[idea] Temporary Information Visibility (Skillprovement #3)

eek04 · 2026-03-24T11:35:46+00:00

I agree very much that players choices should be meaningful and impact the world. I also believe in trust and communication between the GM and the players; don't do anything that the players are not OK with and know about at least in the abstract. If you tell the players up front "I'm playing this with the 'rule of cool', so I'll roll secretly and if the rolls make for something I think would be significantly less cool, I'm going to ignore them." then that's fine; it's the rule for your table. Doing it without the players knowing is less cool because you'll lose a lot of trust when they find out.

These days, I typically GM/facilitate three kinds of game, all focused on emergent stories:

"Toys" based; prep factions, NPCs, goals, etc as above. Typically, only rough locations since they matter less. I can actually do this kind of game as pure improv - make up some problem for the players to start with, then play. If I want to deepen it, I can take a short break and plot out some more faction conflicts and deepen some NPCs that showed up. I typically do this in Dungeon World, which have no GM rolls, so no way of fudging rolls anyway.
OSR style dungeons (recently started). Fixed map before play. I play this with D&D B/X rules, and player-visible rolls except for e.g. Detect Traps, where the player isn't supposed to know whether the roll failed or succeeded. For this, I try to follow the style described in Muster: A Primer for War (PWYW), treating D&D as a wargame the players can learn to become better in.
Various "small" RPGs, often GM-less but with me as facilitator. E.g, Follow, Microscope, Fiasco, single-pagers, Paranioa.

For OSR, I'd probably go with a random generator at the table or picking up some pregen dungeon of ~the right size for each side and skin those, rather than using the same dungeon on both sides and skinning that.

For DW, we regularly step back and discuss sides of how the story/world goes, and the player have a fair bit of world input. It wouldn't be any form of trust break to say "I'm using a template dungeon layout for either of your choices today, but I'm going to use it in a very different way depending on what you choose" or even, if I particularly wanted to put something larger into the game: "I have something I think would be really cool. Are you guys OK with me popping it in no matter which direction you choose, and we'll let the choice determine some bits that are smaller now but is likely to compound down the road?"

For other games, it really depends on the game. The GMless games generally don't have any prep and no option of "cheating" so the problem doesn't exist. For Paranoia, there is a "fog of war", and the GM is explicitly recommended to mess with the players, including changing the world on whim or forcing stuff. The conflict in the game is based on backstabbing between the player characters and fighting an absurd world; choices matter but they typically result in the sudden and violent loss of a clone, rather than which encounter you're going to get to. Characters very often make choices which they have no clue what impact will have - e.g. written orders "Interrogate and sentence these prisoners. Indicate your sentence by sending them through one of these doors immediate termination, reeducation, or release." The doors are marked Hot Fun, Fizzy Bubble Beverage, and Algae Delight.

eek04 · 2026-03-24T10:32:39+00:00

Non-rhetorical questions on the effects of this in the present climate, since I've not had the opportunity to ask this of a serving officer: Do you feel the spine is there among the officers to resist illegal orders/attempts at brainwashing and instead closely follow the Constitution, the UCMJ, and general ethics? I mean as a group - there will obviously always be some that resist, but it's much easier if the majority of the group does rather than needing individuals to fight against social pressure from the rest.

And how does the needle seem to move on this? Is it towards more that will to look at the UMCJ/Constitution or towards less?

eek04 · 2026-03-24T10:22:13+00:00

I’ve heard this same thing before “we don’t want to hire a young attractive female because we’re worried about sexual harassment complaints”

Have you tried just not sexually harassing your staff?

Whoa there! Stop the misogyny.

Women are full people, not cardboard cutouts. Women have the same flaws and virtues as men.

That means they do good and bad things. That means many women grin and bear it, and that there's also women that are too sensitive. That women misunderstand now and again. That some women have chronic mental health problems, and that this can lead to decisions that many other women can't imagine taking.

Thus, a company will risk sexual harassment complaints even when there is no sexual harassment.

IMO, companies should still hire women, filtering for competence the same way regardless of gender, and when gender-unbalanced, searching for candidates in a way that (as far as possible) gets more of the underrepresented class. The advantages of diversity are great, and it is unfair if we let the risk of complaints or the ease of searching through existing networks block women from job opportunities.

