Davis_Kingsley
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I am not sure that I could disagree more with this post. I consider Mark Rosewater’s “When Cards Go Bad” and the associated ideas to have been extremely damaging to card game design.
(Sorry, hit submit too early, will have more to say in detail later!)
Interesting. For my part, I was waiting before getting more into Artifact to see what they would do about the obvious balance issues (Axe being the most prominent one), and their recent announcement has me really happy. It turns out I just care so much more about a game *being a good game* than I do about the “physicality” of the cards or whatever.
I’ve long thought that the physicality of real card games is a downside and that digital games are hugely advantaged by their ability to patch, but that most of the digital game designers were failing to make use of the medium to the fullest by implementing balance patches, instead focusing on “showy” randomized effects and animations that can’t be done in paper. I’m really pleased to see that Artifact is going to take a more aggressive approach to balance issues.
IIRC I’ve heard it claimed that Mattis is so popular that he could throw a coup, but that might only apply to the Marine Corps.
I’m actually not sure re: practice. I know people who would just play out the first X turns of a game then reset to get deliberate practice on the openings; I think there’s some merit to that, but I also think most people don’t practice fighting back from really unpleasant situations enough. Not sure how these effects line up for particular individuals.
Very cool review, made me seriously consider taking this game seriously.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on KeyForge, if you ever feel like posting/formulating those.
If You Want to Win, Stop Conceding
One important caveat to this is that it doesn’t mean you have to fight as hard as possible in every single battle, play out every single hand, or otherwise fight ferociously on an *object* level—you should be fighting ferociously on a *meta* level. It’s fine, and perhaps even necessary in many games, to concede some battles in order to win the war.
(inspiration for this comment goes to Rationalist Discourse Club user “Bar Fight”, who pointed out “good post, but ‘concede less’ is extremely bad advice for most poker players”!)
Schools Proliferating Without Practicioners
I don’t consider “the title of this post is almost completely uninformative” to be a minor issue, nor do I consider “it doesn’t signal in-group enough” to be an issue at all. I know the author personally and she’s probably way more “in-group” than I am, I’d just prefer to see posts here with more informative titles, especially if they don’t pertain as directly to the main topics of the site.
(I was wondering if there was going to be a Big Rationalist Lesson at the end, since the title didn’t tell me it was just a scooter review.)
I like this post in several respects but it doesn’t really feel like LW content to me, especially given the title.
There’s a possibility for corruption here, as I briefly mentioned, if people get so deprived that they will sacrifice their other needs or values for the sake of status alone.
I considered that to be obvious in writing this. I’m not necessarily talking about the problem of getting status regardless of everything else. I’m also not talking about how to get status as an individual. I’m rather talking about getting the whole community a sense of status while keeping our other values intact.
Yes, I think giving the community a “sense of status” has substantial risks of exacerbating the corruption that I mentioned earlier. In other words, I think recognizing achievements is nice, but making that recognition too systematic leads to significantly increased gaming of that system, Goodharting, etc.
My sense is that increasing the amount of time and attention that we pay to status and related dynamics is extremely negative; I don’t expect it to help and I think that issues related to these situations get significantly much worse when people are consciously targeting them.
As C.S. Lewis said in his excellent talk “The Inner Ring”:
The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.
And later:
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
This is essentially my view. I do not think it is generally productive to concern yourself with being In or High-Status or Getting Invited to the Right Parties or Being Talked About; I think it is productive to focus on the work that actually builds and contributes to the project, and let the parties and invitations and all that come as they may (or may not).
Both, but the sidebar widget is the main thing I miss. I notice that I still use it on the EA Forum, for instance, which has much of old-LW’s structure. On current LW I have to scroll down a lot on the front page to see recent comments and they don’t appear while reading posts, which IMO quite reduces my engagement.
One thing I’ll point out is the “recent discussion” feels less accessible than on old LW (requires scrolling), and the lack of a “top users, 30 days” section probably decreases my engagement a bit as well—both because of the lack of a “leaderboard effect” and because it can be useful to look at that to see who’s been posting interesting content that I might otherwise have missed.
