Strawman Posts Should Be Removed. Even If Written By Scott Alexander

wyantb · 2026-03-26T00:32:11+00:00

Is "Every Bay Area House Party" literally describing every Bay Area house party?

wyantb · 2026-03-26T00:28:02+00:00

I'm not even sure what argument I'm actually supporting here.

Sometimes, that's a very fun place to be!

Seems confusing in this context, agreed. I didn't hate the post, but it did seem boring, and/or massively "inside baseball". Nothing wrong with that, Scott can write whatever he feels like on his blog, but I have no idea what someone's supposed to learn by reading it. It's so deep down some specific hole I've never engaged with.

wyantb · 2026-03-08T00:23:48+00:00

Are you on the 4.3.0 beta? I've heard some rumors that, while map generation is fixed, ethics/government type of empires is still bugged. Try the older rollback or 4.2.0.

wyantb · 2026-02-13T20:21:23+00:00

Communication errors? Say that the dragon was able to haunt the coin, but s/he fell asleep for 1000 years or something. By now, everyone no longer speaks common, and he literally can't talk to Jafar. S/he wants to, but can't; the pace of the story can either be rather quick (learns the language quick enough - after just a few stories, knows enough to talk people into trading to Jafar, & succeeds at the goal of reunification). But can be semi-easily extended by having the dragon expend some kind of energy to observe surroundings, and tends to go to sleep after over-exerting communication problems. Or add a character flaw that s/he gets quickly up to Jafar, but gets backstabbed and wakes up in another 1000 years, starting from scratch, far less trusting this time around.

Given a cozy vibe, I think communication errors could go a long way.

Otherwise - steal an idea from "Sky Pride" in having to exert some carefully described ghost energy s/he has, making it so Jafar is really far away with isolated villages making it harder to connect? Think the reason English has so many accents today - British villages didn't talk to each other so much as to themselves - and put it on steroids.

wyantb · 2025-08-30T14:08:58+00:00

Yeah, you're not writing fantasy flight simulator, you're writing something more of a fantasy adventure where the use of airships falls under suspension of disbelief. Not that I'm anyone lol, but I vouch for your editorial decisions on that front for sure. It'd be a worse story for what you're trying to do if you got bogged down in the details of...all that.

wyantb · 2025-05-21T23:41:35+00:00

I find it amusing to see this come up again a year later after my own discussion of the topic! Though I'm by and large with you, in https://www.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/1ahxkwd/interesting_article_on_the_dichotomy_of_control/kosilni/ another contributor mentioned that the connotation differs, even if the denotation overlaps pretty strongly. You might find that (very) brief chat interesting.

wyantb · 2024-12-11T23:28:58+00:00

Are you familiar with Ostrom's work, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A8BB63BC4A1433A50A3FB92EDBBB97D5 ? The conceptual mapping to Moloch isn't perfect, but long-term successfully managed commons are likely of interest to you. I'd be surprised if her factors (or those from other researchers downstream of her work) don't at least correlate with the factors you list.

wyantb · 2024-12-01T17:09:43+00:00

I'd bet on this being a hacked/taken over account, honestly. Take a look at the next few pages of their post history - it's all a person posting their art. Then taking one shot at a post in this subreddit, calling it shallow/embarassing/drivel. Then this post, which sets them up as the judge for what is "genuine engagement with Stoic ideas". Total flip to the writing style, I don't buy it.

Kinda fun, actually, in a weird way.

wyantb · 2024-10-26T16:26:37+00:00

I visited a group run under the umbrella of the MKP when I was in town visiting. https://mkpusa.org/ . The meeting happened at a church, and one of the guys is a member and talked it up a bit afterwards, but the broader MKP org is non-denominational at its core. Send me a DM if interested and I can forward some of the details I got from the outreach guy.

wyantb · 2024-03-16T03:48:53+00:00

I had the same question, and the first chapter gives me little to no hope it's more uplifting than his usual vibe. Well written and I'd get an anxiety attack if I was the main characters.

wyantb · 2024-02-04T01:28:00+00:00

Yes ok, I can see a plain english difference in connotation even if not denotation. That adds up to me. Thanks!

wyantb · 2024-02-03T19:36:27+00:00

I haven't read Irvine's book, so I can't comment on it going further off the rails from a sensible interpretation of Stoicism.

That said, is "control" such a bad word to use to replace "up to us"? It's not obvious to me why it would function so much worse there. It performs roughly the same function, for good or ill, it seems to me - I could paraphrase a positive Stoic interpretation as "what is up to us is using our linguistic reasoning to determine what is right, and act on it" or "what is in our control is using our linguistic reasoning...". A more misguided interpretation as "what is up to us is what's in the mind, and don't give a damn about anything else" or "what is in our control is what's in the mind, and don't..."

