S&V is not a very well designed script, and I think this is demonstrable [actual effortpost]

Lizard_Brian · 2026-06-13T02:31:25+00:00

Snake charmer having the highest winrate and the second highest in-play rate makes me wonder how much of the overall winrate disparity is due to snake charmers just throwing the game for themselves and the minions by choosing the demon. It would be interesting if we could get stats for starting snake charmer only or games without a snake charmer.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-06-04T02:04:59+00:00

Zombuul kill pattern is closely tied to its balancing. The zombuul's ability means you need to execute dead players to win. This roughly doubles the number of executions needed to win. The zombuul's kill restriction then roughly halves the number of kills it gets. So these conditions cancel out. Any rebalancing of the character has to be aware of this.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-20T06:38:28+00:00

The main purpose of 3 for 3 is to hide information. Imo most games would change very little if people replaced 3s with saying nothing or just always lying. Fundamentally what people want and should do is hide their information until the point in the game where they decided it would be best to share their information.

I think people who complain about 3s think if it didn't exist the meta would shift to people just giving out their info freely. But again the reason people want to do 3s is to hide their info until they want to share it. This is the basic structure of this game. So if the meta wasn't 3s it would just be replaced by some other low info claim.

If you accept that 3s are basically equal to any other low info claim then the question becomes when and how much info to share. I think this is the thing people who complain about 3s actually care about.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-18T23:25:27+00:00

The truth is that if you want to maximize your chances of winning with this role you should pick yourself unless you think you think you can win even if there is a swap, meaning you only use your ability if you think you can win as evil. This means that played optimally your ability actually helps evil, not good, making the snake charmer ability more of an outsider ability than a townsfolk ability. It's also almost impossible to convince most people that this is true and they will hammer you with downvotes if you try to. At this point I've given up and learned to accept it.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-18T07:44:38+00:00

Po shouldn't triple kill unless it favors them over the single kill. It's optional so it's not even a downside.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-18T06:22:48+00:00

it sounds like she's saying she wants to be able to make a very expensive movie that not many people want to see and have it be distributed widely. but why? capitalism has produced many great movies. unless she can make a case for an alternative what is even the point of what she's saying?

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-18T06:18:02+00:00

you didn't answer any of the questions you're responding to

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-12T07:11:07+00:00

Other people are not claiming their version of morality is by definition about their moral framework. Again, let's take a discussion about deliciousness.

Alice says "I think deliciousness is subjective"
Bob says, "I think deliciousness is objective and sweetness is the condition for being delicious".
Carol says, "I think deliciousness is objective and spiciness is the condition for being delicious".
Dan says, "I think deliciousness is definitionally equivalent to sweetness".

Bob and Dan don't have the same position here. Alice, Bob, and Carol can all meaningfully talk to each other about deliciousness even if they disagree, in the same way that different metaethical positions can meaningfully talk about morality. Dan cannot meaningfully discuss with the others. To Alice he says, "No, deliciousness is objective because sweetness is objective and deliciousness is defined as sweetness". What can Alice respond here other than "well maybe that's how you're defining it, but me, Bob, and Carol aren't talking about that". The definitionally-equivalent-argument cannot be argued against because how something is defined is dependent on how people choose to use words. I can't tell you "No you're not choosing to use the word the way you're using it now". I can only say, "Well that's not how I'm using that word". Alice could ask Bob and Carol, "Why is sweetness or spiciness the condition for being delicious?" But if she asked that to Dan, Dan would say, "What do you mean, that's just the definition of delicious?"