It… sorta feels like you’ve reinvented the (broadly discredited) Great Man theory of history? The focus on institutions mitigates one of the problems with that theory, but I think it may just be kicking the can down the road a bit.
While there are some highly effective and influential organizations and institutions that seem to have greatly benefited from strong leadership from founders (Naval Reactors Branch under Rickover), there are others where this story is much more dubious (Bell Labs).
My friend FireBatVillain drew my attention to the following study: You Can’t Stay Here, The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech. He points out that this study indicates after hateful subreddits were banned from Reddit, the removal of the offending subreddits did not cause “hate speech” to increase on other parts of the site—on the contrary, even subreddits that saw an influx of users who had formerly used the banned areas did not see significant changes in “hate speech” usage.
In other words, this study shows an instance where the existence of spaces for certain types of bad content was increasing their prevalence, and removing those spaces did not cause the content to “spill back” into the rest of the site.
Now, one difference between this and my original claim is that the spaces in question were not explicitly containment areas—however, I still consider this to be relevant supporting evidence.
Great points here. The UI/UX distinction is key here in my view—when the act of creating a containment space necessarily makes the existence of such a space visible, the problem I’ve described is much more relevant than when the existence sort of space is not immediately apparent to users—even if via simple obscurity in a huge list, as with IRC.
(One potential way to address this in Discord is to make the containment space opt-in, but in my experience this has not been particularly effective, in part because the best way to do this on Discord (roles) is itself quite easy to notice.)
And yet I now notice people saying things along the lines of “SlateStarCodex is a place to go for culture war things” and the like. If that was intended that’s fine, but I think culture war stuff on SSC absolutely falls into the category where an affordance is being created.
I just used random.org for this. Here’s my metric, I don’t know if you guys count it:
-1: Clearly failed, repudiated by history (slavery in the US)
0: Unclear if had any real lasting success
1: Partial success—did something meaningful but has not fully accomplished goals, still active
2: Major success—became a major, lasting cultural force, still active
3: Total or near-total victory (abolitionism in the US), may or may not be still active
Random.org gave me the following 28 results. I’ve linked to the Wikipedia pages and provided my rating and brief justification for each. All of these are my attempt to rate these things as a dispassionate evaluator rather than using my own opinions of the value of these movements. My evaluations may be especially inaccurate for non-US political movements, feel free to correct me if you know more than me about any of these:
Slow movement: 0. Slow food is the most impactful aspect of this movement that I can identify and it’s unclear to me whether it had any impact other than being a fad, though there’s still some activity.
India Against Corruption: 0. Movement broke up via internal schism, and the bill that it was promoting failed. Anti-corruption is still a cause but this particular movement seems to have died out.
Animal rights movement: 2. The animal rights movement has clearly “moved the needle” on some issues and achieved broad mainstream recognition, but there is still a ways to go in terms of the deeper animal rights objectives and their views are far from universally accepted.
Gerakan Harapan Baru (New Hope Movement in Malaysia): 1. After their attempt to create a new political party was rejected, this movement took over an established political party and elected several candidates.
Pro-choice movement: 2. The “pro-choice movement” (supports abortion in the US) is clearly a major cultural force and has achieved several major victories, but is still very much still controversial and some of their gains have been reversed or are at risk of being reversed.
Slow Food movement: 1. This is slightly redundant with the Slow movement as a whole, which I already rated. I gave the Slow movement as a whole a 0 but I’ll give Slow Food a 1 since it’s been fairly relevant in its sector, albeit thanks to much less ambitious goals.
Effective altruism: 1. EA has moved substantial amounts of money and achieved relevant and growing cultural influence, but is not a “major cultural force” at this phase… yet! Growth mindset! (I’d like to reiterate that this is my private opinion and not that of any org!)
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: 0. Voluntary human extinction is very fringe. I’m tempted to give it a negative number, but VHE/antinatalism is still somewhat active and it was a rather unlikely position to begin with.
