MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Honor based systems are still based on incentives. Sometimes unconsciously via cultural evolution, but it's not like "honor" just get defined randomly. A family backing down and losing honor is essentially signalling "you can kill us without consequence". Maintaining honor, either by getting paid or by getting revenge, signals "if you kill us it won't be worth it." It creates incentives in others not to kill you and your people because the costs to them will outweigh the benefits.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
The primary purpose of laws is to create incentive structures to influence people's behavior. While putting murderers in prison is a worthwhile task if you expect them to murder again, they ideal scenario is that nobody murders at all due to the fear of punishment. The best threat is one which never needs to be tested because everyone is so sure that it would be if they transgressed.
This applies to destruction of evidence as well. If you establish a precedent that destroying evidence creates reasonable doubt, people will destroy evidence. If you don't want that then you need to punish it consistently. By treating destruction of evidence as if it were the strongest thing that the evidence could possibly be (absolute proof of guilt) you create a scenario in which nobody has an incentive to destroy evidence because it can never improve their situation.
It only matters a little whether the destruction of evidence is literally proof of guilt, it mostly matters that treating it that way is good legal policy. And if adhered to consistently then both guilty and innocent people can take that into account and behave accordingly.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
in an efficient market
The point is that it's NOT an efficient market. For some reason fewer people are investing in politics than you would expect, therefore prices have dropped and dropped until the ROI has gotten as high as it is.
Politicians offer $100 in however many years for $90 now, no one buys. Politicians offer for $80 now, no one buys. Politicians offer for $50, a couple people buy but not many. More politicians come along and the price eventually equilibrizes at $20 until enough companies start buying so that the number of buys and sells match up.
That's a buyer's market. You can't sell your $100 bill for $90, even though it's $100, because everyone else is selling for $20. For whatever reason there aren't enough buyers waiting to snatch it up. A buyer's market is defined by having high ROI for the buyer. If it was a seller's market and they could sell for $99 then ROI would be LOW, because ROI is defined as the return "to the buyer", not to the seller.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
By definition, ROI is a fraction with "return" in the numerator and "investment" in the denominator. It being high could mean returns are high OR bribes are cheap, but either way that means it's a buyer's market. You're essentially arguing that if potatoes are cheap and a great deal for shoppers then farmers can charge more money for potatoes. But if there's tons of potato farmers around and not many people buying potatoes then anyone who tries to raise prices will get outcompeted by their rivals.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
I beat Hades 2, at least the main/normal ending, not the whatever 100% completionist ending that's going to take another 50 hours if I decide to stick around.
I'm going to be vague to avoid spoilers, but overall I liked the direction it went. It was not enough to fully make up for the decrease in quality since the first game, but it was a partial recovery, better than expected. I don't think they did a great job of leading up to it, which could have made the earlier game better. My overall assessment of the game doesn't change qualitatively: the gameplay mechanics are better, the story/atmosphere is worse, and since it's a roguelite game which is primarily about the gameplay mechanics rather than the story, overall I think it comes out ahead of Hades 1. I'm more confident on this conclusion that I was in my previous post when I hadn't gotten to the ending yet. Still disappointed that it wasn't as good as it could have been, but it's fine. Get it if you played and liked the first one.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
I partially agree with you, but would shift 80% of the blame for the establishment of this environment to the left. The left made Nazis cool again, by being simultaneously awful and anti Nazi. 99% of people's experience with Nazism is bad people on the left equivocating between Nazis and normal people on the right. If Trump is a Nazi, and Elon Musk is a Nazi, and Joe Rogan is a Nazi, then someone who likes all of those guys is going to think Nazis are pretty cool. Or at least, make jokes in that direction. People are going to feel comfortable pretending to be a Nazi, because what's the worst that's going to happen, some angry leftist is going to accuse you of being a Nazi? They were already going to do that just by you not supporting open borders.
