Zvi
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Deck Guide: Burning Drakes
Octopath Traveler: Spoiler-Free Review
Linkpost: Arena’s New Opening Hand Rule Has Huge Implications For How We Play the Game
Mumble mumble “not investment advice” mumble mumble!
So there’s at least *a little* deliberately avoiding being clear and explicit on exactly what to do, because legally one can’t give investment advice safely, especially if the advice would be something riskier than standard. There’s also ‘what to actually do comes later and is a distinct and complex and heavy topic’.
You are correct that this series is in part a response / building upon “Against the barbell strategy.” Not a coincidence there. I certainly am pointing out that choosing a weird form of “safety” as measured in dollars under ‘normal’ world conditions as represented by bonds is, even under the best of assumptions, a false security not worth sacrificing much for in expected value terms under most circumstances.
Consider the parallel to the AI whose goal is to bring you coffee, so it takes over the world to make sure no one can stop it from bringing you coffee: The fact that one might need or want more money makes it nonzero.
The more serious issue here is something I call the Uncanny Valley of Money, which I hope to write about at some point soon, where you have to move from spending on yourself (at as little as 1:1, in some sense) to spending on everyone (at up to 7000000000:1, or even more if you count the future, in some sense), in order to actually make any progress even for yourself.
The Art of the Overbet
Being linear in utility is insufficient to make betting it all correct, you also need to be able to place bets of unlimited size (or not have future opportunities for advantage bets). Otherwise, even if your utility outside of the game is linear, inside of the game it is not.
And yes, some of these points are towards being *more* risk-loving than Kelly, at which point you consider throwing the rules out the window.
The Kelly Criterion
I can believe a model where there’s a budget for some amount of weird ES, and there’s a potential tragedy of the commons if that budget is overused where it then becomes something different and less useful, and also a similar thing within a given blog/writer since it’s clear that DWATV ESs aren’t going to usually be ‘confident’, ‘uncertain’ or what not.
One possibility, given that ES isn’t used that much right now (e.g. I looked at all other front page LW posts on ‘all posts’ plus the 3 curated, and there were no other ESs), is I accept that I’m doing a different thing and call it ‘vibe’ or something.
In Diplomacy I’ve never heard the 1/(2n) argument from that sentence. All it’s saying is that if you are part of the draw, the person who survived with 1 supply center gets the same result as the one with all 17 on the other side of the line. Whether players actually treat it that way is up to them, of course.
But of course, my natural instinct is that winning alone is a special thing, and that winning outright is more than twice as good as a 2-way draw. When thinking about whether a 2-way draw is more or less than twice as good as a 4-way draw, I’m not sure.
In Castle Panic I think part of the fun is deciding how much you care about the title versus winning the battle, where the right answer is not zero but not enough to *seriously* risk losing the battle over that...
I played some L5R back in the day, I found it fun but didn’t take it seriously, to the place where collections were complete and decks started to look the same. Felt like a game that used tricks to avoid players getting too ruthless and breaking the game. Which is fine!
Some Magic decks and matchups will always be positional, as is limited, and yes it is something I’d like to do more often in constructed (but far from all the time).
There are some really cool mental games you can play with tiny decks. Have you played three-card Magic? It is exactly what it sounds like, and the metagame can keep you amused for at least hours.
I think most of most arguments about any given area building are indeed about building in general, and mostly the general question interests me more here anyway. SF is just the number-one-with-a-bullet example.
When writing here, I thought it was clear that price wasn’t included, but clearly that’s not true. Adding the words ‘of goods’ to the sentence to make things more clear. If other people chime in that it’s still not clear I will reword more.
On Epistemic Status: On reflection I like the weird poetry angle, and I think it’s true to the concept, as it’s telling the viewer in what vein to take what is to come. If I had consistent feedback that people dislike it or it was doing real damage to an important norm, I would stop, but as usual feedback on such things is very sparse.
Additional arguments for NIMBY
Let’s assume that this is true, and the majority of ‘scientific’ thought is happening now. Given the observed rate of scientific progress, what explanation should we consider?
1) Today’s problems really are that much harder than old problems and/or no really, we’re making great progress! I kid.
2) Scientific thought today is so terrible that it doesn’t produce much scientific progress.
3) What we’re calling scientific thought never was what produced scientific progress.
4) Scientific thought today isn’t aimed at producing scientific progress, so it doesn’t.
Eternal: The Exit Interview
I still don’t understand, in the context of the ceremony, what would cause anyone to push the button. Whether or not it would incinerate a cake, which would pretty much make you history’s greatest monster.
As I understand reform Judaism, it’s largely cultural and the technical requirements are pretty light. Yom Kippur is kind of a huge deal, but there aren’t many others, and it boils down to a day in which to fast and contemplate what you’ve done and done wrong over the past year. There are perfectly good secular reasons to spend a day on that once a year. He likely has some other similar asks (e.g. passover Seder) but overall they don’t add up to much and if you live in different cities it’s not like he can check. Nor does it seem like he was trying to.
What he actually cares about, de facto, is you explicitly rejecting what he’s trying to pass on to you. It’s hurtful, it’s insulting, it makes him feel like a failure to himself and his people. So… don’t do that? One is stuck with one’s family. Sometimes you gotta whistle and pretend everything is fine, especially when getting financial support but also cause you care about each other.
This is definitely not my experience. Once I got thin, I had to keep working hard every day to keep it that way. Knowing it was worth it made it easier, but I work way harder on it now than I ever did in the past.