Not providing context is in fact a flaw of the original post. The basic reason I didn’t do it is that I felt providing inside-view accurate context might be promising too much. And providing inside-view inaccurate context would feel too much like lying. But in the original context where this sort of riddle is used, there is usually some non-ciphertext to help you out. Oliver Habryka kindly provided some of this, otherwise I probably would have posted it myself.
So: while looking through the daily page, I just noticed the icon by this post’s title indicating that it was a personal blog entry, and its tone suddenly made a lot more sense. Apologies; I was linked here by the list of recent posts and thought it was intended as a public LW article (by which standards it would, of course, be unreasonably obscurantist!)
(PS. I’ll bring this issue up in the LW 2.0 meta chat, because it seems like a rather unfortunate design)
Not providing context is in fact a flaw of the original post. The basic reason I didn’t do it is that I felt providing inside-view accurate context might be promising too much. And providing inside-view inaccurate context would feel too much like lying. But in the original context where this sort of riddle is used, there is usually some non-ciphertext to help you out. Oliver Habryka kindly provided some of this, otherwise I probably would have posted it myself.
So: while looking through the daily page, I just noticed the icon by this post’s title indicating that it was a personal blog entry, and its tone suddenly made a lot more sense. Apologies; I was linked here by the list of recent posts and thought it was intended as a public LW article (by which standards it would, of course, be unreasonably obscurantist!)
(PS. I’ll bring this issue up in the LW 2.0 meta chat, because it seems like a rather unfortunate design)