social system designer http://aboutmako.makopool.com
mako yass
Karma: 2,951
I guess there’s a subcultural aspect in how comfortable people feel with declining to answer questions: In subcultures where people can (or know to) just say “don’t worry about it” and people don’t get offended by that, questions are free.
But for the most part I think whether people are happy or annoyed with being asked a question comes down to how many times they have been asked. Asked zero times → very happy, like summer rain. Asked 30 times → not so much, but idk maybe you can mitigate the annoyance by copy and pasting something/publishing a statement.
I had fun by ridiculing the entire situation, waiting it out while asking the doctors questions like:
Can identical twin brothers transmit testicle cancer through sodomy?
Can I keep my surgically removed ball? (For storing in a jar of formaldehyde)
Does hair loss from chemotherapy proceed in the same stages as male pattern baldness?
If you were hoping we weren’t going to want to know the answers to these questions, I gotta disappoint ya
I think your response mostly didn’t make sense. “What’s that like” imposes a greater burden on you by requiring you to explain something again and again, and bluntly, I’m only going to be interested in that if me knowing helps you in some way, and I don’t see why it would, but maybe it would, I wouldn’t know, so it makes sense for me to just express willingness to help if needed, and that starts with “If you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you”.
I get frustrated with imaginary social scripts too, but that part of the script is fine.
I might be interested in doing that, but to clarify; the reason you need VR for board games is that VR facilitates the same kind of sense of shared presence and quality of audio conversation that playing in person does. I’m fairly sure VR boardgaming is going to be better than physical boardgaming (larger tables, no upkeep, more immersion, venues that can be teleported to from home so more repeat interactions so more legacy games are possible). That is the sense in which you need VR. But for prototyping, sure, developers have pre-existing buyin and can put up with the limitations of 2d.
That’s interesting thanks, but I hope you can understand how keeping all of the individual goals secret would make it much harder to practice negotiation. It’s okay (great, even) if there’s some way of exposing the secret goals. In most games with secret goals that doesn’t happen during the game, but since, iirc, it’s a legacy game, maybe players tend to figure out each others’ secret goals as the campaign goes on. Is that the case? If so, I’d be very interested in seeing that stuff, and the late-game.
(only including downstream effects of your policy)
I’m not sure I know what you mean by this, but if you mean causal effects, no, it considers all pasts, and all timelines.
(A reader might balk, “but that’s computationally infeasible”, but we’re talking about mathematic idealizations, the mathematical idealization of CDT is also computationally infeasible. Once we’re talking about serious engineering projects to make implementable approximations of these things, you don’t know what’s going to be feasible.)
I don’t know how to convince anyone of this but just having low network latency to California may be worth a lot after VR gets good. Physical access will matter much less than the quality of your network connection, the delay between speaking and seeing and hearing others’ reactions, and timezone overlap.
I’m not sure how to put a price on these things. People seem to be able to adjust to the delay in conversation, but adjusting requires becoming comfortable with talking over people sometimes, it can get noisy. The timezone overlap issue also seems important, if you don’t get off work/have your mid day break at the same time as others, you get left out of things, but people can adjust their sleep/wake time (I certainly can) and synch with a remote timezone so idk.
I note that in the cooperative bargaining domain, a CDT agent will engage in commitment races, using the commitment mechanism to turn itself into a berzerker, a threatmaker. If they’re sharing a world with other CDT agents, that is all they will do. Whoever’s able to constitutionalize first will make a pre-commitment like “I’ll initiate a nuclear apocalypse if you don’t surrender all of your land to us.”
If they’re sharing the world with UDT agents, they will be able to ascertain that those sorts of threats will be ignored (reflected in the US’s principle of “refusing to negotiate with terrorists”), and recognize that it would just lead to MAD with no chance of a surrender deal. I think commitment mechanisms only lead to good bargaining outcomes if UDT agents already hold a lot of power.
A general pre-commitment mechanism is just self-modification. CDT with self-modification has been named “Son of CDT”, and seems to have been discussed most recently on this arbital article.
It behaves like a UDT agent about everything after the modifications are made, but not about anything that was determined before then.
I’m not aware of any exploits for that. I suspect that there will be some.
It seems like the anki for notetaking is https://www.remnote.com/ ? Suggested here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes-after-roam-s-renaissance?commentId=9LY2cTTAKbaJsBCNf
I think the whole roam fad may have been an example of a phenomenon I’m noticing where these fundamentally social apes that we are cannot conceive of an activity failing to become social, the idea that what I see isn’t what others see, or the idea that there are activities that can’t be shared, is unnatural and unintuitive to us. Roam would have made a lot of sense as a new kind of social network oriented around collaboratively, iteratively building evergreen knowledge together, and it vibed like it was that, and I think that’s why there was so much excitement, but due to the way Roam works and the shoddy way it was built, it actually couldn’t grow into that. The human sense for social fun isn’t smart enough to notice that it wasn’t going to happen and so it took a long time to wind down.
Specifically, multiplayer roam has no notification system, and it’s siloed into groups. They don’t have per-block/per-page read/write permissions, meaning that you kind of have to be sharing all of the notes in a graph or none of them, and as far as I’m aware there are no communities that makes sense for. Most peoples’ notes end up being mostly private, rough or intimate.
But massively multiplayer roam as a concept is totally possible, it just has to be built in a different way, with different systems.
It’s one of the things I want to build.
From what it sounds like, the Roam community would never stand for that
Not sure exactly what’s meant by roam community but Subconscious are thinking about that stuff. I forget what exactly they’re doing with it, I haven’t been paying attention to it (maybe I’m the roam community), but I think it was something like… it goes and surfaces something from the past to remind you of it to make sure things you might have forgotten about get linked together. (Gosh that would be bad for my productivity.)