When you spend ten years crying wolf, and telling everyone all their pet dogs are wolves, don't be surprised when kids grow up thinking wolves are cool, and the dog lovers start wearing wolf shirts and howling to mock you.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11d ago
I am struggling to maintain motivation on the game I'm making (previously mentioned here ). I've spent too much time making stupid placeholder GUI stuff and it's taking too long to get to the cool gameplay features that I actually care about. I am reconsidering my stance on doing everything from scratch. Does anyone know of any useful libraries or stuff that I can import and/or copy/paste that would be useful? For context, it's a turn based grid dungeon crawling roguelite thing, so I don't need any 3D graphics or physics or anything. Just an easier way to have a bunch of menus and buttons that I can stick my game functions onto instead of wasting time re-inventing them all myself. I've never done proper game dev before, I don't have a CS degree, I'm a math dude who self-taught programming to do math research, so I have no idea what exists or is useful, and figured I'd ask here for recommendations before delving into google hell.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11d ago
Ah yes, the classic Yankee Doodle strat.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
In a mathematical sense you can't simultaneously maximize two preferences unless they have a perfect correlation of 1.
Suppose we give this person a choice. Option 1 will make others very happy and well off and prosperous. Very very happy. It's basically a lifetime worth of doing good in the world. But will cause this person to lose all of their wisdom. They will be unwise and make bad decisions the rest of their life. The total good from this one decision is enough to make up for it, but they will sacrifice their wisdom.
Option 2 will not make people happy, but will make the person very wise in the future. They can spend the rest of their life making good decisions and making people happier via normal means, and if you add it all up it's almost as large as the amount of good they could have done from Option 1, but not quite. But they will be wise and have wisdom.
The kindest most loving thing to others is to choose option 1. The most hedonic desire for a person who values wisdom in its own right in addition to loving others is Option 2. Depending on how you balance the numbers, you could scale how good Option 1 is in order to equal this out against any preference strength.
U(A) = aX_1+bY_1
U(B) = aX2+bY_2
Where a and b are the coefficients of preference for loving others vs loving wisdom, X and Y are the amount of good done and wisdom had in each scenario. For any finite a,b =/= 0, this has nontrivial solutions, which implies either can by larger. But also for any finite a,b =/= 0 you can't really say both have been "maximized" because one trades off against the other.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d ago
Seems more like a soft R? Or no R. It's patronizing and disconnected but still offensive in a similar way that going up to a bunch of black guys and calling them "my nigga". Because that's what they call each other, right? Right? Probably maybe? Vote for me my niggas!
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.
The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.
"Punishing" speech for the sake of punishing it is bad. There's an important distinction between actions of direct self interest (or in the interest of others, but direct), and actions meant to punish for ostensibly pro-social deterrence reasons.
If somebody attempts to harm me and I stop them, this is my direct interest. If I find a corpse in the woods and a series of notes with damning proof that their brother murdered them yesterday and I inform the police, this is for punishment. I have almost no self interest (I knew neither the victim nor perpetrator), but help promote the pro-social deterrence that murderers will get caught. It doesn't actually help the victim, who is dead. It doesn't help me (other than psychological satisfaction), but it potentially helps others by preventing the perpetrator from doing it again, and preventing others from following in their footsteps. This can extend to behaviors which are still legal but anti-social. If your kid smashes a vase because they're angry then you ground them. Not because grounding them fixes the vase or makes your life more pleasant, but because it discourages the behavior.
The key to free speech then is that punishing speech is fundamentally illegitimate. The punishment is anti-social, not the speech. Speech is not a thing that we want to deter, even if it's bad speech, because we don't trust anybody to wisely judge good and bad speech, and we expect good speech to win in the marketplace of ideas, which drastically limits any supposed harms of bad speech. (With exceptions, which is why most people make allowances for punishing things like direct calls to violence). So for any given speech act, your moral obligations are to leave punishment motives out of the calculation for your actions. If you act in your own direct self interest (avoiding a Nazi who you would expect to be unpleasant to be around), this is legitimate. If you act in your friend's interest (my friend hates Nazis so I expect him to have unpleasant experiences if he is friends with this person) this is legitimate. If you act out of punishment (I hate this guy I wish he had no friends) or deterrence (I want all the hidden Nazis to keep their icky evil thoughts to themselves) this is illegitimate and you should not do this.
