site banner
PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   2591 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Against Talking About Anthropics/Possible Worlds/etc in the Sleeping Beauty Problem

I get it. Anthropics is an interesting topic. Possible worlds has a long and rich philosophical history. I can get why people might want to expose more people to that stuff, kinda squint at the sleeping beauty problem, then think that it's close enough to spread the gospel.

But that's confusing people.

It's confusing them on what is otherwise a very simple math problem.

For those who haven't seen my last entry, I made some minor modifications, primarily adding a second person, so we have both Alice and Bob undergoing simultaneous experiments. The simplest version is that they each undergo approximately the same experiment, with the same coin, but opposite (the implications of heads for one person are like the implications of tails for the other). I also had some computer communication between them for some instructive purposes, but that's not even necessary here.1

Let's follow Alice and Bob a bit further. Suppose after their one/two awakenings, they're put back to sleep, memory again wiped. They're both finally awoken on Wednesday. "No more questions," the doctors say. "We took the liberty of interpreting your answers as wagers. We have your home address. We'll compute your payout and mail you a check with your results, revealing to you how the coin actually came out, how you answered the questions (because they won't remember), and what your payout is. Expect it to take 4-8 weeks."

Alice and Bob leave their respective rooms. They run into each other in the lobby.

Wait

Can Alice and Bob run into each other in the lobby? Aren't they, like, in different possible worlds or something? No, silly. That's confusing people. They're in the same world. They've been in the same hallway all along, separated by only a paper-thin wall.

Ok, so they run into each other in the lobby. They hit it off, decide to go out to a pub and grab a pint together. Naturally, the conversation turns to the strange experiment they each went through. Neither one is going to know how the coin flip actually went or what subsequently happened for another 4-8 weeks.

They begin to debate. How should they best guess what their results might have been? What if they'd like to wager against one another about the results? Should they have significantly different estimates of what they're going to see in their results? Should Alice think that there's a 1/3 chance that they're going to learn that it was heads, while Bob should think that there's a 1/3 chance that they're going to learn that it was tails? Did they truly "update" their probabilities during the course of the experiment?

No. Of course not. If either of them thought that, you could take their money. They should both think that it was 1/2 either heads or tails. This is because they didn't "update" some probability estimate. They didn't enter some weird different possible worlds, where never the physical Alice and Bob could ever meet again.

Instead, Alice and Bob are both capable of having a perfectly reasonable conversation. "Yeah, of course I think the probability of the coin flip was 1/2. It's just because of the weird observation function of the experiment that I computed that there was a different probability for what I was likely to observe." "Yeah, me too, but my observation function was the opposite, so I computed that I was likely to observe the opposite. But obviously, at the same time, the probability of the coin flip was 1/2."

They're just different probabilities with different meanings. You can just compute them from the observation functions.

1 - That time, I was trying to get people to figure out that they could have one individual's brain retaining multiple different probabilities, with multiple different meanings. I guess this time, I'll just try having multiple different minds meeting.

I can no longer look at Nick Bostrom the same way after finding out he’s a halfer in the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

In fairness, it trips up a lot of people. I would probably say including you. Last time we discussed it, you didn't come back to explain how your position worked, but my best interpretation was that your position thought:

Alice is smart enough and capable of distinguishing between "the probability that Bob observes an outcome" and "the probability of the coin flip, itself"... but is too stupid to distinguish between "the probability that I, Alice, observe an outcome" and "the probability of the coin flip, itself"?

(This is for Variant 1:) The number that Alice should put into the computer is not her credence that in her side of the experiment, right now, the coin came up tails. Alice should put p, the weight of the coin, into the computer. All of the weird anthropic probability shifting only occurs because Alice doesn't know what day it is. Because of the way the computer works, it will only transmit the message to Bob if it is Monday. This is why the probability that Alice should put into the computer is the naive weight of the coin, and not the anthropically shifted probability that she should bet herself.

How about in Variant 2? Should Alice do some weird anthropic probability shifting for what she puts into the computer for Bob? Should she do two different weird anthropic probability shifting things, one for herself and a different one for Bob?

...wouldn't it be sooooo much simpler to just say, "Alice is capable of distinguishing between the probability of the coin flip itself, the probability that she observes an outcome, and the probability that Bob observes an outcome," rather than some conceptual mess garbage about her simultaneously anthropically probability shifting for Bob opposite her own? Like, what do you even mean "anthropically probability shifting" now? I thought it was supposed to be something about updating a belief on the coin flip, itself, but it seems like you've already just admitted that that is not happening. She still has "the naive weight of the coin". She still knows about this probability as a distinct probability.