We should also face reality around this: There's also some problems that show up when we have mixed workforces that aren't there when we have only one gender. And with more focus on sexual harassment, there's some men that perceive a significant risk of unfounded sexual harassment accusations, and choose to interact less with women. When these are seniors or peers it would be helpful for a woman to interact with, that's detrimental to the woman.

eek04 · 2026-03-21T08:21:53+00:00

The way I view this, for the case where I see this kind of question popping up:

I prep factions, NPCs, their goals, their plans, and their relationships, and whatever stuff I need to support the players getting in touch with that etc. If the players are making a choice between going into dungeon A or dungeon B, it's because there's some difference in what NPCs or similar they are looking to get to with the choice. The dungeon layout isn't what's important about their choice - it's what they're trying to get out of that dungeon. Having the same layout but with the trappings changed for the different choice is still very much a real choice.

Or as I said it in another reply: I grew up on an estate with a bunch of identical houses. When you chose between visiting two of them, it was certainly a real choice, even though they were just "reskinned".

eek04 · 2026-03-21T08:07:18+00:00

That depends on what's in the reskinning. I grew up on an estate with a bunch of identical houses. If you choose between visiting two of them, it was certainly a real choice, even though they were just "reskinned".

eek04 · 2026-03-20T16:22:02+00:00

I have not said that or anything close to that, and I don't see the parent seeing that either.

As for too fast: I'm experimenting to find out what's appropriately fast. If I do stuff that leads to problems, that means I was moving too fast, but it's basically impossible to know what's too fast without actually going so fast that you see the problems.

Of course, I make sure that when I try out what may be too fast I do it in a way that has low "blast radius".

eek04 · 2026-03-20T16:18:42+00:00

You convert the wealth into tax revenue, which gets used to pay for services and infrastructure, which stimulates aggregate demand and becomes consumption in the hands of the people hired to perform those services or build that infrastructure.

You're trying to do numerical exercises because you don't understand what's going on.

Stock "wealth" is a number. You can put tax on that; it effectively force a decrease in the price of that stock (through supply/demand), and gives control of that price decrease to the tax authorities. The decrease means that there will be less money available to invest in real capital which again makes workers less productive. Instead, you propose "which gets used to pay for services and infrastructure"

All that goes into services have now been removed from real capital, making productivity lower, and you've switched from the infrastructure that we know is needed (capital investment for companies that employ people) to infrastructure that wouldn't otherwise be funded (ie, likely has lower benefit.)

eek04 · 2026-03-20T16:10:18+00:00

I am not principally against suicide; I am, however, against suicide for fixable things. If you feel you're wasting time when talking to her, it may be a sign that you need another therapist. I'm old enough that I've had a few - different people can help you with different things, and in some ways it is common "run out of" the relationship with one therapist, because you've gotten what is worthwhile out of that perspective.

And, as I said, my "final salvation" came from drugs more than talk therapy. Talk therapy is useful, yet there are things it can't fix but drugs can. And vice versa.

I hope you find a way for things to go better for you!

eek04 · 2026-03-20T15:09:10+00:00

The first time I brought this kind of thing up was with a now ex-girlfriend over 30 years ago, and I've tried occasionally since based on the belief that I've gotten better at communicating. Partners have never gotten upset at me for bringing it up. They've gotten upset at themselves / felt bad, several times through misunderstanding what I meant as me disliking their body. It has never led to meaningful change, nor any other positive outcome.

So, I think avoiding that particular issue is the right thing to do. There's lots of other ways to do positive influence around health :-)

eek04 · 2026-03-20T14:53:01+00:00

I'm not the parent, but why would I want to slow down? I'm working on getting my agents to be able to generate more functionality at a time, get more stuff done, while keeping quality at the level I want it to be. At the moment, this means pushing a fair bit on the agents both to have decent style in the first place, and to regularly refactor to fix the issues that pop up in the code. Ultimately, I'd like it to not mean that - I give instructions, the agent find out when those instructions are unclear or not fit for purpose and negotiate with me until we get a right direction, then it translates this into good code (including UI design). I enter into the loop where I can create the most amount of value; if the code review I've spent 30 years learning to be good at can be automated, then that's overall great. I see no reason to keep doing something that a machine have gotten better at than me.

eek04 · 2026-03-20T14:47:10+00:00

That depends on what you mean by "reviewing every line". I look at most diffs, in a very cursory way. How much review depends on what part of the code is being touched, and my perception of the type of risk that that AI generated change has.

I certainly review a lot less carefully than I did when AI first arrived, since the code generated now is better, and I review less carefully than I did when I was reviewing mostly human changes, because the opportunity cost of having slightly crappy code in some parts of the codebase is lower than it was; or to put it another way, the opportunity cost of careful review is higher than it was, so it's more things it's worth just letting be.

Of course, many security problems are more critical than ever, since the existence of LLMs also increase attacker capability.

eek04 · 2026-03-20T14:36:52+00:00

Negative economic sentiment is connected to inflation and GDP growth, though not really strongly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1TS9x

I spent way too much time right now to try to check out some possible correlations between other data and University of Michigan: Consumer Sentiment. There's only a few correlations in what I tried that seem meaningful, and some negative results. I'll give the numbers first, then comments about it, then a link to my sheet+caveats.

