RobinZ comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Unnamed 01 April 2010 03:21PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (524)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Strange7 07 April 2010 09:57:33PM 0 points [-]

What about making the prison a hedge-maze sort of area, with lots of controllable access-points? Points earned by interactions can be spent to give yourself temporary access through a specific gate, any given pair of prisoners can only play the game a certain number of times per day, and unspent points decay - say, 5% loss per day. To earn enough points to pay your way out the front door, you effectively have to have access to the whole interior, and be on good terms with most of the people there.

Comment author: gwern 07 April 2010 10:17:21PM *  0 points [-]

The problem is that with 'currency' and iterated interactions like that, you start to approximate a concentration or POW camp, with considerable mingling and freedom, which allows bad'uns to thrive. At least, if my reading of literature about said camps (like World of Stone or King Rat) is anything to go by.

Comment author: RobinZ 07 April 2010 10:34:43PM *  0 points [-]

The reference to King Rat I can identify with an Internet search - what's World of Stone?

Comment author: gwern 07 April 2010 11:37:49PM *  0 points [-]

Try "Tadeusz Borowski". Sample quotes:

"I was told about a camp where transports of new prisoners arrived each day, dozens of people at a time. But the camp only had a certain quantity of daily food rations - I cannot recall how much, maybe enough for 2, or 3 thousand - and Herr Kommandant disliked to see the prisoners starve. Each man, he felt, must receive his allotted portion. And always the camp had a few dozen men too many. So every evening a ballot, using cards or matches, was held in every block, and the following morning the losers did not go to work. At noon they were led out behind the barbed-wire fence and shot."

A (nonfiction) quote I sometimes think of in connection with World of Stone, though it's actually from The Captive Mind, is:

"Had Beta been French, perhaps he would've been an existentialist, though that wouldn't've satisfied him. He smiled contemptuously at mental speculations, for he remembered seeing philosophers fighting over garbage in the concentration camps. Human thought had no significance; subterfuge & self-deception were easy to decipher: all that really counted was the movement of matter."