We actually had a discussion about this about 5 months ago, and I still stand by my response from then. The only thing that's possibly to his discredit is thinking that "the Sleeping Beauty Problem" has a well-defined answer at all. If you are not willing to commit to something like "at each awakening, Beauty makes a bet at these odds, what will maximise her earnings?", your question for "the probability" might as well be asking about a dog's Buddha nature.

I guess if you want to get metaphysical about the idea of probability and statistics at all then you can dismiss the problem as underspecified, but you'd have to apply the same radical skepticism to coin flip odds, dice rolls, and all other stochastic phenomena. I mean, can you really say that a coin has a 50% chance of coming up heads? Any given coin flip is a completely determanistic process, only capable of coming up heads, or only capable of coming up tails. Probability is just a shorthand we use to make sense of pseudorandomness beyond our control or comprehension.

When one uses the same tools of probability and statistics that we use to analyze every other stochastic phenomenon to analyze the Sleeping Beauty problem, one finds that there are three equally likely states that are indestinguishable from Beauty's point of view. Two of them correspond to tails, and the other one corresponds to heads. The math is simple.

The underspecification is in the conversion of the word problem to a rigorously defined sample space, not in the interpretation of what happens once you have done that. I am not aware of any "tools of probability and statistics" worth the name that would help with this. A "1/2er" presumably would insist that the question Beauty is asked (like "what is the probability that the coin landed Heads?") is about a sample space with two states (coin landed H or T). If you want, you can think of it as a sort of repeatability

Here are two specific ways to refine the problem (replacing the ambiguous question for Beauty's "probability" with well-defined bets, vaguely inspired by Dutch book arguments): say Beauty is asked for odds that she will accept for a bet on the coin's state. A bet on H at odds 1:n will be executed as follows: Beauty pays $1, and gets back $(1+n) iff the coin is H.

Version 1: Beauty is asked every time she is woken up, and the bet is played immediately upon asking her. What is the lowest n such that she can bet on H at odds 1:n and not have a loss in expectation? (The answer is 2, corresponding to 1/3 "probability".)

Version 2: Beauty is asked every time she is woken up. At the end of the experiment (so after 1 or 2 awakenings), we take her answer unless we asked twice and she contradicted herself (which she anyhow can only do if she randomised), and then play the bet once. What is the lowest n such that she can bet on H at odds 1:n and not have a loss in expectation? (The answer is 1, corresponding to 1/2 "probability".)

You can protest that refining the problem statement into Version 2 rather than Version 1 defies common sense, but I don't think you can argue that it defies "the tools of probability of statistics that we use to analyze every other stochastic phenomenon".

A "1/2er" presumably would insist that the question Beauty is asked (like "what is the probability that the coin landed Heads?") is about a sample space with two states (coin landed H or T). If you want, you can think of it as a sort of repeatability

You cannot ask her this question. You literally cannot ask this of her, because any question you ask of a person is automatically attached to the modifier "conditional on the fact that I am asking you this question", which here splits it into three cases. The only way for Beauty to not rationally update on the fact that you asked a question is if you either don't entangle your asking on any of the results of the coin flip, or if you lie to her about the premises of the problem, in which case she can be dutch booked and believe in incorrect probabilities like 1/2 because she's been deceived.

You can protest that refining the problem statement into Version 2 rather than Version 1 defies common sense, but I don't think you can argue that it defies "the tools of probability of statistics that we use to analyze every other stochastic phenomenon".

It absolutely is defying those tools, because you are combining multiple answers into a single bet. You're essentially weighting bets based on the outcome. Consider

Version 3: Beauty never goes to sleep or is woken up or has any amnesia, she's just a normal person. A bookie flips a coin weighted to come up heads 1/3 of the time (according to normal probability rules) and then flips a second coin, this one fair 50-50. If both coins are head He tells her about the first coin and asks her to bet if it's heads or tails at 1:n odds. If the first coin actually is heads, the bookie pays out normally. If the first coin was tails he looks at the second coin, and if it's also tails he pays out the bet, but if it's heads he reneges on the deal and runs away, not taking her money nor paying her (though she would have lost betting on heads). Beauty can now bet on heads at 1:1 odds with no loss, but this does not correspond to a 50-50 probability that the coin actually lands heads because the declared payouts are not honest. Half the time she bets heads and would lose she doesn't lose anything, so she can bet heads more freely. She's betting on "the ratio of the probability you will take my money to the probability you will not take my money". What you want is "the probability the coin came up heads, conditional on you asking me this question right now and me making this bet". For normal betting procedures we make sure these are equal and can thus use them interchangeably, but your version 2 disentangles them.

