I lurk and tag stuff.
Multicore
Karma: 976
I haven’t spent much time on this, but here’s the basis for my submission:
Feasts with 5-6 items do best on average
Food items seem to be split into “sweet”, “spicy” and possibly other categories.
Having too many spicy items seems to be very bad
Combining items from different categories seems to be good
So my plan is to make a 6 item feast with two sweet items, two spicy items, and two “other” items.
Submission: [Applesauce, Brisket, Dumplings, Gateau, Roc, Stew]
Applesauce is Sweet and the best performing item overall.
Brisket is, I think, Spicy, and interacts very well with Applesauce.
Dumplings doesn’t seem to interact much with anything; it’s safe filler since I wanted 6 items rather than 5.
Gateau is another Sweet item.
Roc might be in a category of “meaty” items that you also don’t want too many of. It appears in some of the best-performing feasts in the dataset.
Stew is another Spicy item.
I selected members of the categories that had better correlations with the items I had already picked.
This was my first time participating in D&D.Sci after reading a lot of the other ones. This one drew me in with its low advertised difficulty rating and by seeming more amenable to my skillset (writing lots of python scripts yes, fancy stats and ML tricks no).
I’m happy enough coming close to the regulars. I wouldn’t give myself the point for Averill—I noticed the irregularity but I assumed even until the end that it was some sort of second order effect like “Averill is mostly in town when class is in session, and someone else only heals rumblepox when class isn’t in session.”
Making some charts of mage location x disease location:
The only new accusation I add is Tehami Darke curing Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome. It seems to only ever be cured when she is in the same district as the cure or when she is in district 6.
Azeru’s healing seems to affect the districts adjacent to him, while Dankon Ground affects the opposite side of the city.
There are some weird things going on with the Problems Disorder/Parachondria/Disease Syndrome triad. Many mages have a lot of zeros in the mage location x heal location matrix. Maybe whatever Boltholopew and Moon Finder are doing pulls in more people to make it work, or maybe there is some selection effect on when it happens.
More accusations:
Dankon Ground was present in the city on 100% of days when Mildly But Persistently Itchy Throat was cured, vs 13% of days overall.
Azeru was present in the city on 95% of days when Scramblepox was cured, vs 62% of days overall.
When Problems Disorder/Parachondria/Disease Syndrome are cured, Boltholopew and Moon Finder are always in the two adjacent districts.
Observation:
Rumblepox is almost 10 times less likely to be healed when Averill is in the city. Is he keeping someone else busy?
Accusations so far:
Nettie Silver has been curing Smokesickness.
Zancro has been curing Scraped Knee and Scraped Elbow
Danny Nova has been curing Babblepox
The above diseases have never been cured without the associated character present.
Other diseases do not have as strong an association with a character’s presence, so presumably they are the work either of multiple characters or of nonlocal effects.
Observations:
Some magic users only go to a subset of the city’s districts, while others travel all over the city.
Some magic users have their locations recorded much more often than others. (I assume N/A means “not in the city”?)
Some magic users are absent from the data for entire years at a time.
Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome was not healed at all until day 390, at which point it became one of the most common heals and has maintained a steady rate of cases per year.
Other diseases healed have variation by year, but no other one ever goes to zero in a year.
Problems Disorder, Parachondria, and Disease Syndrome all have the same pattern of locations, appearing only in districts 4-10 with the highest frequency around 10 (the Market, on the map) and the lowest around 4.
If it worked earlier today (and you didn’t make any commits in the meanwhile), you may need to do something more like “binary search through your undo history.”
If this is an issue consistently, it means you need to commit more often.
My interpretation of what Inside Out says about sadness is different from how people usually describe it:
Throughout the movie, characters constantly inadvertently signal to Riley that they don’t care about her. Her dad is preoccupied with his startup and sends her to bed without supper on a flimsy pretext. Her mom is preoccupied with the moving process and has to be reminded to kiss Riley good night. Her teacher calls on her in a way that ends with Riley being humiliated in front of the entire class. Her old friends have replaced her, and no one at her new school invites her to eat lunch with them.
Riley starts to worry that no one cares about her. To use an evolutionary just-so story, having everyone in your tribe see you as unimportant and disposable is probably pretty bad for your inclusive genetic fitness, especially if you are a child. If that was the case you’d want to do something about it, maybe something as drastic as running away to join another tribe. But before taking such a drastic action you’d want to test to see if your worries were well-founded.
At the end of the movie, Riley performs a dramatic display of sadness in front of her parents, and they respond with compassion and change their behavior to be more attentive to Riley’s needs. Riley is able to stop worrying that no one cares about her and go back to normal.
But if we imagine an alternate scenario where Riley’s parents responded to that display of sadness with anger and punished her for trying to run away, in that scenario her worries would be confirmed and she could be confident that a drastic change was needed.
So in this reading the purpose of sadness is as a performance for other people, to attempt to gain information about the state of your relationships and/or make a bid for other people to devote more of their attention or resources to you. It’s bad to never perform sadness because then you can never get that clarity. You’re stuck having a vague worry that something isn’t right, and having to choose either to act like nothing is wrong or to take a drastic action based on a worry that might not be well-founded.
As I said, I haven’t seen anyone else describe the movie this way. This interpretation also doesn’t really answer every question about sadness—people often feel sad even when there isn’t another person around to perform to. But at least to me it makes sense of the movie.