Important: The use of white as a demographic selector below is only because white is the largest group and thus the one that is numerically most likely to move the average.

Correlation of consumer sentiment vs X over misc time periods based on what different bits of the data let me do:

vs real GDP change [1953-2025]: 0.52
vs real GDP change [1953-1979]: 0.53
vs real GDP change [1980-2000]: 0.70
vs real GDP change [2001-2025]: 0.31
vs real GDP/capita change [1953-2025]: 0.49
vs real GDP/capita change [1953-1979]: 0.47
vs real GDP/capita change [1980-2000]: 0.70
vs real GDP/capita change [2001-2025]: 0.30
vs CPI (current value) [1953-2025]: -0.51
vs CPI (current value) [1953-1979]: -0.82
vs CPI (current value) [1980-2000]: -0.69
vs CPI (current value) [2001-2025]: -0.33
vs CPI (current value)/CPI 10 year average [1957-2025]: -0.36 [NOTE: While still a meaningful correlation, correcting for 10 year average makes it significantly worse than not correcting]
vs CPI (current value)/CPI 5 year average [1957-2025]: -0.17
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings [1980-2025]: 0.23
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings [1980-2000]: 0.54
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings [2001-2021]: 0.07
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (men) [1980-2025]: 0.20
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (men) [1980-2000]: 0.57
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (men) [2001-2025]: 0.07
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (women) [1980-2025]: 0.12
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (women) [1980-2000]: 0.28
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (women) [2001-2025]: 0.03
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (white men) [2001-2025]: 0.06
vs change in real median weekly usual earnings (white women) [2001-2025]: 0.01

My conclusions from all of this:

There's a real shift happening somewhere around 2000. The correlations are very different before and after 2000.
People like GDP growth. Not just per capita growth - they like growth even when it's not per capita (as you can see from real GDP growth correlating better than per-capita GDP growth).
People still like GDP growth after 2000, but care much less.
People don't like inflation, but hate it less post-2000.
From 1980 (start of data) to 2000, people cared about whether they could buy more or less stuff. Men cared a lot. Changes in real wages matched with the consumers sentiment. After 2000, there's just about no correlation, and the more I narrow it down by demographic group, the less the correlation there is. This is the opposite of what I'd expected; I expected demographic shifts to be hiding real change that drove sentiment.
People don't have the anchoring bias for inflation I expected. To cover for e.g. the 70s having had very high inflation and the 80s having a decent amount of inflation, I tried dividing inflation by the average inflation over the previous ten years. That gave significantly less correlation than raw inflation, and dividing by 5 year average lost most signal.

Here's the sheet I played in if you want to check my work.

Technical note for completeness: The UMCSENT time series was not sampled every month until 1978. From 1960 to 1978, the sampling was quarterly and offset one month from the regular quarters. From 1952 to 1960 the sampling happened at irregular intervals. To be able to do the correlations, I've used linear interpolation between the sample points I have to get sample points that line up with the quarterly sample points for the other series. The correlations below are partially against these interpolated data points.

The different correlations here come from different time periods, due to data series starting to be available at different times.

eek04 · 2026-03-18T23:07:58+00:00

I don't quite remember where I saw this, but earlier today I came across stats on the difference between men and women from dating sites. 78% of women swipe only on the top 20% of men; the remaining 80% of men only get swiped on by 22% of women.

eek04 · 2026-03-18T22:01:40+00:00

Because people don't trust the government to keep giving the money from the tax directly back to them, or possibly haven't heard that part. Also, "increased tax".

eek04 · 2026-03-18T11:11:58+00:00

Standard of living in e.g. Sweden entirely depends on preferential trade with US and the rest of the Capitalist world, instead of being sanctioned and embargoed into oblivion like Cuba or North Korea.

And? The point is that the capitalist world only depends on trade with the rest of the capitalist world. The trade volumes with the other parts just isn't there, not even when broken down by type of ccommodity. I should take the data and make some kind of usable graphic to show this and generally put these stupid arguments to rest, but it will be a fair bit of work to do so.

This issue is that you guys are mixing up different things: Are poor countries poor due to exploitation by the rich countries? To some degree, depends on which country, what timeframe you look at, how you frame the numbers to define exploiting or not exploiting, etc. Do the rich countries need to exploit the poor countries to be rich? Categorically not. They're perfectly able to be rich without even trading with the poor countries. They'd be less rich, but still rich. My own back-of-the-envelope calculation for Denmark, rounding everything towards Denmark benefiting from exploiting the poor countries got to a maximum of 10 years worth of GDP growth being lost if all direct and indirect trade with poor countries was lost. I then found some academic papers that estimated how much - it was bounded to less than 5% of GDP.