Mathematically, this is equivalent to your version 2. This is why you get the answer for your "bets" and the actual probability diverging, because half of her bets are being cancelled/fused. In the tails scenario you asked her twice, she bet and lost twice, but you only took her money once.

You cannot ask her this question. You literally cannot ask this of her, because any question you ask of a person is automatically attached to the modifier "conditional on the fact that I am asking you this question"

This does not track with real-life language usage; otherwise, a whole swath of common expressions ranging from the colloquial to at least semi-formal settings would be rendered incoherent. "I got a middle seat on my Spirit Airways flight, and it turned out I was sandwiched between Avril Lavigne and Justin Bieber, and they didn't know about each other's plans! What's the likelihood of this happening?" (Fairly high, conditional on the fact that someone would come up with that scenario and ask the question seriously?)

For examples that are more in the class of mathematical word problems, something like shuffling a deck of cards, getting an unexpected outcome (e.g. the first 10 cards are all the same suit) and then asking about the probability of it is a very common idiom, and always understood to refer to the probability of that outcome if the experiment were repeated. This is actually very similar to the "1/2er" interpretation of the Sleeping Beauty problem I suggested. Only contrarian weirdos like me even get the idea of taking the anthropic-principle angle towards that question, and rebutting with the question what subset of permutations the original asker would consider sufficiently "special" to be surprised by and ask; but this is what I would need to do, if I seriously wanted to answer the question "what is the probability of the first 10 cards being all the same suit, conditional on me asking this question"! (Most shuffles would presumably be boring and you would not ask anything about them!)

I'm unfortunately struggling to parse your "Version 3" example. You say

If both coins are head He tells her about the first coin and asks her to bet if it's heads or tails at 1:n odds. If the first coin actually is heads, the bookie pays out normally. If the first coin was tails he looks at the second coin, and if it's also tails he pays out the bet (...)

Is the "If both coins are head" a leftover from some previous edit? Because otherwise, it seems that the "If the first coin was tails" condition can never be met (he only asks her to bet if both coins came up heads?). Also, even removing that phrase, I don't understand the meaning of "He tells her about the first coin and asks her to bet (...)". What does it mean that "he tells her about the first coin"? Is it just that he tells her "I just flipped a biased coin with 1/3 P(heads)"?

(...but either way, even if the example you are intending to communicate is mathematically equivalent to my Version 2, the existence of a contrived mathematically equivalent construction is not proof that the original construction is contrived! You can build contrived isomorphic setups for any setup.)

On the first point, you're right that it is possible to ask this question. I suppose I exaggerated what I was trying to say. The issue I think is language tense. If you ask in the progressive tense "what are the odds of this happening, then you are asking someone about repeated probabilities. "If I, knowing nothing, get on a plane, what are the odds of A and B happen simultaneously?" The correct answer would be to compute the probability of A, the probability of B, and then multiply them together. Because you're not asking about whether this happened in the real world, but about whether it could/would happen in general.

If you ask in the past tense "what are the odds that this happened, this is a question about the world. This is actually the question "What are the odds that this thing happened, conditional on everything you know right now, including me asking you this question?" It is not a question about general repeated probabilities, because that's not how verb tenses work. It's past tense. You could convert it into a question about repeated probabilities (which you might need to if you are a frequentist), but if you did it would translate into "What are the odds of this thing happening conditional on you finding yourself in a mathematically analogous situation to the one you find yourself in now." If you ask me the probability that you yourself were sandwiched between Avril Lavigne and Justin Bieber on a flight I'm not going to compute the probability of them being on flights, I'm going to say ~0% because if that had actually happened you would have phrased it very differently when using it as an example.

