presentations of that data, you removed the outliers. When performing the dutch book calculations, however, it seems like you keep the outliers in.

Yep. Well, in the individual reports I reported the version with the outliers, and then sometimes did another pass without outliers. I kept all of the entries that answered all the questions for the dutch book calculations, even if they were outliers. I think this is the correct move: if someone's valuations are wild outliers from everyone elses but in a way that multiplies out and gets them back to a 1:1 ratio, then being an outlier isn't a problem. 

(Imagine someone who values a laptop at one million bikes, and a bike at equal to one car, and a car at one millionth of a of a laptop. They're almost certainly a wild outlier, and I'm confused as heck, but they are consistent in their values!)

Hrm. I guess what would be helpful here would be a sense of the range; the average briers floated around .20 to .23, and I don't have a sense of whether that's a tight clustering with a bit of noise or a meaningful difference. To use running a mile as a comparison, differences of seconds mostly aren't important (except at high levels) but differences of minutes are, right?

If Other is larger than I expect, I think of that as a reason to try and figure out what the parts of Other are. Amusingly enough for the question, I'm optimistic about solving this by letting people do more free response and having an LLM sift through the responses.

Thank you! I felt quite clever setting it up.

Yeah, I should probably add a bit at the start or end of that section that everything in it is potentially selection effect. I don't know how to look at the thing I'm curious about without that.

Thinking out loud: If you get a random selection of people from the Pushup Club and count how many pushups they can do, then do the same for general population, the difference could be selection effect. People who like doing pushups are more likely to go to pushup club in the first place, and more likely to stick with it. But I can't realistically pay a bunch of Mechanical Turkers to hang out on LessWrong for six years and watch what happens. Presumably there's some approach actual scientists have here, but I don't know what it is. Suggestions welcome.

In the mean time I'm going to add a bit towards the start of the section warning of potential selection effects.

No, I think that's correct. 

There's 107 people who answered above 200, 21 who answered exactly 200, and 113 people who answered below 200. The second quartile (aka the median) is 200. But nobody guessed a negative number, so the people who guessed low aren't pulling the mean down that much. Meanwhile 33 people guessed 1000 or higher, and they can yank the mean a lot without doing that much to the median. If you're asking people to generate numbers, you tend to get whole number quartiles because nobody guesses there's 100.5 stations.

Imagine a the set [1,1,1,2,2,2,2,100,100]. The average is ~23.444, but the median is 2. 

Or have I misunderstood the thing that you think needs to be corrected?

Wouldn't that get rid of all of the table of contents?

Ideally I'd have a hierarchy of headings. I think what's happening is it picks up some (but not all) lines that are entirely bold, and treats those as a sort of Heading 4.

Future Survey Discussion thread

A Screwtape Point (and upvotes) to whoever can tell me how to fix the table of contents.

That's just plain unfortunate.

Huh. Let me check with the local organizer and see if they have an update.

Ooh, please share the butter beer recipe? 

I was leaning towards reading part of Dumbledore's letter in 119. There are a lot of funny, silly lines I want to quote throughout the day but this piece is short and poignant. 

There can only be one king upon the chessboard.

There can only be one piece whose value is beyond price.

That piece is not the world, it is the world's peoples, wizard and Muggle alike, goblins and house-elves and all.

While survives any remnant of our kind, that piece is yet in play, though the stars should die in heaven.

And if that piece be lost, the game ends.

Know the value of all your other pieces, and play to win.

What shape is the screen? 

This one is probably my favourite for an event banner.

Thank you for pointing that out, I've changed it to point at the github. Maybe at some point it'll get updated or have a new domain.

Now, does anyone have any clues why that url was chosen for that content? Murder isn't usually part of escorting, but it's so close to something Hanson might talk about that I'm not sure it's random. . .

I'd say it's level-1 advice that is better than the level-0 move of just criticizing and never praising, which is indeed a failure case people can fall into. When people notice you're doing it or if you execute it poorly it can come off badly, though I think still better than the level-0 failure it's meant to fix.

10x is a bit tricky in a small post like this, but I agree with the direction. Thank you for the nudge. I broke the guide out into its own line and bolded it, does that seem better?

You might enjoy knowing this got a brief shoutout during Boston's Secular Solstice. Thank you for your service!

That's fair- sounds like you've been lurking for a while! I'm a big Scott Alexander fan. He's got some old writing here if you want more stuff to read.

What kind of things would you like to publish or coauthor?

Welcome to LessWrong Nicolas. How'd you come across the site? I'm always interested what leads people here.

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. 

1. ^{^}

   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.

2. ^{^}

   "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.'

3. ^{^}

   in The Alexandrian sense

4. ^{^}

   Actually it was pigs, not horses. They made pigs giant and gave them wings. 

5. ^{^}

   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.