I am Andrew Hyer, currently living in New Jersey and working in New York (in the finance industry).
aphyer
Karma: 5,207
I have not played Secret Hitler specifically, but in similar games (Mafia and Resistance) it is not in fact the case that members of the majority team should immediately share all information, and some of the best plays I’ve seen have involved members of the majority bluffing the minority.
(With that said, everyone following both of the first two bullets on your list above seems like clearly not a Nash equilibrium).
...but now the winner is a four-and-a-half-way tie. Just take the credit, it’ll be neater. :P
My current accusations of which wizards have been causing[1] disease.
VERY SIMPLE LINKAGES:
Babblepox and Chucklepox are both caused by Danny Nova.
Scraped Knee and Scraped Elbow are both caused by Zancro.
Smokesickness is caused by Nettie Silver.
INTERMEDIATE LINKAGES:
Disease Syndrome is caused by Moon Finder. However, the power of the Moon allows him to strike people with this from a distance: he affects people in sector X+1 or X-1 while he is in sector X.[2]
Parachondria and Problems Disorder are caused by Bartholopew, who says ‘Pew’ while casting spells to strike people with this from a distance: he affects people in sector X+1 or X-1 while he is in sector X.[2]
Scramblepox and Bumblepox are caused by both Azeru (at range up to 1) and Danny Nova (just in his own sector).
Mildly But Persistently Itchy Throat is caused by Dankon Ground. It’s not occuring in his sector, but it only occurs when he is present in the city, never otherwise.
COMPLEX LINKAGES:
Rumblepox is mostly caused by Averill (who leaves behind delayed-action magic that goes off up to 4 days later to spread it), plus a little bit by Danny Nova (just spreading it directly).
Gurglepox is caused by Azeru and Cayn: I believe they may be deceiving the monitoring (since both of them claim to always be in Zone [Day+9 mod 12]) every day they are in the city, even if this means skipping zones). However, it only appears on days when one or the other is in the city. Perhaps they are hiding behind invisibility or illusions while spreading it? EDIT: I am withdrawing this accusation, since it turns out that Azeru and Cayn always have at least one of them in the city. (Also, we already have Azeru nicked on other charges).
Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome was caused by a ritual of some kind cast around Day 390 - it did not appear before then, and since then it has appeared regularly (ha) across all Calderia. I have no proof of who conducted the ritual—I suspect the wizard Gouberi (who formally showed up in the university for the first time the next week), but don’t have enough proof to make that a formal accusation.
I have no idea where The Shivers come from.
- ^
Obviously, no-one would be this offended by people curing disease for free! Rather, it seems clear that the Calderians have some customary circumlocutions around speaking of spreading plague, in order to not bring down the attention of the Pallid Princess, She Who Arises In Filth. We should interpret this whole dataset as about problems caused rather than problems healed, but we shouldn’t say that directly to the Calderians.
- ^
There seems to be some pattern in when these mages affect the clockwise sector and when the counter-clockwise, but I don’t know what it is. It might match e.g. phase of moon, but not neatly enough that I can easily work it out.
Fusion is also a thing. A glass of tap water contains (admittedly a very small amount) of deuterium.
Would you define ‘nuclear weapon’ as ‘anything not produced in a way that verifiably could not contain any nuclear material’?
(Keep in mind that this would categorize e.g. a glass of tap water as a nuclear weapon.)
To the extent that these things are problems, they are both problems today. There are insular Amish communities that shut out as much modern culture as they can, and hikkikomori living alone with their body pillows.
AI may exacerbate the existing issues, but on the whole I don’t feel like the world is drastically worsened by the presence of these groups.
This might be downstream of a deliberate decision by designers.
An LLM has been trained on data through February 2025.
A user asks it a question in June 2025 about ‘what happened in May?’
How should the LLM respond?
(I wish to register that I didn’t miss this scenario, and intend to get around to playing it this weekend...it’s just that you made the awful indie-game blunder of releasing your game the day after Silksong came out, and my free time has been somewhat spoken for for the past few days).
In some other world somewhere, the foremost Confucian scholars are debating how to endow their AI with filial piety.
You can be a moderate by believing only moderate things. Or you can be a moderate by adopting moderate strategies. These are not necessarily the same thing.
This piece seems to be mostly advocating for the benefits of moderate strategies.
Your reply seems to mostly be criticizing moderate beliefs.
(My political beliefs are a ridiculous assortment of things, many of them outside the Overton window. If someone tells me their political beliefs are all moderate, I suspect them of being a sheep.
But my political strategies are moderate: I have voted for various parties’ candidates at various times, depending on who seems worse lately. This seems...strategically correct to me?)