You're also right that I mangled my example while editing. The example is supposed to create a scenario where there's a 50% everything is normal (we flip one coin and it's heads) a 50% chance we have a flaky bookie (who in turn has a 50% chance of reneging on his bet). The point is not that the example is "contrived", the point is that it detaches betting odds from probabilities because the payouts are distorted. Consider a friend who, on a first roll, fumbles his dice and drops them clumsily. If the result is a 1 he says it doesn't count and rerolls them properly, keeping the result no matter what. But if the fumbled roll is good he keeps it. If this were a consistent pattern you would be on his dice differently than 1/6 per side, because you're not betting on the probability that a die rolls a certain number in a vacuum, but the probability that a certain number is kept in the end.

When sleeping Beauty wakes and makes a bet, there's a chance your version 2 is going to discard her bet and roll again, only accepting her bet if she wakes up and makes the same bet again the next day. If she always bets on "heads" she will be wrong 2/3 of the time she says it, but lose money 1 time and gain money 1 time. You might as well never wake her up on Tuesday at all because you're essentially taking bets on Monday in both cases and then ignoring her Tuesday answer unless it conflict with Monday. The probability you're actually getting here is "Conditional on me asking you this question and this being a day when your answer actually matters for betting purposes, what is the probability of it being heads?" which is a very very different question from "what is your belief that the coin is heads right now?" which is what she's actually asked in the original question.

I think a more straightforward way to notice that this scenario detaches P(heads|you just woke up) from the optimal betting strategy is to compare it to the following scenario:

Some researchers flip a coin without showing you the result. On Monday, they interview you about the coin and ask you to make bets about its status. Then, on Tuesday, if the result was tails, the researchers play the videotape of your interview from Monday and perform all your bets a second time on your behalf.

Here, your belief that the coin landed on tails should clearly be 0.5 even given the condition that you're currently being interviewed. But if you make any bets, you need to keep in mind that they'll be executed twice in the tails condition. The optimal strategy is the same as in the original Sleeping Beauty problem, since that problem supposes that you were going to do the same thing on both days anyway. (That strategy is not as straightforward as "assign probability 0.6667 to tails" if you can bet things like "all the money currently in my checking account" rather than just fixed dollar amounts.)

So within the problem, the concept of "credence" is not as broadly applicable as it normally is; the conditional probability is different from the optimal betting odds (and those odds themselves differ based on details of the bet). You can either stick to the conditional-probability definition, say that the odds are 0.5 (0.6667 in the original problem), and not use that value for any practical purpose. Or you can say "I think there is a 50% chance that the coin is tails, and if that is the case any actions I take will happen twice", which is a more useful fact to know when strategizing.

I think you detached them in the opposite way here. In the original problem both the conditional probability and optimal betting odds are 0.6667. In /u/4bpp version (and the version I attempted to describe) the conditional probability is still 0.6667 but the optimal betting odds go to 0.5. In your version the conditional probability is 0.5 and the optimal betting odds are 0.6667. You are correct that this is an easier way to describe how betting odds and conditional probabilities can detach.

Please explain.

What's wrong with that? I'm a halfer as well.

I'm not really familiar with Nick Bostrom. I did some googling and all I could find on him and the Sleeping Beauty problem was this paper from 2006

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:44102720-3214-4515-ad86-57aa32c928c7/files/m379c32004c01471b53b6585c11231418

which upon skimming just seems to be him getting massively confused. He keeps inventing new variants of the problem which change certain important premises and then taking them seriously as if them obviously not being 1/3 has some bearing on the original problem which doesn't have those premises. But he comes to the conclusion at the end that both the standard 1/3 and 1/2 views are wrong, but doesn't come to a clear answer himself.

Is there more recent work or posts from him committing to 1/2? Twenty years ago is a long time and I assume he's said more since then.

You're right that he's a bit cagey about it, but if you dig-in you can find what he would actually guess if you drugged him and ran the experiment.

"The 1/3-view is right that Beauty’s posterior credence in HEADS after being informed that it is Monday should be one-half. The 1/2-view is right that Beauty’s prior credence in HEADS, after awakening but before learning that it is Monday, should be one-half."

Eww.

I finished my protracted play through of StarCraft 2. Took me a few months of on again off again play.

The Terran campaign I played on normal, and it was easy to the point of being tedious and boring. I definitely feel like some pussification happened in the difficulty, and "hard" became normal, normal became easy, and easy became "This is mathematically impossible to lose unless you are a game journalist".

The Zerg campaign I played entirely on hard, and that felt about right.

