fmaa
13d ago
It's 2025, I really expect devs to put more effort into it.
This and the following paragraph imply you think it is a lack of effort, not them choosing not to cater to your specific preferences.
Fuck no. It is a perfectly valid concept. Games that have difficulty settings that only amount to differences in HP scaling or damage dealt/received are lazy, making the player do something as brainless as wailing on a foe for twice the time with no moment to moment change in gameplay is as artificially stupid as it gets. Difficulty that manifests as changed movesets, better AI or the player having to manage resources better is fine.
The "HP/damage scaling is bad and wrong" is another, separate stupid complaint from calling difficulty artificial. sun_the_second already pointed out some of the reasons why this is stupid - those values are what fundamentally determine whether the enemy gets to do anything before dying, and whether you have to care about what they do. This is also often having to manage resources better.
But calling difficulty "artificial" in particular is a deep confusion of what a single player game is. There is no divinely ordained natural difficulty from which any deviations are artificial. It's all artifice and there's no standard by which to differentiate them. Developer intentions are still only someone's specific choice, and for big budget games normal is going to optimized for focus testing appeal, not designer intent anyway.
I've never seen anyone but you complain about this, and I've played all 3 of the recent Doom games without caring. In fact, I prefer it, if the enemy is defanged, in a non-trivial manner, then I'm happy to wait to dispatch them after I've dealt with everything else trying to punch me in the face.
If you don't see the problem with taking two significantly different enemies, each with a rich set of interactions with other enemies and the level geometry, and replacing them with two functionally identical enemies (ok, you have to shoot the revenant's guns twice), which, if you're playing well, never do anything, then I can't really explain further. I just hope game devs continue to disappoint you by making games for other people.
You hate iframes because they offend your simulationist sensibilities, I hate iframes because they reduce combat to timing the iframes. We are not the same.
In general, you seem to have trouble understanding that people don't design or play games only for simulationist reasons. Yes, wounding has immedatiate gameplay effects, which can go against the intended experience and/or make the game worse.
Using the incredibly stupid phrase "artificial difficulty" is also a sign of some confusion.
Edit: an example of wounding making the game worse, from those new Dooms. In the original Doom, arachnatrons and revenants are both fairly tanky enemies with unique firing patterns. The arachnotron's steady stream of plasma prevents doubling back while facing them, but is otherwise easy to avoid. The revenant's homing rockets can be easily outrun but require active attention to get rid of by juking them into an obstacle. Both can be easily used to set up infighting. In Eternal, both of these enemies have ranged attacks that are too dangerous to let them fire, but you can easily shoot off their gun attachments. So in practice for both you just shoot off the guns the moment they appear at which point they kinda shuffle around doing nothing.
fmaa
18d ago
Not being a child murderer is worth >10m to you seems simple enough. Combined with the same sort of distinguishing between action and inaction that's required for basically any human to function, as otherwise you're killing a statistical african for every ~5k you spend on anything besides lifesaving charity.
fmaa
1mo ago
Except those words would describe Scott, a majority of the SSC commentariat and half the Motte before its evaporation over the past couple of years.
And yet very few if any of these people would agree that TPs description fits them, even beyond the parts where he still couldn't resist more boos ("protects (favored) groups as legitimate victims but doesn't really protect individuals" is nobody's self-description).
fmaa
1mo ago
The horses are meant to be identical to our own. Humans on Roshar are refugees from what is implied to be basically fantasy earth, horses are one of the species they managed to bring breeding populations of over. I don't remember if the first book talks about this much (possibly in the context of axehounds being called that despite no other hounds existing).
fmaa
3mo ago
Well, Yudkovsky's interested in moral theories for nonhumans as well.
And, once you get detached enough, or more realistically, when deontology doesn't give a clear enough answer, you do get to do some utility calculation anyway. Effective altruists may have their 10% charity rule, but they use utility calculations to decide on the charity. Which can lead to both Givewll $/life saved and shrimp welfare, so not exactly perfectly reliable either, but nothing is.
fmaa
3mo ago
If your point was that rationalists are deontoligical in practice, why did your first post in this thread express confusion as to why rationalists like the pithy phrase expressing this rule, not a useless utilitarian tautology? 07mk gave the rationalist answer to why prefer the shorter version. I do agree that you shouldn't mistake a moral rule for an argument, though. But it's going to be a popular rule in rationalist and ex-rationalist communities, as they do select for people who highly value epistemic rationality.