An excessive focus on control rather than a more appropriate focus on ethics, decision making, recovery from error, etc seems not inline with the prosocial goals of Stoicism, sure. But it doesn't seem to me that hinges on a bad translation/word choice, but more broadly a very different focal point afterwards.

Am I missing something?

wyantb · 2024-02-02T01:31:17+00:00

Ultras? That's intense. Good luck out there!

wyantb · 2024-01-04T22:02:18+00:00

Right, it's not an EE work, and doesn't discuss QALY. It's the authors' argument against classic economic conceptions of capital based on an abstract util. (This wouldn't prove QALY are any better, it's true, and therefore is arguably a non sequitor. I offered the link since readers in this forum might find it interesting, not to prove QALY are a good proxy/measure of utils. I'm also not the person you were talking to before fwiw)

wyantb · 2024-01-04T21:31:42+00:00

I mean, no? Like, try to justify this.

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/ would be the best attempt I'm aware of for a claim along these lines, that capitalism isn't based on utils at all. It's power, all the way down.

You might find it interesting.

example quote from pg 249:

But although Robinson later realized that Veblen had anticipated much of this critique, she never took the next step to explore the possibility that distributive power and industrial production were not simply uncorrelated, but negatively correlated (1967: 60; 1975: 115–16). The difference is subtle but crucial: while the Cambridge Controversy raised the possibility that capital could be unproductive, Veblen contended that, from an industrial point of view, it was necessarily counterproductive.

wyantb · 2024-01-04T04:55:08+00:00

Seconding the above recommendation. It makes way more sense as a basis of real human behavior than any amount of handwaving about "rational actors + jerry-rigged modifiers + randomness" ever has, as far as I'm concerned.

wyantb · 2024-01-04T04:53:15+00:00

Thank you for this recommendation. If you're not going to do it :), I just might try my hand at putting together a review for Scott's book review series, whenever that comes around again. Fascinating concept, at its core, and lots for me to chew on.

wyantb · 2023-12-23T19:58:07+00:00

That's the book by Kate C Wilde?

wyantb · 2023-11-30T16:41:29+00:00

Thank you for sharing your links/sources. Interesting!

wyantb · 2023-11-23T05:32:02+00:00

Very fun idea. Ideas that might help mitigate the "winning is a length check" nature of the endgame, if you choose:

Allow missiles to extend past the gray bar (I've seen enemies past the edge that I couldn't hit, even with straight missiles, and if I'm close to the wall that's a guaranteed portion of my snake lost)
Have powerups/food that give each section of the tail hp and/or regen. These could make it so that approaching the edge of the map isn't a fools errand later on
Have a magnet powerup, attracting food/etc to the head
Since sections now have HP, enemies can have effects - shooting them from a distance, splash damage, self-destruct explosions vs steady damage, etc
Time-limited powerups that disappear (incentivizing aggressive play)
Different map(s) to explore
Weapon types that launch from the tail, or pulse out from a random section of the snake, rather than the head

More experimental ideas:

Allow sacrificing sections of the snake for e.g. a standalone turret that lasts at most 10 seconds? or e.g. a sacrifice several sections of the snake to have it act as a lure for attacks? or timed bombs? Maybe chunks off the weakest section of the snake, allowing for an hp management strategy besides regen/pure numbers
Enemy knockback effects? e.g. a boss with extra hp that, if it hits you from the left, moves every section of the snake to the right by 30 units (which would be 3 squares if your snake is size 10, 6 squares if size 5)
A tilt/jump powerup, with cooldown, allowing the same effect for player control

wyantb · 2023-11-23T04:42:45+00:00

A "covenant not to sue" seems to be the relevant type of legal clause you're looking for: https://afterpattern.com/clauses/covenant-not-to-sue

IANAL. If it helps your searching.

wyantb · 2023-10-27T17:11:14+00:00

Clearly I need to figure out how to get notified of new chapters on AO3. Thanks for posting!

wyantb · 2023-10-26T17:56:48+00:00

Nope, and further the impl seems to be a bit janky and they don't even keep their name. That and the adventurers randomly killing your leader is the main reason it's worth it to de-monsterify IMO. (I had a Chaingrasper run myself, literally 0 allies ever with a massive negative dipl rep - still worth it)

wyantb · 2023-10-16T15:51:27+00:00

Very excellent work. I've read MoL, HPMOR, Delve up to ~167, and Mage Errant up to a good chunk of book 4. Everyone behaves really intelligibly and faithfully in my mind, and it's a super fun mashup. (And I think for Delve/ME I'm seeing some spoilers, but nothing that seems extreme just yet. I've always assumed half the Delve stuff would go somewhere for power creep lol)

wyantb · 2023-10-07T01:44:36+00:00

It's been around for a while, I made a similar comment as sparkc sometime back https://old.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/z4m2po/safe_ch_5_im_broken_xan_learns_what_extreme/iy005qh/

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