I didn’t read this post. But I did like the pictures!
rysade
Karma: 183
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Ouch. Halfway through that list I started wincing. A lot of what chimera has said resonates with me, and plenty of your observations fit me as well!
Chimera, I can say that lots of the advice so far on this topic are things I tried and they worked like charms. I mean ‘charm’ quite literally. It was like magic.
Ok. I don’t think I’ve actually done a regular LW style intro yet, so I’ll roll them both into one intro.
I’m 27 years old, from Springfield Ohio. Areas of interest are mathematics and computer science. I hope to turn my wide angle focus on those topics into a narrow beam focused on either AI or neurology, depending on what I discover while I’m still exploring. I have a personal vow to follow path of Tetlock’s Fox until I discover the ‘best’ thing to do with my life. I went to ITT Tech and got an Associate in software development, not much of the degree has been useful, post college. I toyed with the idea of getting a bachelor’s, even going so far as to move to Columbus for a while in an attempt to get into OSU but found the area I was in too hostile, and my job was terrible. I met a guy named Max there who is very much a Less Wrong type, but I don’t think he gets on much. He was going to go back to school as well but ultimately decided self-education was the better option. I eventually came to same conclusion, and moved out of the area. I’ve been trying to take Stanford Online classes and work full time since moving, but it’s not going well. I hope the next round of classes in January go better. I’ll only be taking PGM so hopefully I’ll have time for both schooling and working.
On a personal level, I have several geeky hobbies. I play D&D or D20 Modern as often as time allows with a group of particularly talented roleplayers. Our group has been coalescing for years now. We have got enough players with enough talent to produce some of the best roleplay sessions I’ve ever seen or even heard of.
The group includes my friend and roommate Roux (pseudonym) who is very much the yin to my yang, or what have you. We are very complimentary to each other, and have been assisting each other in every imaginable endeavor for a very long time now. He and his girlfriend have one of the most stable and beneficial relationships I’ve ever seen. We all three live in a rental house in downtown Springfield.
Roux and I play lots of action games, primarily FPS. If we can, we play cooperative storyline games. We are quite good. For example, Roux was the #1 player in the US in Halo: Reach Team Deathmatch for a couple months according to the site Halocharts.com.
Not a lot more springs to mind that would make good intro material. I spend a lot of time these days thinking about how to get stable financially. It’s very hard to do. About a year and a half ago my finances went into a tailspin and I’ve been desperate for money ever since. I hope my new job can clear up the problems, but I’m really trying to figure out a good way to get on my feet and stay there on my terms. I don’t like the idea of selling my time and labor. I’d prefer to keep my labor for myself.
I can personally attest to the usefulness of exactly that kind of feedback. I truly feel lucky to have a friend as close to me as my roommate, we’ll call him Roux.
Back in high school, I was awkward and constantly scheming up ways to become socially savvy but failing in ways that were not charming in the least. Roux was a battered kitten just out of the ‘nut house.’ He wore a black outfit with black baggy jeans that were painted all over with white fabric paint and accentuated with white handprints all up the front. On the back was a patchy paint job concealing the words ‘I made this shirt in the nut house’ with ’46 + 2′ written over it.
Over the years we’ve been friends I have learned more from him than I would in two of my lifetimes without him, I believe. Our minds are so closely synched that conversation can be deep and informative with a very reliable regularity. We ask each other questions like the example above regularly. To ask a question like that, one of us need only outline a concept to fully form it in the other’s mind and then ask the question, just as directly in the example above.
That said, I suppose I should put in that I feel Roux and I get a lot of benefit from this kind of ‘QA Session’ because we are so familiar with each other’s minds. I can’t see anything wrong with setting up a site or subsection (my vote is for separate site) as an area for these “Crocker’s Questions,” but it seems likely to miss the mark often.
Perhaps you could include some verification during the early stages and find out if the offered advice is useful.
I concur.
The beginning of games typically have next to no worthwhile activities.
Wired’s article on the making of Halo 3 describes the process of leading the player along a set path using ‘no return’ strategies exactly like the one displayed here. The motive for doing so in Bungie’s case was to make it so the player did not get confused and wander around endlessly. In this case, the no return strategy is supposed to be symbolic of something, of an irrecoverable loss. However, if nothing is being lost, then it fails to symbolize in any meaningful way.
I would say in order to get the ledge to symbolize that loss meaningfully, you’ll have to fill the beginning of the game with worthwhile and engaging activities. Mini-games if you will. That way, falling down the ledge will be a kind of ‘Ender burrowing through the Giant’s eye’ sort of moment. It will move the game past the time-wasting distractions of the beginning and it can start to take on real meaning.
Now, I definitely don’t want to introduce any elements of scope creep into your development, but I do think that if you want to tell the story you are trying to tell, then there has to be something for the player to give up.
So, I went to see it with a friend. It was not a disappointment. It also did not fall into the trap I thought it would inevitably fall into, where the special power granted to the hero would eventually result in his downfall. I’ll try to give a summary without any spoilers.