If you ever do it, please be sure to try to confuse archaeologists as much as possible. Find some cave, leave all your flint tools there, and carve images of space aliens onto the wall.
This might be a cultural/region-based thing. Stop by a bar in Alabama, or even just somewhere rural, and I think there might be more use of bars as matchmaking.
Here is a list of numbers. Which two of these numbers are closest together?
815
187
733
812
142
312
I think the obvious approach is comparably neat until you get to the point of proving
that k=2 won’t work
at which point it’s a mess. The Google approach manages to prove that part in a much nicer way as a side effect of its general result.
I looked at the Q1/4/5 answers[1]. I think they would indeed most likely all get 7s: there’s quite a bit of verbosity, and in particular OpenAI’s Q4 answer spends a lot of time talking its way around in circles, but I believe there’s a valid proof in all of them.
Most interesting is Q1, where OpenAI produces what I think is a very human answer (the same approach I took, and the one I’d expect most human solvers to take) while Google takes a less intuitive approach but one that ends up much neater. This makes me a little bit suspicious about whether some functionally-identical problem showed up somewhere in Google’s training, but if it didn’t that is extra impressive.
- ^
IMO Q3 and Q6 are generally much harder: the AI didn’t solve Q6, and I haven’t gone through the Q3 answers. Q2 was a geometry one, which is weirder to look through and which I find very unpleasant.
- ^
(Credentials: was an IMO team reserve, did some similar competitions)
Have the actual answers AI produced been posted? Because I could see this mattering a lot, or not at all, depending on the exact quality of the answers.
If you give a clean, accurate answer that lines up with the expected proof, grading is quite quick and very easy. But if your proof is messy and non-standard, coordinators need to go through it and determine its validity: or if you missed out part of the proof, there needs to be a standardized answer to ‘how big a gap is this, and how much partial credit do you get?‘
(Also, have the exact prompts used been posted? Because it would be very very easy to add small amounts of text or examples that make these problems much easier. If the prompt used for Q4 contains the number ‘6’ at any point in it, for example, I would basically just instantly call that ‘cheating’).
Not in general. As you say, GM requires positive numbers, but there’s a reason for this: imagine GM as log-scaling everything and then performing AM on the results.
So to get the GM of 10 and 1000:
Realize that 10 = 10^1, 1000 = 10^3
Then average 1 and 3 to get 2.
So your result is 10^2=100.
But now notice that:
0.01 is 10^-2
0.00001 is 10^-5
0.0000000001 is 10^-10
0 is 10^[negative infinity]?
-1 is...uh...
and so the GM of 1 million and 0.00000000000000000000000001 is 0.00000000000001, and the GM of 1 billion and 0 is 0. This won’t really lend itself to calculating a GM of a list including a negative number.
One thing you can do, though, which makes sense if you are e.g. calculating your utility as log(your net worth) in various situations, is calculate the GM of [your current net worth + this value].
For instance, if you are considering a gamble that has a 50% chance of gaining you $2000 and a 50% chance of losing you $1000:
If your net worth is $1000, this replaces $1000 with a 50% chance of $3000 and a 50% change of $0. Since GM(3000, 0) = 0, this is worse than just staying with the $1000 .
If your net worth is $2000, this replaces $2000 with a 50% chance of $4000 and a 50% chance of $1000. Since GM(4000, 1000) = 2000, you are indifferent.
If your net worth is $4000, this replaces $4000 with a 50% chance of $6000 and a 50% chance of $3000. Since GM(6000, 3000) ~= 4242, this is better than staying with the $4000.
Strongly seconded.
Suppose that two dozen bees sting a human, and the human dies of anaphylaxis. Is the majority of the tragedy in this scenario the deaths of the bees?
I could be convinced that I have an overly-rosy view of honey production. I have no real information on it besides random internet memes, which give me an impression like ‘bees are free to be elsewhere, but stay in a hive where some honey sometimes gets taken because it’s a fair trade for a high-quality artificial hive and an indestructible protector.’ That might be propaganda by Big Bee. That might be an accurate summary of small-scale beekeepers but not of large-scale honey production. I am not sure, but I could be convinced on this point.
But the general epistemics on display here do not encourage me to view this as a more trustworthy source than internet memes.
Given that prediction markets currently don’t really have enough liquidity, saying ‘you need 1000x more liquidity to try to entice traders into putting work into something that can only pay off 0.1% of the time’ does in fact sound like something of a flaw.
I feel like this paragraph should at least mention the whole ‘they have already accidentally leaked all your data’ thing.