Free love: 1. This movement was ultimately supplanted to a degree by other related causes in the “sexual revolution”, but it did have a meaningful impact even if it didn’t end up being the “final form”. This could be argued to be a 2, I’d rate the sexual revolution as a whole there but free love in particular ended up being marginalized.
Women’s suffrage movement: 3. So successful, at least in the West, that every now and then pranksters circulate petitions to “end women’s suffrage” and people sign because ‘suffrage’ sounds like ‘suffering’ and the suffrage movement has been so effective that it is now broadly disbanded and people don’t know what it is anymore.
Black Lives Matter: 1. While this movement certainly achieved prominence and could be said to be a major cultural force in the United States, it remains to be seen how lasting and impactful this will be—the movement is still in its first five years.
Anti-capitalism: 2. Anti-capitalist movements may have failed to overthrow capitalism completely, but they had a lasting impact on world history and are still politically relevant in many areas of the world.
Children’s rights movement: 2. Child labor has been greatly reduced, but there’s still a ways to go, especially in non-Western countries. This should perhaps be a 2.5 or so?
Organic movement: 2. Organic food has become a significant industry and “organic” certifications are now considered important. However, while organic things are trendy at present it’s unclear if the influence here will keep growing.
Rural People’s Movement: 0. Failed political movement in Weimar Germany. Several of its people were arrested after they began terrorist attacks and the Landvolk newspaper was repeatedly suppressed. Naziism superseded this to some degree; I almost gave this a −1 but it may have been a precursor to later developments.
Mad Pride: 0. Unclear to me whether this has had a substantial or lasting impact. Mental illness terms have been destigmatized to some degree but this seems to me likely the result of broader factors.
Narmada Bachao Andolan: −1. Attempted to stop the construction of a dam—the dam was constructed anyway, and while this group may have delayed that I still count this as distinctly failed.
Temperance movement: −1. This movement was so successful in the short term that they were able to amend the Constitution in the United States and implement Prohibition, but this proved to be dramatically unsuccessful, was repealed less than fifteen years later, and is now widely derided.
Occupy movement: 0. This movement attracted widespread attention for some time, but after the “protest camps” died down it has fallen out of the public eye. It is possible this movement drew national attention to the issue of income inequality but it is unclear that they were responsible or that this will last.
Situationist International: 0. This movement was very influential in France in the late 1960s, but closed down in the 1970s and its lasting impact, if any , is unclear.
Time’s Up (movement): 1. This movement is very recent and is broadly part of the #MeToo movement. It is popular in a certain sense but it is unclear whether it will have a substantial, lasting impact (though I certainly hope it does!)
Landless Peoples Movement (South Africa): 0. It is unclear to me whether this movement is really having a big impact.
Pro-life movement: 2. Like the “pro-choice movement”, the “pro-life movement” (opposed to abortion in the US) is a major cultural force and has had some victories recently. It is unclear what the lasting impact of this will be, but at least right now it’s quite a big deal.
Anti-nuclear movement: 2. The anti-nuclear movement was very effective at stopping nuclear power developments in the West and remains powerful in several respects, but has not achieved or come close to achieving full nuclear disarmament.
Counterculture movement: 2. As Wikipedia says, “The era was also notable in that a significant portion of the array of behaviors and “causes” within the larger movement were quickly assimilated within mainstream society, particularly in the US, even though counterculture participants numbered in the clear minority within their respective national populations.”
Brights movement: 0. My assessment is that the Brights movement is an essentially failed rebranding of the atheist/skeptic/secular humanist movement.
Free software movement: 1. The Free software movement has been broadly supplanted by open source, but hasn’t been entirely replaced, and is clearly still culturally relevant. If open source were the question I’d probably give it a 2 rather than a 1.
Via Campesina: 1. This movement claims to represent very many people and coined the term “food sovereignty”, but it is unclear to me how organized and effective it is. I could easily see this being a 2.