The Protoss campaign I started on hard, but towards the end I caved and had to switch to normal. They just throw too many high level units at you when all you start off with are zealots and stalkers. Also too many obnoxious defense missions where it feels like Protoss are just too squishy on defense. I forget which mission it was that finally broke me and caused me to switch to normal, but it was some defense mission where your allies start off covering your east, west and south entrances, and you get repeatedly hammered from all three directions.

Then I played the epilogue on normal, because I'd already switched, and also the Nova mini campaign. They felt alright on normal. At least not tediously boring like the Terran campaign on normal.

All in all, it was alright I guess. I had to obsessively watch every dialog because I can't help myself. Which really slowed things down because the game feels like 50% dialog and 50% gameplay. The story beats of "Cure Kerrigan of her Zerg infestation, then re-Zerg her, then she saves the universe" was as dumb as it always was. Especially with that being the penultimate climax of the Terran campaign, and then completely undone halfway through the Zerg campaign. It reminds me of all those show runners that end season 1 on this show altering cliff hanger/climax, and then completely chicken out and backtrack in the first episode of season 2. Like in Santa Clarita Diet when the first season builds up towards Drew Barrymore turning into a feral zombie, and then in the first 30 minutes of the next season they cure her and go a completely different direction with the story.

It also got pretty tedious how every campaign is some weird neoliberal fanfiction about all these different peoples coming together in a melting pot where all their differences actually make them strong enough to defeat the big bad. In every single campaign. I don't remember StarCraft 1 being remotely that obnoxious and one note. Oh well.

The Protoss SC2 campaign is just "there are N locations each guarded by progressively stronger groups of enemies" over and over again. It's tiresome. And if the writers had the balls to keep Kerrigan human and have some amount of control over the Zerg, and reckon with what she did as the Queen of Blades, then the back half of HotS would have been much more interesting.

Oh, are we ranting about Starcraft? Let me pour out a drink and ante up.

I don't remember StarCraft 1 being remotely that obnoxious and one note. Oh well.

Starcraft 1 had it in a much older style, that hews closer to "White guy gets accepted into alien culture" tropes. Think The Last Samurai, or every rip-off of The Last of the Mohicans. Once you get past the first Terran campaign, Raynor is estranged from Mengsk, so the story keeps him around by just letting him tag along with the Protoss.

"Greetings. We are the Firstborn, the sons of Aiur, the Protoss. Our people are advanced far beyond your ken, both technically and psychically. We have come to do battle with the greatest forces of darkness, wielding our eldritch might in the most ancient of our sacred warrior traditions.

Also, we brought our friend Jim. He is a kind of monkey-thing, militia, motorcycle-cop. We gave him a battlecruiser; it's hilarious."

SC1 is a lot funnier if you interpret Jim as the Protoss' version of Boblin the Goblin.

But yes, the plot for SC2 is fucking stupid all around. They can't alienate any players, so all three factions have to have Good Guys, though they all splinter so much that there's someone for everyone.

I forget which mission it was that finally broke me and caused me to switch to normal, but it was some defense mission where your allies start off covering your east, west and south entrances, and you get repeatedly hammered from all three directions.

My general love for Starcraft is matched and mirrored by my burning hatred for the damned defense missions. Why the actual fuck did that team think static defense missions were the best way to cap almost every campaign? And the LotV one was just actually offensive. You spend the whole campaign building up and unlocking Solarite powers, and then they take them all away for the final mission?! One of my angriest video game experiences.

Difficulty-wise, "hard" feels like the correct choice for all of them. Normal for the horrendous defense ones that feel terrible to try at.

You and I could probably discuss this for days. My friends and I were huge into SC1 and Battle.net back in the day.

Raynor always served his role well as the go-between of sorts between the different races as well as the Terran factions. The campaign story was a lot more extensive than a lot of the competitive players originally realized, and in multiplayer especially, SC1 reproved its replay value for years and years up until SC2 came out (which I was disappointed by, even in the SK professional circuit; and I used to watch Tasteless and Artosis commentary in the Code S bracket a lot).

After the first chapter of SC2, I let the story drop off for me after that, not being too satisfied with the direction of things they went. That said, did they ever finish the chapter or cliffhanger with Lieutenant Duran and his experiments he was conducting across the stars?

You and I could probably discuss this for days. My friends and I were huge into SC1 and Battle.net back in the day.

Same. Many, many late nights doing 3v3 and 4v4 on group calls with the boys.

