I didn't particularly like this until the last few paragraphs, which I feel are really well written compared to the rest of the piece (this is both praise and criticism).  It feels like a very rough or early Scott Alexander piece (this is both praise and criticism).  I don't feel like my time has been wasted, which is the most fundamental job of a short story. Keep writing, keep practicing.

This is my favorite exchange I have ever read on LessWrong.

I read it, it's a summary of a weekly challenge in Opus Magnum by the author of the challenge, detailing how people managed to beat the author's cycles score and get reasonably close to the theoretical minimum cycles.  As someone who only got about halfway through Opus Magnum, the puzzle and solutions there are wildly complex.

That's definitely not Zachtronics, at least any of the games I've played.  If that game exists it would be pretty awesome - although probably even more niche than Zachtronics games (which weren't too niche to support the makers for a decade+, granted).

Thanks for the answer.  Sad that you never get an answer, although this sort of thing (organizational/personnel changes at the client makes them drop your work / never give feedback) is not uncommon in tech in my experience.

I have the luxury of reading this years after it was posted (going through the D&D.Sci archives and this was linked there), so you may actually have an answer to this question: did the model work?  That is, did your client use it and save/ make money?

You're correct.  I wish we had any sort of tradition that let people with a minor dispute go before some neutral party without expense or bureaucracy - less in the sense of court of extremely small claims, and more that people should be more willing to say to a trusted friend, "hey, resolve this dispute for us and we'll buy you dinner."  Then again, this requires you to both trust the same person, and for neither person to be acting in such bad faith that they refuse the process.  If there's a default place people can go, with very low costs in time and no cost in money, refusing to even have an argument heard would be a pretty big strike against you in most situations, and as you said if the panel has multiple cases/ complaints against a person that's at least Bayesian evidence that they're doing something wrong.

I've seen a bit of this in some organizations I've been part of.  The most important part I see missing is enforcement powers.  If you have a group of excellent and sage judges who can impartially consider the facts but all they can do is issue advisory opinions, all you have is another social bloc taking one side or the other in an interpersonal debate.  You have gossip and the whisper network cosplaying a court of law.  You have nothing.

I have not the first clue how to handle this outside of a formal organization, but solving this in an organization with a real structure is at least a step forward.  Not naming names because I don't speak for them, but one organization I've seen do this well had a small elected committee that handled any complaints about members.  They did basic investigation, worked with both accuser and accused, and normally focused on repairing the harm and reintegrating both people into the community (the keyword here is restorative justice, if you want details).  Often this caught troublemakers early, and people have been accused of wrongdoing, gone through this process, and remained members of the organization with much drama.  This works because the committee also had a hammer: they could ban people from attending organization events temporarily while they put permanently removing the person from the organization to an organization wide vote.  While I was part of the organization, no one was removed by a vote, but people have been removed by vote before, and people have quit the org when it became clear that there would be consequences for the bad actions due to this process.

Importantly, the committee was explicitly held to far lower standards than a court of law.  They were expected to be impartial (and not handle a case if they couldn't be), but no one was spending hundreds of hours on a single case.  There are no lawyers, no rules of evidence.  The trade-off for the whole process being far less formal and less work - not just for the committee members but also for the accuser and accused - is the relatively lightness of the penalties.  Defendants in a criminal court need the full protection of formal systems of law because the court can take away your money, your freedom, or even your life.  The committee I'm talking about can at worst take away your membership in one organization, and even that has a safeguard.  The people who wrote the rules for the committee understood that not being a massive burden on everyone involved was worth the trade-off of less protections.  The focus on repairing and preventing harm over punishment also helped - the consequences of ruling the wrong way on something are minimized here, which helps smooth over any wrong decisions.

It's also worth making it explicit that when this sort of issue comes up, of how to handle accusations of wrongdoing in organizations or groups without involving the courts, it's almost always about rape.  The whisper networks or public accusations that these sorts of more formal structures try to avoid aren't about someone getting beat up or stolen from, they're almost always about rape, other sexual assault, or behavior that make people feel like they're in danger of being raped.  If someone beats you up or steals from you, you don't have to start a whisper campaign, you go to the police (or a lawyer in some cases).  Explicitly saying something I don't have proof of, epistemic status "confident but maybe you shouldn't be": this is because the (American) courts are bad at dealing with rape and sexual assault, and in the absence of formal systems of justice you get informal systems of justice, and those tend to suck for everyone, accuser included (public accusations and whisper campaigns aren't a great way to achieve justice, but if they're what you have, they're what you have).

I want to say that I don't play these, but I love reading them and reading other people play them.