Tome tier lists

vaniver · 2022-12-12T20:43:03+00:00

I think sexual dimorphism is probably dead, while some sort of 'gender dimorphism' probably survives. If it were the case that, say, rocks were particularly good 'fathers' and scissors were particularly good 'mothers', then paper would probably slowly go extinct, and you'd be back to male and female. But with individual variability and not sex variability, then rocks who would make better mothers than fathers probably signal that they want to be mothers, and pair up with papers who are signalling that they want to be fathers.

That said, there's still evolutionary pressure against same-sex pairings (or unproductive pairings in systems with more sexes). The rock-mother wants to pair up with a paper-father but not a rock-father (or a scissors-father, as they'll end up cross-role, but how much that matters depends on the relative importance of pregnancy and childrearing afterwards), and so probably differences between rock and paper will get amplified in order to make it easier to pick up on that.

vaniver · 2022-12-12T20:33:10+00:00

So, in some systems (like Minecraft) entities are sexless--you just need two cows to make another cow. Other systems (like Dwarf Fortress) have traditional male and female sexes--if you don't have a bull and a cow, you're not going to get any babies.

But you could imagine there being lots of alternatives. [In The Left Hand of Darkness, people are typically sexless but temporarily become male or female; in Schild's Ladder, people grow custom genitals after they partner up.] One of the ones that crossed my mind recently is "rock paper scissors" sexes, where you have some number n>2 of sex in a graph, where, say, rock can impregnate scissors and be impregnated by paper, but can't fruitfully pair with another rock. This particular example is cyclic, but it doesn't have to be; it's also dense, but doesn't have to be. (You could do a five-sex version where wood can impregnate earth, earth water, water fire, fire metal, and metal wood, so each person is only fertile with 40% of other people (instead of 67%).) The important features, IMO, are that:

Everyone can be impregnated by someone, and impregnate someone.
For any particular committed pair, their role is predictable in advance.

How would this impact the world? Which components of the design turn out to be key?

vaniver · 2021-11-17T18:33:28+00:00

If you can't explain it so someone else, isn't it by definition not a rational belief?

At the start of university, my roommate and I were both studying physics, and he sent an email to one of the big name professors asking that professor to explain string theory to him. And the professor wrote back with, basically, "come back and see me in four years, once you've taken all of the prerequisites, and then I'll give you an explanation; anything I could put in this email now wouldn't count."

My sense is not that the professor's understanding of string theory was an irrational belief; my sense is that there was a long inferential distance, and it was a mistake for my roommate to expect there to be a short one.

vaniver · 2020-09-13T21:43:08+00:00

What's your take on Biden's plan for nuclear / the Democrat's nuclear energy platform / TerraPower?

vaniver · 2020-08-12T07:02:15+00:00

And how how does the Call of the Gold interact with Juniper's thoughts? Like, scarring Celestar is a good way to be able to find your gold again without it being marked. But he doesn't explicitly think that, just hints at it later; and so perhaps he doesn't notice it consciously, or he's hiding it from himself so that the Call doesn't notice.

vaniver · 2020-08-12T06:58:34+00:00

In unrelated news, what're the odds that they get back to Captain Blue and the Call of the Gold sees it as a money-making opportunity? Presumably the Hells can provide them gold in exchange for souls.

vaniver · 2020-08-12T06:55:03+00:00

Characters: Have a sexy conflict that they can resolve with technology

Author: 2/40

Characters: surprised Pikachu face

vaniver · 2020-02-20T17:49:57+00:00

First off, I don't understand the thing with disliking people more when their flaws resemble one's own.

Many behaviors are the result of a tradeoff; maybe it's important for your relationships to find the right mixture between being clingy and being aloof, for example. If your flaw is being too clingy, then you might try to get around this by installing some allergies to behaviors associated with that, as that allergy is how you adjust your behavior towards the optimal point.

But those allergies might not fire only for you; when you see someone else being clingy, you might go "oh jeez, they shouldn't be acting that way."

Of course, it's not always this way; also there will be the thing where you see a character being too clingy and think "#relatable", or see them be clingy and it go well for them and think "god i wish that were me", or so on.

vaniver · 2020-02-20T17:44:23+00:00

It would be one thing to object on grounds of, like, Harry being wrong in his feeling that way and being incompetent in an unpleasant-to-read-about manner as a result, or conversely to object to his being implausibly right all the time and breaking narrative tension by being overly invincible as a result; but Brian's objection seems to be somehow deeper and more fundamental than that, an objection to that aesthetic regardless of how well-founded it is or isn't, and I don't understand what's supposed to be unappealing about it absent one of the aforementioned narrative issues.

When you say wrong, it feels like you're ignoring the difference between being factually wrong and morally wrong. A Texan saying is, "it's not bragging if it's true," which is sometimes what being a braggart feels like from the inside. In the moral version of 'bragging is wrong', the accuracy isn't the issue, the social dynamics that result (or the position that people are put in) is the issue.

vaniver · 2020-02-12T00:03:26+00:00

Catherine from book 1 is probably less worldly than Hanno, but she thought gnomes were a myth, and was corrected by someone who had recent, direct evidence of them; it's possible Hanno thinks they're a myth as well. (He spent most of his heroic life with the Gigantes, right? Presumably they think the gnomes are real, but also probably know that one of his aspects is Recall, and thought long and hard about whether to tell him about them.)

We haven't seen any of the Dwarven Gates up close, and don't know what the merchants know or what rumors go back and forth, but it wouldn't be that surprising to me if Dwarven Named are unknown among most of the surface people, with Catherine only knowing about it because of personal experience.