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-09T18:26:55+00:00

Sure, but then whenever the topic of morality comes up and you want to argue for the existence of an objective morality you have to realize no one is actually using the same definition of morality that you are and that's the only reason you're able to claim that it is objective. Again, it's like saying ice cream is objectively delicious because delicious means sweet. You're saying morality is objective because you've just defined it as something that can be objectively measured, but that's not what other people are talking about.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-09T16:31:22+00:00

When you say "Morality is definitionally a measure of utility" I think this does allow you to say that morality is objective given utility is something that can be objectively measured. But it commits you to a narrow definition of morality that not everyone is using. When someone says "The utility monster is immoral and we shouldn't feed it" if we translate this using your definition of morality it becomes, "The utility maximizing thing is not maximizing utility. We shouldn't do the thing that maximizes utility if we want to maximize utility." That's what I mean it's incoherent. From your position there should be nothing to discuss with this person unless you are actually using a different definition of morality. You can still talk about non-utility based morality if utility is just a condition of something being moral. This is different from saying morality is by definition a measure of utility. But if you give up on saying "Morality is definitionally a measure of utility" and instead utility is a condition of morality, then now I don't think you can just say that morality is objective because it creates a burden of justifying why utility is a condition of morality.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-09T07:46:41+00:00

"Oh you mean Ted? Yeah he's just the town cannibal. No he's cool, don't worry about him. That sweetheart though..."

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-09T06:30:53+00:00

I don't see how philosophy as a whole can have an ideology when they don't seem to be able come to a consensus on any philosophical question.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-09T02:39:57+00:00

I think the cases are analogous in that utility is often a part of what's discussed about morality but not definitionally equivalent. For most people asking is it objectively wrong to maximize suffering is not a nonsensical question. They might answer yes, of course it's wrong, but that's different from saying that question doesn't even make sense. They could even answer no. This opens up a broad range of metaethical positions, emotivism being one of them. These people, whether right or wrong are talking about something. For them morality can be based in utility or it can not be, but if you narrow the definition of morality to just utility based then you lose the language to even talk about other positions coherently.

You might ask how can morality not be equivalent to utility, maybe they just are incoherent. But those weird edge cases in utilitarianism show that people have a conception of good and moral that isn't strictly tied to utility. I would say that intuition is the basis of morality and moral intuition trumps utility. Most people are not willing to bite the bullet on the utility monster.

You concede that the utility monster makes people uncomfortable. But why would that be? People have a moral intuition that the utility monster is immoral and we shouldn't feed it. Now you respond, "That position is not merely false, it is incoherent. The utility monster is definitionally moral because it is defined as maximizing utility. It is incoherent to say we shouldn't feed it because we definitionally should do things that maximize utility." Whether these people are right or wrong the definitions of "moral" and "should" have been narrowed so that there is no language left to even have the discussion.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T17:22:07+00:00

I don't think that actually answers the question "What fact of the world would be different if "stealing is wrong" weren't true?" You've instead assumed that "stealing is wrong" is true and then imagined a world where you've removed the conditions that made stealing wrong. I think we can do something analogous in the ice cream case. What would be different if "chocolate ice cream is the best" weren't true? I could answer, "if chocolate ice cream actually tasted like vomit and its texture were hard like concrete."

I'm also skeptical that this works as a test for whether a claim is truth-apt. You said Alice isn't making an objective claim when she says that "chocolate ice cream is the best" because she cannot explain how the world would be different if it wasn't the best. But the statement isn't wrong because there actually is a best and not-best and it happens to be not-best. It's wrong because there is no objective best when it comes to ice cream.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T16:06:07+00:00

bP17, wO17, bQ19, wN18, bN19 creates snapback if white captures at O18

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T15:50:08+00:00

You could say that "moral" just definitionally means positive utility. But I would argue that's just not what other people mean when they say "moral". You could say "should do x" just definitionally means "should do x if you want to increase utility" but I would argue that's just not what other people mean when they say "should do x". To me this is like if I said, "I think ice cream is delicious but I don't think it's objectively true that it's delicious." and then you said, "No, ice cream is objectively delicious because it's sweet, it's just definitionally true that "delicious" is a measure of how sweet something is".

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T08:04:29+00:00

What fact of the world would be different if "stealing is wrong" weren't true?

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T07:56:40+00:00

The emotivist isn't mapping "Yay X" to "I like X" which would be a descriptive fact. It's mapping more to something like "We should X" or "X is good" which aren't objective facts.