fmaa
3mo ago
Here's Yudkovsky saying exactly that (but worse and with more words, as is his style). A common rationalist stance is that utilitarianism is what's correct, but deontology is what works for humans.
fmaa
4mo ago
Otoh it turned out that the optimal level of smallpox was in fact 0. Don't confuse "eliminating this bad thing isn't worth infinite resources" with "eliminating this bad thing requires infinite resources".
fmaa
4mo ago
See the first part of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/
I don't even necessarily disagree that this might be a good use of government, but this is essentially not an argument for democracy, but an argument for imperialism. Backwards communities need better morals enforced on them by guys with guns from more enlightened ones.
fmaa
4mo ago
Ok, I don't believe we have metaphysical free will. That in no invalidates any choices I have made so far or any choices I'll make in the future, because their importance to me has never been based in metaphysical free will, see also the litany of Gendlin. That an algorithm is deterministic doesn't make the work it does any less real or avoidable.
If you want to call this belief something else, go ahead, but then also replace all instances of "free will" in FCfromSSC's posts with that same word, because we're both talking about the same internal feeling of making choices.
fmaa
4mo ago
Which includes this quote from you:
My religion, at least, doesn't require me to reject the readily-observable reality of free will, which is the base of my argument here. You can directly observe yourself making choices moment-to-moment. Materialism says that can't actually be what's really happening, and makes specific predictions as to why and how to prove it. Those predictions have been falsified every time they've been tested. Materialism ignores the falsifications and simply pretends such control exists, as you yourself demonstrate above.
Which flatly denies the existence of compatibilism. Neither materialism nor determinism say you aren't really making choices. Determinism does make the currently untestable claim that, given the exact same starting state and exact same inputs, the choice-making algorithms in your mind would produce the exact same outputs. Materialism claims that this choice-making is fully contained in physical processes in the brain, which is currently imperfectly testable, but has some good evidence for it.
Just so. You are assuming materialism/non-determinism. You are treating materialism/non-determinism as an axiom. I do not object to you doing so, because this is exactly what axioms are for. Nor do I claim that I can prove your axioms wrong, because that is not how axioms work. At best, I might be able to present evidence that does not fit nicely into your axioms, giving you the choice of discarding the evidence or the axiom, but even this is difficult to accomplish and boils down to an apparently-free choice on your part.
No, I assume materialism and determinism for my model of the world (Yeah, quantum uncertainty means the universe can't be perfectly predicted. There is currently no reason whatsoever to believe this has any effect on the brain or cognition.) But crucially my ability to converse does not in any way rely on these assumptions, let alone their opposite, which is your original claim that I objected to.
My objection to Determinism is not "I don't feel like I'm a machine". My objection is strictly empirical: you cannot in fact manipulate me like a machine, and that sort of manipulation is the central characteristic of machines.
The first quote sounds a lot more like "I don't feel like I'm a machine" to me. Otherwise, this comes back to your absolutist stance where the weather isn't materialistic because we can't fully control it and lobotomies aren't physically controlling your personality because they only produce a specific, not arbitrary, change to it.
fmaa
4mo ago
The pretense is in ignoring compatibilism. The sole evidence against materialism isn't the experience of free will, which feels the same under materialism (and determinism, for that matter), it is the conscious experience and the hard problem. Which is why all the evidence that conscious experience is materially based is so interesting.
We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.
I am communicating with you right now, and from my perspective no part of this communication is based on assuming non-determinism.
And same as the last time we had this conversation, I genuinely do not care what other people did under the label of capital m Materialism before I was born. Like, you keep going on about this, both with me and other materialists in this thread (Perhaps because your conception of your own Christianity is so deeply based on you feeling like you're continuing millennia of tradition?), but this is not a motte-and-bailey on my part. I'm not trying to be part of a Movement here.
fmaa
4mo ago
This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will. But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?
We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.
While determinism is currently unfalsifiable, we do fact have a significant amount of empirical evidence that the mind in materially embodied in the brain. But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).
fmaa
4mo ago
I largely agree with you, but I don't think the last part is true. As with the weirdos wanting to be hunter-gatherers (or worse, raiders), you really can't be those things as they were in the past, because all the good land has been taken by people doing something vastly more productive with it.