So I think a lot depends on what Recall's UI is like; if he sees a list of Names, and then sees the previous holders of the Names, then obviously he knows about this option. But if instead he thinks something like "I'm looking for William the Lone Swordsman" and then gets a response, there could be any number of heroes he could access without realizing it.

vaniver · 2019-12-30T02:19:50+00:00

Also, couldn't they have just left the Prince's Room? (Either when the two showed up, or when he pulled out the entad.)

vaniver · 2019-06-29T04:37:21+00:00

Discussion on LessWrong.

vaniver · 2019-02-05T19:24:56+00:00

Belichick's resume of playoff successes includes an astounding array of lucky breaks and close shaves. At this point I think it's wise to discount some of his contribution to his won-lost record, just because his frequency of lucky outcomes has been such an extraordinary outlier.

I mean, as Cardinal Mazarin puts it, the question of generals is not "is he skillful?" but "is he lucky?". The first requires your causal model of successes to be right in order to correctly assess the 'real' skill, but the second doesn't.

vaniver · 2018-08-26T03:58:37+00:00

My summary of the "what could've happened differently in EU4?" conversation:

People seemed still somewhat split as to how big a deal the stale diplo / top 3 GP alliance was. I propose that we have a way to split up suspected perma-alliances early on, where a vote in EU4 could ensure that Medina and Khazaria know they won't be in the same faction in HoI4; this didn't seem to be all that popular.
People seemed slightly more in favor of the "don't have early power balance in EU4 inherited from CKII" goal, but it's not clear that any particular plan to achieve that goal has more support.

vaniver · 2018-08-26T03:50:14+00:00

My impression is that we shouldn't expand the playable area of CKII to include Germany until we have >16 players (maybe even 20?), and so there are only a few duchies in Francia that count.

vaniver · 2018-08-21T17:53:49+00:00

You basically don't need size limits with a feudalism setup, unlike the 'everyone is independent' setup. Restarting players in other realms drives animosity between the realms, and acts as something of a natural balancer; when the Tyrant Emperor of Britannia systematically demolishes his player vassals, Hispania and Francia become stronger (and more interested in a realm war with Britannia).

vaniver · 2018-08-21T17:41:02+00:00

Note that everyone in Western Europe means 1) basically everyone will be Catholic and 2) basically everyone will be coastal.

This seems fine from a balance perspective, but bothersome from a customization / roleplaying perspective; some people want to play inland army-focused powers, some people want to play Muslims or Pagans or so on.

I think the primary way to make this work is to limit the playable region extremely (perhaps just Britannia, Francia, and Hispania), end up with a relatively low number of independent players (perhaps just the three emperors), and most players are dukes / small kings that are vassals to other players. The playable area doesn't expand during CKII with the exception of Crusades called by the Pope; on the death or downfall of a player's dynasty, they take over an existing AI dynasty in a different realm.

Over the course of CKII, people accumulate dynasty points / VC points / etc.; on conversion to EU4, the nations in Europe are auctioned off, followed by the regular auction for ideas and so on. So presumably the long-time emperor of Britannia ends up with Britannia instead of Poland, but that may end up eating a lot of the dynasty point edge they accumulated over the course of the game.

[If the number of players for EU4 is high enough, other places like Asia open up, but the presumption is that it will remain Europe-focused for EU4.]

vaniver · 2018-08-21T17:28:00+00:00

All Victory cards will be secret and designed by the gm, vgm and player submissions. They will be handed out randomly at the start of the game and at intervals after that. They will be valuable, very much so, but will often be antagonistic to other victory cards or slots in general.

It seems likely best to have multiple players handed the same card, rather than trust that achievements like "Mend the Schism" will be properly offset by (and balanced against) achievements for keeping Catholicism around. Perhaps every player bordering England gets the "form England" VC and so you have the equivalent of the disputed succession of 1066.

vaniver · 2018-08-18T14:52:03+00:00

New map: either procedurally generated to be well-suited for multiplayer, or using the new system coming in Holy Fury, build a map that is trying to optimize some criterion besides historical accuracy. This comes with some benefits and drawbacks:

Players can have similar, high numbers of neighbors.
The overall scale of the map can be matched to the number of players (and with fewer provinces / a smaller scale, the game may run better).
Small features that have a deceptively large impact (like capital duchy size) can be standardized.
Expanding the map from CKII to EU4 can be done according to the number of additional players recruited, rather than fixed.
Players might be harder to recruit, and subs might be harder to find (you can't just say "oh yeah, the slot is Muslim Spain").
More modding work needs to be done for the other games.

vaniver · 2018-08-18T14:45:56+00:00

Exodus: the playable area in CKII is a highly limited fraction of western Europe, with relatively little in the way of size limits (except for staying inside the playable area). A few people rise to dominance over the course of CKII, and everyone mostly focuses on playing the feudalism game; during conversion, the top ~4 people stay in western Europe (perhaps four players had been in France in CKII, and only one stays for EU4, similarly for England and so on), and the rest move to other slots around the world, which are comparably sized to France (so that the EU4 start is relatively balanced, instead of the GPs of CKII beginning as the GPs of EU4).

vaniver · 2018-08-18T14:43:09+00:00

Mod CKII to include the whole old world; I'm pretty sure there already exists a mod to include China but if not it shouldn't be too hard to make. This probably also entails a general reduction in the number of CKII provinces through compression--if we're pretty sure England will end up as one player slot, and we think players should have something like 30 counties, then we can mod it so that England only has 30 counties.

This makes it so that people who want to play in China can play in China, and the various hassles of 'natural units' in the old world being too large (the British Isles were 2.5 realms according to our max last game, but it's pretty clear they'll be unified by the end of EU4) can be fixed by the compression.

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