That said, did they ever finish the chapter or cliffhanger with Lieutenant Duran and his experiments he was conducting across the stars?

Yeah, Duran shows back up in Heart of the Swarm as "Dr. Narud", and after Kerrigan's heel-face-turn he takes over as a Zerg villain personality. He was doing the Big Bad's work fusing zerg and protoss into the hybrid, which are very powerful elite enemy units that show up increasingly often as HotS and Legacy of the Void progress. Duran himself is slowly revealed to be a sort of high level eldritch horror. HotS does a lot to humanize the zerg, with actual characters that have personalities. Alexi Stukov is revealed to still be alive, if zerg-infested, and he takes the role of "human friendly zerg guy". He gives some missions to finish Duran/Narud to satisfy his vengeance after what Duran did to him and the UED at the end of Brood War.

I will say that a lot of the missions are very fun, with good replayability.

Why the actual fuck did that team think static defense missions were the best way to cap almost every campaign?

As a turtler who's terrible at RTS games because I'm horribly sloe to expand, I love me a good defense mission. But I'm hardly the modal player, and SC sure as hell shouldn't be catering to me.

I was always a turtling / defensive player by default, especially in the FMP maps that made it easy to macro. In all my private matches we’d orchestrate, my peers hated playing my ass because they said I played “boring.” Well yeah… When you play competitive, you play to win. If you’re looking for something casual, stick to playing in public channels with randos.

Back when we played the private ladders like Vile Gaming Tour (VGT) and StarCraftDream (SCD), things were serious and we all wanted to see the “best” players in bo3’s, bo5’s or bo7’s who could put on a fascinating show, along with all the shittalking that ensured from everyone complaining that “so-and-so plays like a faggot!,” and calling each other noobs’s and retards. I swear it was the teenage immaturity that kept the game alive longer than it otherwise would have, but it was great.

I would say that every strategy game should certainly have defense missions (though not necessarily as the climax), so you should get catered to in that sense. Both defense and attack are part of the strategy game experience.

Fire Emblem players know that a good enemy phase team is a thing of beauty. Just sit back and watch as the enemy breaks itself upon your swole waifus and husbandos.

This is now a vidya thread.

I haven't played SC2 past the first campaign, but the Terran campaign was ridiculously bad. Like, B-movie bad and not the kind that becomes a cult classic.

In other news, I finally played Dispatch for a minute and had to quit it to try again later. I expected it to be a VN, but it's a Telltale-style game. Which sounds like not a big distinction, but it is. A proper VN puts you in charge of the technical (not dramatic) pacing. Clicking through after every line is a tiny action, but it results in a completely different experience, as you can stop at any moment, reread, etc. I picked "no QTEs", but every single dialog choice was a QTE.

I don't mind a Telltale-style game, but it's a much more involved experience, not something I want to play half-asleep.

Mildly interesting masochism game: Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library

You are the librarian of a magical university. Your goal is to reshelve literally three thousand books that have been thrown onto the floor by a rogue fairy. You must figure out from each book's title on which of the 31 shelves it belongs.

The game is translated from Japanese, so the proper categorizations of some titles are not obvious, and you must figure them out by trial and error. For example:

  • The shelf labeled "romance novels" actually is for non-mystery novels in general.

  • Puppet Crafting: An Introductory Guide to Automata and Statues belongs on the art shelf rather than on the magical artifacts and enchanting shelf.

  • Ultimate Choice: Curry-Flavored Poop or Poop-Flavored Curry? belongs on the psychology shelf.

The game costs only six dollars (and currently is on sale for five dollars).

You are the librarian of a magical university. Your goal is to reshelve literally three thousand books that have been thrown onto the floor by a rogue fairy.

Ook!

Now THAT's a Japanese learning game!

Is 'masochism game' a generally used term? It made me think of Viscera Cleanup Detail.

learning game

This game does not use a real-life library classification scheme, so I don't see how it counts as a "learning game".

Is "masochism game" a generally used term?

No, I made it up just now.

What I mean is that as a semi-advanced Japanese learner, it sounds like the best way to play is in Japanese where translation quality is not an issue and you have to go by real cultural nuance / in-depth understanding to figure out the answers. It's very rare to find something that is a) not targeted at (beginner) learners, b) not novels and novels worth of text as in an RPG, c) requires specific attention to the language at a level deeper than 'can I work out vaguely what is going on', and d) provides feedback about whether you got it right.