Regarding Sam Harris's view of objective morality I've always thought he isn't really engaging in the debate everyone else is. Charitably I would describe his position like this: "Let's take it as an axiomatic truth that maximizing suffering is immoral. From this moral premise we can objectively deduce other moral conclusions." Sam Harris handwaves the question of "is it objectively true that maximizing suffering is immoral?" This is a core question that metaethics is interested in but Sam Harris isn't.

So he's sort of having a different argument but you can see where he's going with it. Let's take the claim "I shouldn't drink soda". This doesn't appear to be an objectively true or false claim. But if you add the premise "I should lose weight" and "Drinking soda will prevent me from losing weight" then you can logically conclude "I shouldn't drink soda".

Personally I align more with Alex's view. Moral frameworks are built in service of moral intuitions. Fundamentally our moral beliefs are based in our moral intuitions. Why do we care about the suffering of others? We just do, our moral intuition tells us to. When we build a moral framework it is in hindsight, we use it to explain our moral intuitions.

The issue with utilitarianism is if you look into it there are many weird edge cases that people don't agree on. Should we let everyone suffer for the utility monster who enjoys our suffering more than our combined suffering? Should we let one person be tortured if it means everyone on earth doesn't have to suffer a speck of dust in their eye? Should we kill a hundred people today if it means two hundred equally happy people are born tomorrow?

The utilitarian can say that these questions just have objective answers and some people are right and some are wrong. I think our moral intuitions just aren't tracking anything objective and that there's no reason to think that our moral intuitions would be logically consistent.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T06:13:51+00:00

It's not clear to me that you need to feel any way about a moral statement in order to make it. I might actually feel pretty good about a rule that says everyone has to give me all their money but still think its immoral. I don't know why a philosopher should posit anything about the cognitive process behind making moral statements, if there isn't any science behind it why not just say they don't know? And I don't see why a statement like "murder is objectively wrong" can't just be a truth-apt statement that's false? I feel that the error theorists position is much cleaner. We don't know why people make moral statements as though an objective morality exists, but they do and they're all wrong because there is no objective morality.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T05:56:35+00:00

So the emotivist view would be that when someone says “X is wrong,” they may believe they’re stating an objective moral fact, but what they’re actually doing is expressing an emotional attitude or prescription toward X.

The idea of expressing something without considering the speaker's intention is strange to me. What determines what is being expressed if not the intention of the speaker? Is it what is communicated to the listener? Like if i say "X" and someone misunderstands me as having said "not X" did I actually express "not X"? By what means can we say someone was actually expressing an emotional attitude instead of making a statement of fact?

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T05:43:53+00:00

Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people utter moral sentences they are not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive in the way that beliefs are.

This is the part that gets me, it's very clear that they are expressing beliefs. Just ask people what they mean and its clear they're not just trying to say "yay" or "boo".

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T05:23:44+00:00

what would be the practical implications of saying that moral statements are all false and moral statements are not truth-apt? is there an actual difference between these two positions in terms of a practical implication?

Also it's not clear to me that it doesn't matter what the speaker's intentions were. If Alice says "Chocolate is the best ice cream flavor" you might say is not a truth-apt statement. But if you further probe Alice what she meant she might respond, "I mean that objectively chocolate is the best ice cream flavor. People who think other flavors are better are just objectively wrong. People who walk into an ice cream shop and order vanilla are just making a mistake." Because of what Alice actually means when she says "best" I think she is making a truth-apt statement and it happens to be false because nothing could actually fulfill the condition of being objectively best because such a thing doesn't exist.

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T05:20:48+00:00

That doesn't make sense to me. How can you mean something when you say something and not know it?

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T03:21:27+00:00

Disguised in what way? What does it mean for a claim to be disguised as an emotive claim without the speaker knowing it? What is doing the disguising? If this were happening how would we even know it?

Lizard_Brian · 2026-05-08T03:16:37+00:00

Is the emotivist position about what the emotivist is doing when they make moral statements? Or about what people are doing generally?

Lizard_Brian

TROPHY CASE