Reminds me of The Epistemic Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The Y-axis on that political graph is weird. It seems like it’s measuring moderate vs extremist, which you would think would already be captured by someone’s position on the left vs right axis.
Then again the label shows that the Y axis only accounts for 7% of the variance while the X axis accounts for 70%, so I guess it’s just an artifact of the way the statistics were done.
In Magic: The Gathering, basically anything technically complying with the rules is valid.
Magic actually offers a good example of varying chicanery levels. The game rules themselves are basically Chicanery: Yes. If it looks like a particular combination of cards could give you unlimited mana or unlimited damage, it probably does. (There are some exceptions, seemingly legal sequences of game actions that are not allowed, but not many.)
However, there are things around the game that are Chicanery: No, like bribing your opponent to concede or exploiting bugs in online versions of the game.
The same interviewer has now done two more podcasts on Ziz.
With Adrusi:
With @jessicata:
Edit: Another one with toasterlighting/Celene Nightengale. This one is mostly about Audere, the alleged murderer of the landlord.
Oh, I see, one could reasonably misinterpret the bullet points in my original comment as being about “the way many people have been describing the situation” rather than “major claims in the podcast”. Sorry for the ambiguity.
To be clear these are just patterns of claims made by Slimepriestess in the linked podcast, and I have no corroborating evidence. But for example at 2:06:00 in the video she says:
At least as far as, like, Ziz et al goes, I don’t think that’s a remotely accurate description of… Like, there’s no organization, there’s no centralization, it’s not like we have Ziz on, on speed dial and ask her what to do every day. Like, we’re just a bunch of anarchist trans leftists that are, like, trying to exist in Current Year
With other variations of the same claims elsewhere in the video.
Major claims in the podcast that go against the way many people have been describing the situation:
It’s not a “cult” in the sense of demanding unquestioning obedience to an authority figure who enforces a dogma. (Though it fits other definitions of “cult” like “insular group with unusual beliefs”.) It’s a loose group of people who read each others’ blogs and argued with each other on the same Discord servers. Ziz isn’t in charge in any meaningful sense.
The group’s extreme actions aren’t primarily due to the esoteric beliefs that take 100 pages of jargon-filled blog posts to explain, but due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism (“Everyone who isn’t vegan is complicit in the horrors of factory farming, and therefore evil.”) and left-anarchism (“The government’s authority is illegitimate, landlords are parasites, vigilante justice is cool and good.”)
In Commerce & Coconuts, it seems like anyone who rolls a 4, 5, or 6 for boat building can coast on their starting supplies, build boats every turn, and escape by the end of turn 3 with no trading whatsoever.
a strategic voter doing approval voting learns to restrict their approval to ONLY the “electable favorite”, which de facto gives you FPTP all over gain.
Wouldn’t you restrict your approval to your favorite of the frontrunners, and every candidate you like better than that one? I don’t see how you do worse by doing that under vanilla Approval Voting.
That leaves some favorable properties compared to FPTP
If there’s a candidate perceived as unelectable, but secretly most people like him more than the frontrunners, he will win under strategic approval voting.
Clone candidates don’t split the vote.
If you receive a threat and know nothing about the other agent’s payoffs, simply don’t give in to the threat!
With an important caveat: if carrying out the threat doesn’t cost the threatener utility relative to never making the threat, then it’s not a threat, just a promise (a promise to do whatever is locally in their best interests, whether you do the thing they demanded or not).
You’re going to have a bad time if you try to live out LDT by ignoring threats, and end up ignoring “threats” like “pay your mortgage or we’ll repossess your house”.
This distinction of which demands are or aren’t decision-theoretic threats that rational agents shouldn’t give in to is a major theme of the last ~quarter of Planecrash (enormous spoilers in the spoiler text).
Keltham demands to the gods “Reduce the amount of suffering in Creation or I will destroy it”. But this is not a decision-theoretic threat, because Keltham honestly prefers destroying creation to the status quo. If the gods don’t give into his demand, carrying through with his promise is in his own interest.
If Nethys had made the same demand, it would have been a decision-theoretic threat. Nethys prefers the status quo to Creation being destroyed, so he would have no reason to make the demand other than the hope that the other gods would give in.
This theme is brought up many times, but there’s not one comprehensive explanation to link to. (The parable of the little bird is the closest I can think of.)
Nonfiction examples come more easily to mind.
There was recently a miniseries on nebula.tv (subscription-walled, sorry) called The Getaway where all six contestants on a Survivor-style competition show think they’re the one person with the special saboteur role, and half the show is the producers trying to keep them from noticing that without ever actually lying.
Even more extreme, there’s an old British show called Space Cadets where the producers try to convince the subjects that they’ve been launched into space when in reality they’re in a set in a warehouse.
This is backwards from the current situation—right now it’s Ukraine that actually has an easier time mobilizing its population.
For Ukraine the war is existential, so the people support using forced conscription to refill the front lines. For Russia the war is far from existential, and conscription to the front lines is politically destabilizing. They tried a round of conscription a while back, but since then they’ve relied on paying increasingly large signing bonuses for volunteers.
Russia takes more casualties not because they’ve deliberately chosen a more manpower-intensive style of warfare, but because they’re generally the ones attacking at any given point on the front, and attackers generally take more casualties.