In theory it sounds great for an intermediate to advanced learner. Do you actually get any feedback, or do you have to do all 3000 and pray?

Do you actually get any feedback, or do you have to do all 3000 and pray?

  • If you put a book in a correct position on the correct shelf, it briefly glows yellow.

  • If you put a book on the correct shelf but in an incorrect position on that shelf (e. g., volume 3 in position 7 of a 10-volume row, volume 3 of a 10-volume set in a 3-volume row where the other volumes of the set won't fit, volume 3 of set B in a row where you've already put volume 2 of set A, or volume 3 of a set in one row when you've already put volume 2 of the same set in a different row), it briefly glows red.

  • If you put a book on an incorrect shelf, it doesn't glow at all.

Awesome, thanks. I'll give it a go!

It reminds me of all those show runners that end season 1 on this show altering cliff hanger/climax, and then completely chicken out and backtrack in the first episode of season 2.

Preach!

Co-op online missions mode are pretty fun if you like to grind a bit. You get level based meta-upgrades sort of like the campaign. Worth trying if you're not burned out of SC2 yet.

Recommend not grinding. They're nice if you just want to play a quick game or two, without the stress of a pvp game.

The fake feeling of progression just hits the spot sometimes, applies to many RPGs too, though they usually have more story.

Can MMORPG design principles be applied to real life in order to promote theoretically-ideal outcomes?

The ones which can be, are. It's all well and good until people disagree on which outcomes qualify as "ideal." Casinos are an excellent example.

Math Academy is a (paid) website where you can learn math. There's courses on different levels of math from algebra, to calculus. You get xp for each task, and there's a leaderboard so you can see how well others are doing too. It's pretty sophisticated too. You get basic a lesson on a specific topic, then a short review some time later, and then quizzes which is a set of questions on different topics.

If you mess up on a lesson, or a review you'll fail it and will need to redo it the next day. If you mess up a quiz too much you need to redo it and you lose points for it. There's a warning where if you mess up too many lessons you'll lose more points, but I've never experienced it so I don't know if it's true or just something

In terms of effectiveness I really like it. The xp makes it easy to track how well you've been doing, and it'll give you a date as to when you'll finish the course, which isn't very fast, since each course is around 3k xp, and each task gives about 7 xp.

The creator of it has a whole book on how to effectively learn but I haven't read it just skimmed through and it seems to be pretty effective. It was also used in an 8th grade class and allowed them to do AP Calculus.

The daily grind in World of Warcraft may be more boring than another game, but it’s still a lot more ‘fun’ (or less painful) than running a 10k for most people, for example.

That said, I’d argue many things in real life employ gamification principles - whether it’s job boards / ticket systems like in software engineering, or fitness apps like Apple health with streaks and tracking and scores and medals etc etc. Clearly it works for some people - although I’d guess they all like the game a little before the gamification is applied.

Maybe that’s the best way to look at it, MMOs have dailies to get players coming back every day which promotes retention. I know many gym apps that have essentially the same dailies for small rewards (a coffee, a protein shake), so in that sense it works.

Gamification is a hard thing to get right. But the principle at play has already been known for a long time. AP chemistry in high school wouldn’t have been so hard for some people if you taught kids using black powder explosives and chemicals with energetic properties, as an example. Young boys love letting off fireworks and things that go boom boom.

People like Nerd Fitness regularly try. The problem with gameification is that games themselves have to be at least a little bit fun, especially if you want people to play them long-term. This is much harder to do for things that are (broadly) inherently dull and painful such as tax returns* or learning theoretical physics than for things like shooting monsters or looting dungeons. See for instance the game made by the guy who just tried to kill Trump - to the extent that it accurately represents and tries to teach particle physics, it's much less fun than another game would be using similar mechanics without the baggage.

There are other issues - gamified approaches have to put aside lots of extra time for the 'game' part so they aren't very efficient. If you have to play a periodic table board game for a week's worth of evenings where you could get the most important bits of info from a slide, a 30 minute lecture and a test, that's not necessarily an improvement.

*yes, I know about the XKCD.

The problem with gameification is that games themselves have to be at least a little bit fun, especially if you want people to play them long-term.

This is why I play very few multiplayer games these days. Battle Royale and MOBA games (including Overwatch), or camping simulators like R6S or Counter-Strike, are just straight up not designed to be fun.