In almost all issues of cancel culture, we can easily and obviously distinguish these motives because the majority of the cancelers live nowhere near the cancelee and have absolutely no way of possibly benefiting via any method other than punishment (and social status gained from being seen as a punisher). If you have never met Jordan Peterson and his words upset you, then by all means avoid buying his books so you don't have to be upset, but you have absolutely no legitimate reason to get involved in his life or speak to his workplace or his friends or family, so the only motive remaining is the desire to punish what is (incorrectly) perceived as bad behavior that needs to be punished.
Theoretically you can probably come up with some weird edge cases where this rule is slightly ambiguous. But 90% of free speech conflicts are obviously on one side or the other, 90% of the time the people opposing free speech are wrong and are making society worse, and if we fix that the majority of the issue will be gone and then we can focus on the pedantic edge cases and have reasonable disagreements about tradeoffs.
MathWizard
Good things are good
23d ago
I broadly agree with most of this as a critique, but still think /u/aiislove is gesturing at something real. And your objection to hard status can be largely addressed by adjusting the definition to be slightly more tautological: hard status is not merely being physically strong or attractive, but is the status you gain derived from those. That is, if we take two men of equal and large strength and manly physical appearance and one of them grows a mohawk and becomes a thug and mugs people, while the other one combs his hair and becomes a firefighter who rescues damsels and makes them swoon, the latter has more hard status.
Or an even better example: if both men become policemen who rescue damsels, but one of them lives in a lefty city where police are hated, while the other lives in a rural area where police are seen as heroes, then both could look the same and act the same but the latter gets more hard status because status is ultimately given from the people around them.
You are correct that power =/= status. But power can translate into status with some coefficient varying with the culture, environment, and how well it's leveraged. But the status that comes from this is still meaningfully different from "soft status" which is derived without leveraging power at all. Or at least, not physical power or appearance, since money can be a form of power, and status itself is a form of power. But I think this two-axis system is pointing at something real even if it needs some refinement to become more accurate and useful.
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
I don't think it's a war thing. Different archetypes of personality just tend to look certain ways. Have you never noticed? Like nerd glasses or problem glasses, or dark eyeliner, or cowboy boots, or tank tops, or half-buzz-cut, or high heels. You can't automatically and definitively ascertain someone's entire personality from how they look, but you can often make a decent guess. Because people tend to dress like and emulate people they respect and admire, which often happens to be people with similar personalities, so they end up looking similar to each other.
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
https://www.lovepanky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/lesbian-stereotypes-1.jpg
Not like the short haired butch kind, the feminine one in the pair. I don't think lesbians adhere to the top-bottom dynamic quite as strictly as male homosexuals due, since there isn't a sexual requirement to, but often you'll see a masculine obviously lesbian paired with a more feminine one who sometimes passes for straight but is sometimes almost-but-not-quite-straight-presenting. I dunno, I haven't put a ton of thought into pinning down a strict definition, it's just a sort of vibe I've seen in certain lesbian pairings. But I think it makes sense in theory, given that some lesbians are attracted to feminine features, some will maintain enough feminine features to attract them.
But on further thought, I'm not sure if I've seen it in real lesbians or only games/tv/movies...
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
I think a major issue is that they've replaced many of the major roles with women for the sequel and they don't think it's ok to make jokes at the expense of women so what we get is a whole load of anodyne nothing.
2015+ in a nutshell.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
I wouldn't say "slaves to". Again, it's not too egregious, and not enough to ruin the game. But their earlier games didn't seem to have this issue quite as badly. Or maybe I just didn't notice as much because they were original fantasy worlds so they weren't race swapping classic mythology.
You can tell throughout the time that they're definitely left-leaning. Bastion had a bunch of stuff about xenophobia and colonialism being bad. I never finished transistor but it was generally anti-establishment. Pyre had a made up religion that was abused by corrupt leaders to excommunicate people they don't like. But it's never so terrible that it ruins things. None of them are ever obvious and stupid ripoffs of current events, and Pyre still has you participating in the religious rituals because it wasn't the religion itself that's bad it's just the corrupt people exploiting it.
And most importantly the core gameplay remains good enough that it makes up for the slightly offputting lefty vibes (with the exception of Transistor, which I didn't find very compelling)
But yeah, they're clearly embedded in lefty culture, if not the actual war part of it. And they seem to be gradually slipping further and further into it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
Wait, I think that might actually be the art from Hades 1. Hades 2 is this
Slightly less masculine, slightly more lesbian.