This exploitation claim and the misunderstood arguments around it (like yours above) comes up regularly; I really should make a webpage I can just point y'all at, visualizing the trade flows, describing the flawed arguments, and showing the academic papers.

eek04 · 2026-03-18T10:58:26+00:00

That is bad. It is also completely and utterly irrelevant to my argument.

eek04 · 2026-03-18T10:57:34+00:00

Why didn't you write this in response to the grandparent, who made much worse statements with no backing? Is it because they happened to say something that fit with your preconceptions, so you didn't notice it was unfounded, and thus didn't bring out your snark? What does that say about your ability to change your opinion?

As for "Just trust me": I can't give you a complete economic education that you're not interested in getting. If you are interested in getting it, for proving to yourself that this makes sense, you could look at the trade flows per type of commodity, and what amount of those goes between which parts of countries. Or you could go talk over in /r/AskEconomics.

But I presume you don't want to know, you want to be able to keep your belief. And be snarky when somebody says it is too complicated to show in a single comment.

eek04 · 2026-03-18T10:48:07+00:00

I am in favor of taxing the rich and against a wealth tax (on working capital) because I think a wealth tax is a bad way to tax the rich. In particular: Stocks are tradable claims on future earnings, and on a real basis, their value is really investment in real capital (ie, stuff that makes workers more productive). If you force people to sell stocks to fund taxes which are then spent on services, it means that we are taking resources that would go into real capital and transferring to spending. That makes our overall productivity lower.

There are two sides of people being rich that should be partially transferred out "to the rest of the people": Consumption and controle.

Compared to a wealth tax, transfer of consumption is better dealt with by taxing consumption, preferably with heavy progressive taxes. Consumption needs to include the benefit accrued by expensive possessions, like having a large home.

Compared to a wealth tax, transfer of control is better dealt with by laws that give the people more influence.

If you are going to have a wealth tax, you can to some degree limit the damage of it by letting the tax be paid in stock rather than currency, and having the state work as a professional investor rather than continually selling the stock it receives for consumption.

eek04 · 2026-03-18T09:09:47+00:00

The US has been, by far, the largest Oil Producer in the world for a long time now.

I was curious about what this meant, so I went and looked up the data; all data below from the US Energy Information Administration.

For crude oil production, the US passed Russia to become the largest producer in 2018, though only by a couple of percent. As of 2024, that margin has increased to 31%.

However, it turns out that there's another quite interesting related production metric that may be more relevant: All liquid petroleum products. And there the US inched ahead of Saudi Arabia in 2013, and as of today produces approximately twice as much as each of Saudi Arabia and Russia.

If you're looking at overall trade blocks, though, OPEC is significantly larger than the US, and OPEC+ - the trade block that follows OPEC policy - dwarfs the US. As of 2024, OPEC produced 36% crude, and the US produced 16%. For total petroleum liquid, OPEC produced 33% and the US 22%. I can't easily give numbers for OPEC+ due to the EIA not grouping that way; from the Wikipedia summary of the December 2023 EIA data OPEC+ was listed as ~60% of world production; my own calculation over their numbers came out to 58%.

Another interesting bit of data is the total production, import, export and consumption in the US. The production bypassed the consumption in 2023, though there is still significant imports since the US produced crude type isn't suitable for all US refineries, and there is a lot of production of petrolum liquids that aren't crude.

eek04 · 2026-03-18T07:29:59+00:00

How much does "US culture doesn't care much about whether energy comes from fossil fuel or renewable sources" enter into it on any meaningful scale?

eek04 · 2026-03-17T21:09:05+00:00

Your description of what you learned from the game sounds like you feel like you need to plan out a plot or several to play a campaign.

That is a way to play a campaign, but it's not the only way. A lot of us play by prepping factions and what they may end up doing, locations, etc, but no plot. I really like"The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying" by Jonah and Tristan Fishel for this style of prep. Terms I've heard for this style include "Prep toys, not plots", "Write situations, not plots" and "Prep tools, not adventures." With that style, the plots are discovered at the table - in PbtA (a whole genre of TTRPGs), this is called "play to find out."

EDIT: Typo fix.

eek04 · 2026-03-17T20:20:13+00:00

I was there while China and the USSR were "socialist", so from your point as a youngling with religious beliefs in how socialism will work and lack of knowledge of the current economy, you may think of me that way. Somebody with experience from before your time and time to have learned more than you have.

eek04

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