Subtitles?

So if you want to keep people occupied for a looooong time without running out of game-world, focus on PvP

Or invest in "procedural content generation", where the game world is constantly generated or regenerated. The "roguelike" genre has made games that have been played for decades (like Rogue, Nethack, ADOM) and continues to grow (Ultima Ratio Regum, Dwarf Fortress). It's hybridizing into other genres like action platformers (Rogue Legacy, Spelunky, Risk of Rain). Games are creating new genres by starting with PCG (FTL, Minecraft). Civilization and the Maxis Sim games are classics in large part because of content generation.

For another perspective, game designer Dan Cook has written several blog posts on PCG leading to better-designed game systems than handcrafted content. Similarly, Jonathan Blow has argued extensively against games that extend their use of systems (eg. across all the levels of a Super Mario, Modern Warfare, or Call of Duty game, the player will see few or no changes in rules, just new sets) rather than exploring a system once thoroughly (Braid, The Witness, Portal, Polarity).

I'll leave the comparisons to "Scientific Progress [as] the PvE of real life" for the simulationists and solipsists. But I've always seen the human obsession with status and gossip as a bug rather than a feature and endeavored to advance more interesting things in the world.

Yep. I enjoyed seeing a mix net in MoR. Incidentally, can you see any weaknesses in the Slytherin System as described?

The word 'desperation' really jumped out at me here. I'm very sorry you feel desperate and lonely. I agree that it can be very hard to tell the difference between a straight guy who thinks he deserves a woman, and a straight guy who thinks he deserves to be loved, and that often people don't work as hard as they should to distinguish between the two. (Often including, I must add, the guys themselves.)

But a lot of your descriptions of reality strike me as almost mythic. I don't mean that they are supernatural or inconsistent with the reality I know; it's just that they seem highly oriented towards an explanation of your world and its inevitability, rather than towards power over your world through predictive utility. You use evolutionary psychology, feminist dialectic, and PUA identity categories to 'explain' your desperation- but all without, it seems to me, gaining the ability to make different and better choices about it. Might as well say that you're cursed by Zeus, yeah?

One of the really tricky parts of social interaction is that the agents are all as intellectually complex as you are. The space of all social interactions is truly, mind-bendingly, absurdly, ridiculously large. Myth is especially poisonous in such a situation, both because it will lead to a narrow subjective framing and because it will narrow your own contributions in turn. The problem is hard (and almost certainly uncomputable!), so you might find considerable value in the concession that even the best models have very little power to predict what a given person can contribute to social bonding, or what factors explain that capacity. Begin with curiosity, and a keen sense of your own ignorance, and you are more likely to discover interesting choices that can offer happiness.

Touch typing. This should go without saying, but I've worked with people who hunt and peck and it's painful to watch. But you don't have to type really fast to get most of the benefit, since other bottlenecks will start to dominate. In my experience a pokey 50 WPM is more than sufficient.

I don't touch type, and my typing speed is about 65 wpm. Do you think learning how to touch type will result in a significant increase in speed, enough to be worth the effort?

I'm an academic, so typing speed is probably not as important for me as it is for a software designer, but I do a lot of writing, so it is a potentially significant productivity boost.

Hiring excellent people for very little money. People are motivated by much more than just money.

Could you expand on this?

Looking for a partner for open-ended study of math/cs topics like calculus, linear algebra, stats, Haskell, SICP - open to suggestions for similar topics. Ideally, we'd meet weekly for 1-2h to discuss the previous week's study and plan for the next. Bonus points if you're in Chicago. :)

The workshops currently cost $3,900 + travel, I don't think it was much lower a year ago. Have your improvements recouped that cost? Has the workshop increased your income?

Hi folks, I'm Peter. I read a lot of blogs and saw enough articles on Overcoming Bias a few years ago that I was aware of Yudkowsky and some of his writing. I think I wandered from there to his personal site because I liked the writing and from there to Less Wrong, but it's long enough ago I don't really remember. I've read Yudkowsky's Sequences and found lots of good ideas or interesting new ways to explain things (though I bounced off QM as it assumed a level of knowledge in physics I don't have). They're annoyingly disorganized - I realize they were originally written as an interwoven hypertext, but for long material I prefer reading linear silos, then I can feel confident I've read everything without getting annoyed at seeing some things over and over. Being confused by their organization when nobody else seems to be also contributes to the feeling in my last paragraph below.

I signed up because I had a silly solution to a puzzle, but I've otherwise hesitated to get involved. I feel I've skipped across the surface of LessWrong; I subscribe to a feed that only has a couple posts per week and haven't seen anything better. I'm aware there are pages with voting, but I'm wary of the time sink of getting pulled into a community or being a filter rather than keeping up with curated content.

I'm also wary of a community so tightly focused around one guy. I have only good things to say about Yudkowsky or his writing, but a site where anyone is far and away the most active and influential writer sets off alarm bells. Despite the warning in the death spiral sequence, this community heavily revolves around him. Maybe every other time hundreds of people rally around one revelatory guy it's bad news and it's fine here because there are lots of arguments against things like revelation here, but things like the sequence reruns are really off-putting. It fits a well-trod antipattern; even if I can't see anything wrong in the middle of the story I know it ends badly. (Yes, I know, I'm not.)

If, one hour later, Marty does not activate his Time-Turner, the universe fails its consistency check and is deleted. If Marty does activate it, the universe looks back at the Marty that was added an hour ago. If the two Martys are not bit-for-bit (at whatever the lowest scale of the computation is), the universe fails its consistency check and is deleted.

fails its consistency check and is deleted

By whom? The DM? Jokes aside, how does that happen, exactly?

(As a matter of fact, that could be an amusing mechanic to add to games that allow for time travel, though the players would be stuck in a Groundhog Day Loop until they pass the check).