At least for me—and most of the people I know—we got a garbage dump full of crufty links and pieces of text we hardly ever revisit.
For me, some stuff fell into disrepair when I realized no one else was going to read it or add to it, which I think is mostly due to a bad model for shared use, but a lot of other stuff kept growing and turned out to be really transformative. I’ve continued using it as a very good, very long todo list, a pensieve to relinquish and defer burdensome thoughts into, to sort every possible idea I could be pursuing and to prioritize the one currently most important thing.
Some other pages that’ve remained active over the years:
recipes
tasteweb engineering notes, pitch concepts
UFO stuff (some interesting evidence, but mostly debunkings). I guess this could add up to a post eventually.
“people”, a list of various things to talk about with people next time we’re in a room together, if we ever are. The uncertainty, that we may not meet, is the reason I think it’s important to externalize these thoughts.
while Subconscious has taken the blockchain/protocol approach.
Subconscious isn’t blockchain. The noosphere protocol has the foundational features of a smart contract system, but it doesn’t seem quite secure enough against inconsistencies/double-spends to run finance (and that’s not an aspiration they seem to have), and the sacrifices it makes will make it cheap and easy to scale horizontally/federate. The protocol it’s most similar to is bluesky’s ATProtocol. I actually wanted to complain to them that they’re too similar and they should merge, but noosphere started developing before ATProtocol existed, so who can blame them really.
Although a part of me does wonder, if a protocol like atproto took off, whether people would start doing finance on it, security be damned, and then legal enforcement and auditing would come along and it would be effectively secured through international social technologies and trusted computing instead of cryptographic technologies and game theory and we might just end up in the same place. It would be a weird future.
That isn’t anyone’s first/preferred plan. I assure you everyone born in a liberal democracy has considered another plan before arriving at that one.
I’m not sure why people would think LLMs understand their own output, we know they’re not up to spotting sometimes human-obvious inconsistencies in it (as soon as they are, things will start moving very quickly).
:( that isn’t what cooperation would look like. The gazelles can reject a deal that would lead to their extinction (they have better alternatives) and impose a deal that would benefit both species.
Cooperation isn’t purely submissive compliance.
(I’m aware of most of these games)
I made it pretty clear in the article that it isn’t about purely cooperative games. (Though I wonder if they’d be easier to adapt. Cooperative + complications seems closer to the character of a cohabitive game than competitive + non-zero-sum score goals do...)
Gloomhaven seems, and describes itself as being a cooperative game. What competitive elements are you referring to?
The third tier is worth talking about. I think these sorts of games might, if you played them enough, teach the same skills, but I think you’d have to play them for a long time. My expectation is that basically all of them end with a ranking? as you said, first, second, third. The ranking isn’t scored, (ie, we aren’t told that being second is half as good as being first) so there’s not much clarity about how much players should value them, which is one obstacle to learning. Rankings also keep the game zero sum on net, and zero sum dynamics between first and second or between first and the alliance have the focus of your attention most of the time. The fewer or the more limited mutually beneficial deals are, the less social learning there will be. Zero sum dynamics need to be discussed in cohabitive games, but the games will support more efficient learning if they’re reduced.
And there really are a lot of people who think that the game that humans are playing in the real world is zero sum, that all real games are zero sum, so, I also suspect that these sorts of games might never teach the skill, because to teach the skill you have to show them a way out of that mindset, and all they do is reinforce it.competitive [...] not usually permanent alliances are critical to victory: Diplomacy, Twilight Imperium (all of them), Cosmic Encounter
This category is really interesting, because the alliances expire and have to be remade multiple times per game, and I’ve been meaning to play some games from this category, but they’re also a lot more foggy, the agreements are of poor quality, they invite only limited amounts of foresight and social creativity, in contrast, writing good legislation in the real world seems to require more social creativity than we can currently produce.
Imagining a pivotal act of generating very convincing arguments for like voting and parliamentary systems that would turn government into 1) an working democracy 2) that’s capable of solving the problem. Citizens and congress read arguments, get fired up, problem is solved through proper channels.
Hmm but I think it’ll be solved like 5 years from now so I’d be eager to start working on VR boardgames/social role playing games today. I believe jon blow, when he says it usually takes that long to figure out what a really fresh kind of game wants to be.
And the first good VR RPGs are going to be really culturally impactful.
Oh? I guess asynchrony is one of the things in that design language. And a web based game could leave players in a groupchat/forum after the game, they could make friends there. I used to play Neptune’s Pride, which I guess is an example of that kind of game. It was a… good game… I think. It was emotionally brutal.
Actually, that experience with Neptune’s Pride is probably a large part of the reason I want to make cohabitive games today. It was a game that forced you to forge friendships that were all absolutely destined to collapse. I forget whether there was any benefit to coming second or third, but if there was it wouldn’t have resonated with the narrative, it was a war of domination, the mechanics of the gameworld were such that anyone with an advantage would be able to grow their advantage until there was nothing left for anyone else (and there was no flourishing along the way, just war) so second or third wouldn’t have really meant anything within the narrative of the game.
Honest negotiation wasn’t possible, every message we sent was laced with deception, and often the opponent would pick up on that and not admit it and that would be another deception of their own. This is the norm in diplomacy games. And I guess I became aware of how ruinously that misrepresents the diplomatic games we’re playing in the real world (at least, post WWII, it is a misrepresentation. Maybe when nationalism was more of a thing our game was really like this. But today global culture is getting everywhere.).