And an off-the-grid cabin in the woods isn't really being a medieval peasant. You need a lord for that. But, ironically, for the authentic frontier homesteader experience you really need some nearby raiders to potentially pillage your homestead, otherwise you're benefiting far too much from the peace and prosperity of the modern state surrounding you.
fmaa
5mo ago
The vile part is the guilt transference. Christianity doesn't say that everyone's guilty but god forgives them anyway (not that I don't think original sin is a pretty vile concept as well), christianity says that god can forgive us because he transferred our just punishment by torturing Jesus to death (though he got better). That Jesus dying for other peoples sins is a meaningful moral concept.
If the mother of a criminal to be executed says "No, take me instead!", the official who says "Ok, sure" and executes the mother is an injust tyrant, regardless of how much genuine repentance the criminal feels afterwards.
fmaa
5mo ago
Tbh I have wondered before why atheists more militant than me don't harp on about this more. This entire concept relies on an ancient and, by most modern standards, vile concept of morality.
Forget looking at logical contradictions in the bible or the impossibility of miracles described there. The deepest core of christianity requires you to accept that offloading your guilt onto an innocent creature and then punishing that creature instead of you makes any fucking sense whatsoever. And that god accepts this bargain. I think that in any other context most modern christians would consider this an absurdly evil concept.
fmaa
6mo ago
Monks are a terrible example. Medieval monasteries were communes of second+ sons of aristocrats who, while technically rejecting personal wealth and living in relative privation for their social class, commanded vast wealth through said communes.
Wealth made possible in large part through their ownership of land-bound slaves, aka serfs. Which are the only social class that really matters when talking of the economy of past societies - any praise of the benefits of pre-industrial agricultural society that ignores the part where 90%+ of people were taxed-to-death subsistence farmers and/or slaves (don't forget the chances for death by violence being vastly higher than the 20th century including both WWs) is a comically rose-tinted view.
fmaa
7mo ago
That is a very generous answer to something that seems a lot more like complete gibberish. A single neural structure with known classical functions may, under their crude (the author's own words) theoretical model, produce entangled photons is the only real statement in that article. Even granting this, to go from that to neurons communicating using such photons in any way would be an absurd leap. Using the entanglement to communicate is straight up impossible.
You are also replying to someone who can't differentiate between tunneling and entanglement, so that's a strong sign of complete woo as well.
fmaa
9mo ago
The current givewell estimates are around 4-5k per life saved, and the Gates foundation was a significant factor in pushing that number up that high. It is also working more on malaria eradication, which is a project much harder to make marginal donations to.
fmaa
10mo ago
My only issue with perma DST is aesthetic - it feels stupid for the answer to modern society suffering from pretending to live by the schedules of a century ago to be decoupling our clocks further from the solar day instead of shifting working hours to be closer to where most people want them.
Which doesn't mean it isn't the easiest answer.
fmaa
11mo ago
The real issue with that line of the table is that "the military" is very much not a ruthlessly efficient capitalist enterprise, and accusing the CIA of being such is downright laughable. It is hard to imagine an organization less accountable to its supposed stakeholders.
fmaa
11mo ago
Gifting keys to sympathetic people is free, you can just generate keys for your own game. But those don't count towards the review score. Review manipulation requires buying the game from dummy steam accounts with actual money and probably obfuscated payment methods. Which is not to say it doesn't happen, but there is a pretty clear line between marketing and probably steam tos violating review purchasing.
fmaa
11mo ago
I feel like you just keep describing systems the Steam review score already has.
It a positive/negative aggregate which only counts steam purchases (hard to game review numbers when each review requires giving money to Valve), weights the descriptive categories based on the total number of reviews, has a recent reviews subcategory to downweight early reviews.
Since it only counts paid Steam purchases, it works especially great with niche genres. The steam review percentage doesn't correspond to what fraction of people like the game, it corresponds to what fraction of people who looked at the game and thought it interesting enough to spend money on liked it. (it works less well when the game has a divisive feature that doesn't neatly cleave across genre lines, such as any game with timers getting like a -10% to the review score)
My one big issue with the steam store is not with the reviews, but that recommendations of similar games seem to weigh popularity way more than similarity. Though I don't think there's a magic fix to discoverability, there is just too games coming out for that.
I feel like a transhumanist should really have no problem differentiating between things made through the intentional work of an intelligence and things that arose otherwise. Of which all game settings and rules are the former, so this isn't really a useful word when talking about within category differences. What do you think is the game design equivalent of the mountain range in your analogy?
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