Eddie Morra is an akrasia-prone writer with an idea for a science-fiction novel about the human condition. His situation is fairly typical of any artist. It’s likely a place that the scriptwriter has been before. After a chance encounter with his ex-wife’s half brother (a drug dealer by trade) he finds himself in possession of a tablet of NZT-48. NZT-48 is a narrative device with the unique property being a genie that is too stupid to prevent you from wishing for more wishes. The effect of the drug is heightened awareness, access to all recorded experiences before taking the drug, savant-level capabilities in all areas of human achievement, and a tendency to create unlikely solutions to violent situations.
The movie’s treatment of the subject of wonder-nootropics is fairly mature. The maturity is far above what I would have hoped for with a Hollywood movie, particularly with a double-whammy like intelligence enhancement paired with drug use as an incentive to do some moralizing.
If I had to say the movie was ‘about’ anything, I would say it is actually about intelligence being a good thing, and the more the better. Very early on in the movie, Eddie realizes that writing sci-fi novels, schmoozing at parties and driving fast cars is fine, but there is more to life than that. In a memorable scene that will be familiar to anyone who has read a transhumanist’s life story, Eddie decides upon a long term plan which is carefully not elaborated upon in the movie.
Eddie makes some fairly foolish moves during the movie, and the plot thereby has a couple holes, but overall I recommend watching it.
Similar Characters to Eddie Morra: Adrian Veidt, Paul Atreides, Peter Wiggin.
Ok, I read through the Wikipedia entry, and yes. It has proven to be very helpful. Thanks.
I might be stepping in over my head here, and I want to make it clear I am taking NO ONE’S side. But this seems like a legitimate concern to me. Are we really here for the community, or are we really here for the truth? Which configuration of power best serves the community, and which best serves truth?
EDIT: Given the vast amount of very clear thinking I’m seeing in these comments, I want to say I don’t really see this thread as the most appropriate place to pose a question like mine anymore. If I see a real Truth vs.Community controversy, you can expect this comment to appear there.
That’s interesting. I’m reading Thus Spake Zarathustra right now and noticing a couple things that don’t exactly jive too well with our rationalist paradigm here. Still, I didn’t expect a comment like this to be downvoted this much based on what I’ve read from Nietzsche so far.
Is it mostly because of the antisocial tone of this comment, or is it Nietzsche himself that caused the downvotes?
How about ‘The Decision Tree’?
I have been trying to find the words to say exactly that for a long time now.
Edit: exactly what is stated in the blog post, not “BTW, the post is from his own blog.” That would have been very easy to find the words to say.
While I am irked by Rabid’s response as well, I feel it necessary to point out that if this community accomplishes it’s goals, as a very young member of our community he/she has quite a lot to gain out of this site.
I say, keep at it Rabid and do not get discouraged. My advice is to retreat and think about what is going on.
It is not such a terrible thing to realize that you may have been wrong.
Sorry, that was a bit of a dense quip on my part. Let me deconstruct it.
I got the impression SithMasterSean was deriving his idea of Nietzsche’s writings from other people’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings. Typically those ideas seem to be flat wrong. From what I understand, the Nazis seem to be the most famous misinterpreters Nietzsche, so I thought I’d make a bit of a joke about that, and also try to make a bit of comedic use out of argumentum ad hitlerum while I was at it.
Really, I was just joking around.
What really seems to pay off on LW is clarity, clarity, clarity. I kick myself every time something like this happens. Sorry.
Regardless, I think I will be watching this. It has something I like. Even if Hollywood doesn’t understand it.
Thank you for the heads-up. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie about anything I’m even remotely interested in.
I can say that the ‘reward system’ is laughably easy to defeat as long as you are aware of it’s existence. Hint: the winning move is not to play.
Your typical game based on a reward system will cater to those who are playing the game for the lever, while other games will cater to other other audiences. They are pretty easy to spot.
I consider the primary use of video games to be a kind of virtual sport, with rules for victory, guidelines for possible and impossible actions, etc. Other wonderful uses are as a storytelling medium, a virtual world to explore or exploit, or three dimensional puzzles.
Seconded. As someone who plays a fair amount of First Person Shooter games, I can tell you that there are all types of games and all types of players. The popular Call of Duty games are pretty good examples of life-wasting time sinks. They require little skill and less strategy. However, the recently released Halo: Reach is a deep game with satisfying multiplayer combat that continues to surprise me as I progress in skill. Anyone who is interested in competition and outside the box thinking should definitely take up playing games online. They require speed, accuracy, strategy, teamwork and most of all creativity.
I agree. I think this will be changing my writing style subtly.
Hmm. What are the tenets of Placebomancy? Could we outline the practice in some way? What can it affect and what can it not? What are the limits of it’s power?
And furthermore, does NLP fit neatly into the category?
The main thing I think folks are objecting to here is the idea of ‘swallowing the NLP pill.’
You’ll see plenty of self hacks and hacks that work on others (dark arts, etc) but none of it will be labeled NLP. I imagine plenty of the techniques we have here were even inspired in one way or another by NLP.
But here’s my main point. We have kept our ideas’ scope down for a reason. We DO NOT WANT lukeprog’s How To Be Happy to sound authoritative. The reason for that is if it turns out to be ‘more wrong’ it will be that much easier to let go of.
Introducing the label NLP to our discussions will lend (for some of us) a certain amount of Argument from Authority to the supporters of whoever takes the NLP side, and we really do not want that.