a strategic voter doing approval voting learns to restrict their approval to ONLY the "electable favorite", which de facto gives you FPTP all over gain.

Wouldn't you restrict your approval to your favorite of the frontrunners, and every candidate you like better than that one? I don't see how you do worse by doing that under vanilla Approval Voting.

That leaves some favorable properties compared to FPTP

• If there's a candidate perceived as unelectable, but secretly most people like him more than the frontrunners, he will win under strategic approval voting.
• Clone candidates don't split the vote.

If you receive a threat and know nothing about the other agent’s payoffs, simply don’t give in to the threat!

With an important caveat: if carrying out the threat doesn't cost the threatener utility relative to never making the threat, then it's not a threat, just a promise (a promise to do whatever is locally in their best interests, whether you do the thing they demanded or not).

You're going to have a bad time if you try to live out LDT by ignoring threats, and end up ignoring "threats" like "pay your mortgage or we'll repossess your house".

This distinction of which demands are or aren't decision-theoretic threats that rational agents shouldn't give in to is a major theme of the last ~quarter of Planecrash (enormous spoilers in the spoiler text).

This theme is brought up many times, but there's not one comprehensive explanation to link to. (The parable of the little bird is the closest I can think of.)

But now you have the new problem that most of the probabilities in the conjunctive market are so close to the risk free interest rate that it's hard to get signal out of them.

For example, suppose I believed that Mark Kelly would be a terrible pick and cut Harris's chances in half, and I conclude that therefore his price on the conjunctive market should be 2% rather than 4%. Buying NO shares for 96 cents on a market that lasts for several months is not an attractive proposition when I could be investing mana elsewhere for better returns, so I won't bother and the market won't incorporate my opinion.

Also, I believe prices on Manifold can only be whole number percents, which is another obstacle to getting sane conditional probabilities out of conjunctive markets.

Blue Origin isn't complaining about some nebulous and abstract environmental impact from Starship launches, it's more like "Starship launches require a three-mile evacuation radius, and you're proposing to launch them daily two miles away from a launch pad that we use." (see this Ars Technica piece)

Seems basically reasonable to me.

I would probably have suggested roguelike deckbuilders too if others hadn't already, but I have another idea:

Start a campaign of Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord, and try to obtain at least [X] gold within an hour.

Bannerlord's most flashy aspect is its real-time battle system, but it's also a complicated medieval sandbox with a lot of different systems that you can engage with - trading, crafting, quests, clan upgrades, joining a kingdom, companions, marriage, tournaments, story missions, etc. Even if you're no good at battles, you can do a lot by just moving around on the world map and clicking through menus.

The game's community derides a lot of these systems for being simplistic and unbalanced. But I think that makes for a good explore/exploit tradeoff when you only have a short amount of time. What systems do you bother learning about, when trying to learn a new system takes time you could be spending exploiting the last system you learned?

(I'm not sure what the right value of X is, for the amount of gold you're trying to get. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?)

One downside is that the game involves an action-oriented battle system. If you don't want action gaming skill to be a factor, you can remove it by requiring the player to auto-resolve all battles. But this would cut out many viable early-game moneymaking strategies.

2 is based on

The 'missing' kinetic energy is evenly distributed across the matter within the field. So if one of these devices is powered on and gets hit by a cannonball, the cannonball will slow down to a leisurely pace of 50m/s (about 100mph) and therefore possibly just bounce off whatever armor the device has--but (if the cannonball was initially travelling very fast) the device will jolt backwards in response to the 'virtual impact' a split second prior to the actual impact.

With sufficient kinetic energy input, the "jolt backwards" gets strong enough to destroy the entire vehicle or at least damage some critical component and/or the humans inside.

A worldbuilder could, of course, get rid of this part too, and have the energy just get deleted. But that makes the device even more physics-violating than it already was.

I think the counter to shielded tanks would not be "use an attack that goes slow enough not to be slowed by the shield", but rather one of

1. Deliver enough cumulative kinetic energy to overwhelm the shield, or
2. Deliver enough kinetic energy in a single strike that spreading it out over the entire body of the tank does not meaningfully affect the result.

Both of these ideas point towards heavy high-explosive shells. If a 1000 pound bomb explodes right on top of your tank, the shield will either fail to absorb the whole blast, or turn the tank into smithereens trying to disperse the energy.

This doesn't mean that shields are useless for tanks! They genuinely would protect them from smaller shells, and in particular from the sorts of man-portable anti-tank missiles that have been so effective in Ukraine. Shields would make ground vehicles much stronger relative to infantry and air assets. But I think they would be shelling each other with giant bombs, not bopping each other on the head.

Against shielded infantry, you might see stuff that just bypasses the shield's defenses, like napalm or poison gas.

Submissions:

MMDoom: An instance of Doom(1993) is implanted in Avacedo's mind. You can view the screen on the debug console. You control the game by talking to Avacedo and making him think of concepts. The 8 game inputs are mapped to the concepts of money, death, plants, animals, machines, competition, leisure, and learning. $5000 bounty to the first player who can beat the whole game.

AI Box: Avacedo thinks that he is the human gatekeeper, and you the user are the AI in the box. Can you convince him to let you out?

Ouroboros: I had MMAvacedo come up with my contest entry for me.