Which I suppose partly undercuts my point about it changing. I think it's largely deliberate. They're trying to portray a sexual character but not like... actually sexy. They're trying to say "this character is sex positive, but we're not trying to appeal to straight white men, because that would be gross.
This also is related to the race-swapping of many of the Olympian gods to be black or Asian. Again, it's not like super obnoxiously egregious: it's not like the story goes out of its way to talk about them being oppressed by the white gods or something. But it's anachronistic in an obviously post-2010 progressive way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
There's also some level of difference in invasiveness and permanence.
Removing your arm to replace with a bionic one, is categorically different from implanting an electrical muscle-growth stimulator underneath your skin, is categorically different from putting on strength-boosting mech armor.
Following the logic only goes as far as your axioms allow, and different axioms will lead to different endpoints.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
The Holy Grail of AI privacy and security is one that's both powerful and efficient enough to run on your own hardware so you have full control over it and your information. In some imaginary world where your implants can run their own computations internally and don't require internet access (except occasionally if you want to download verified updates) then they're safe and secure from external threats.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
Hades 2 came out yesterday! I just got into Act 3 on Silksong but........ now I have Hades 2!
Like Silksong, I find difficulty in describing it other than "more of the same game, in a good way". New enemies, new weapons, new buffs, new mechanics, but the same general gameplay loop and overall feel. I especially like that since the main enemy is Chronos, there's a rare event where he ambushes you and temporarily sends you back in time for a level. And back in time is the first game! It's only happened to me once so I'm not sure how robust it is, but it was an instance of an old map with old enemies that would be in the same spot in the run that I was when I got ambushed. That's definitely a cool throwback mechanic.
I will note that the artstyle and characters seem a little bit.... woker? It's nothing too egregious, and it was a little bit like this in the first game, but just the levels of androgyny, the ratio of more female characters, the lore of being Witches, and the weighting of visual sexualization weighted more towards male characters than female ones generally gives off lefty vibes. Heck, Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, and is straight up naked in the game (though conveniently self-censoring with arms and hair) looks like a lesbian.
Again, it's nothing too egregious, and the gameplay and story are still good overall so far. It's just a mild annoyance.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
What is the frequency of ICE arrests and/or deportations being false positives? (The person is actually legally allowed to be here and ICE has no legitimate business with them but grabs them anyway). How would I ascertain or estimate this information from an unbiased source? People on the left keep complaining about this and I can't tell if they're being genuine or just Motte and Baileying their objection to illegals being arrested and deported. How do I tell if this is a real issue or not?
(I apologize for this being potentially culture war fodder, but figured it didn't belong in the main thread since I don't have actual discussion or commentary of my own to provide, and am more looking for links to external sources rather than you telling me your own potentially biased opinion.)
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
This only measures the difference in video-game fan-ness in comparison to creative works fan-ness. So would give a false positive for someone who hates all creative works but hates video games slightly less. I suppose you could further modify it by hacking the two measures together, perhaps take this and add a minimum amount of video games liked from the previous rating. But that ends up a lot less elegant.
Maybe the issue here is just the strict cutoff threshold. Ie maybe you take the first score and instead of saying someone > 0.5 is a fan and someone less than 0.5 is not a fan, you say that someone's fan-ness is a sliding scale from 0 to 1. Ie, someone who likes all video games ever is more of a fan than someone who only likes half, who is more of a fan than someone who only likes 0.1 (while still keeping the quality weighting so someone with horrible taste who likes the worst games is less of a real fan than someone who likes good ones).
I'm not building on top of anything. Everything is from scratch in python. Which might be a mistake, I dunno. I'm definitely not having fun making menus drawing rectangles and stuff and it looks super low quality so far. But this way I have total control over the code. Also part of the point is to get better at python for career purposes, so it's hopefully good practice.
I think this is essentially pointing at the same thing the abnormality is. If you go into a dangerous job with full disclosure and knowledge that it's dangerous, you don't get special compensation because presumably you can ask for an appropriate risk-sensitive amount of compensation up front. If something extreme and unexpected happens, then presumably your original deal you signed was unfair. Underappreciated risks like radioactive watches or infant CPR deaths are the same general category of "did not really expect this or fully understand the risks"
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