BrassLion
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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).
Okay, assuming this means "how many Homo Sapiens ancestors did you have that spent substantial amounts of their working life farming", I think every human being alive has around 25x more non-farmers than farmers as ancestors. I think the ratio is so large that the answers doesn't change even if you ask "how many ancestors lived in agricultural societies" instead of "how many ancestors were farmers" and regardless of where your ancestors were - even comparing people whose ancestors were all in a place that invented agriculture early vs someone whose ancestors didn't start farming until after the industrial revolution.
The only thing that matters, to the extent that it swamps every other... (read more)
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... (read 502 more words →)
I want to say that I don't play these, but I love reading them and reading other people play them.
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.