At least Fallout, though it's just as much a walking and lootbox simulator as the typical BR game, has a few other things going on with it and encounters that are at least winnable. The MP versions of that idea inherently aren't that way.

If I'm going to be forced to wait around there needs to be a payoff, which incidentally is why the pace of building software or hardware prototypes slows down exponentially the longer the effective iteration/build time is.

How do you mean?

Tactical shooters are built around a tension/release loop between the positioning and the shooting. You are running your own strategy with imperfect information about how to preempt the enemy. Collecting more information narrows the possibility space, until one of you gets the payoff in the form of a head appearing under your crosshair.

One extreme form is the extraction shooter, where 95% of the gameplay is routine. Covert maneuvering, inventory management, situational awareness. The whole time, though, you're supposed to be predicting what the other players are up to while you're preoccupied. Then you get a payoff in the form of climactic fights or narrow escapes. I'm sure @self_made_human has said more on the subject.

MOBAs occupy a different space, but they've still got tension/release. The routine activity (farming) gives way to deliberate maneuvers (ganks, pushes) give way to a big payoff (teamfights). You get some control over the transitions between steps if you correctly assess relative strengths, player intents, and so on.

All this without mentioning the social aspect. Monkey brain shows dominance. Monkey brain impress friends. Graah.

For some people the fun comes from directly exploring the game itself. Why bother learning the internal knowledge of the game when you can apply your external knowledge to hack the game and become God? I’ve met people who first learned to program by implementing techniques like DLL hooking, memory inspection, process injection, etc., who basically threw their hands up and said “F this shit…,” and went to directly write to the memory address of a particular subroutine in the game; looking for ways to bypass the controls that limit your ability to easily level up and do whatever you want.

Searching my username alongside "Tarkov" will turn up a fairly unflattering paper trail re: my relationship with the genre. Reading it in chronological order resembles the journal of somebody trying to quit caffeine while living above a coffee shop. I'm not quite sure how I managed it, in the end.

One extreme form is the extraction shooter, where 95% of the gameplay is routine.

This gets at something hard to convey to people who haven't logged the hours. Hardcore extraction shooters share a structural feature with actual combat, or at least with everything I've read about actual combat: long flat plateaus of tedium, occasionally interrupted by short bursts of unfiltered terror. Your life isn't, strictly speaking, at risk, although I suspect if somebody pulled the actuarial tables on long-term Tarkov players we'd find some interesting blood pressure data. But the stakes are higher than in any comparable genre. A single death can wipe out days of progress. Every kill you score has cost somebody, somewhere, an evening they aren't getting back.

The thing that makes this fun (where "fun" is being used in roughly the same sense that ultramarathons are fun, or possibly in the sense that some hobbies are genuinely satisfying to participants and indistinguishable from torture to onlookers, Type 3 fun to be specific) is that death turns out to be effective pedagogy. And not only for the people writing the obituary. You absorb caution and prudence almost involuntarily, and your gut, given enough thousands of hours, becomes something pretty close to a calibrated instrument. You look at a dozen doors, a hundred bushes, and a few broken windows, and you just know that something ain't quite right.

There's also a gameplay premium on what military types call violence-of-action. Once the rounds are close enough to part your hair, you discover that holding still is functionally identical to dying. The best fights play out like choreography: two people of roughly comparable skill trying to outshoot and outguess each other in the span of about eight seconds.

And the decision tree branches forever. Is your magazine still good for another burst, or did you spend most of it on the last guy? Do you loot the body now, or wait in case his teammates are about to round the corner? Do you chuck a grenade into the room where you're pretty sure somebody is camping? Do you, in the immortal words, feel lucky, punk?

Then there's the social layer, and like most things, the game is better with friends, or with acquaintances who rapidly end up becoming your friend. Do you trust the new player you've been mentoring to actually watch your six? Do you accept, in advance, that he probably won't, and forgive him in advance because you remember being him? Do you risk your own kit recovering your dead teammate's gear so the insurance payout works out in his favor? There is no single right answer to any of these. The game just keeps teaching you that some answers are better than others, and you'd better figure out which is which, fast.

And then sometimes you do everything correctly and you still get domed by some guy in a bush three hundred meters away. War is, as the saying goes, heck. I don't play Tarkov anymore, although the reason has more to do with BSG's ongoing mismanagement of the property than with the underlying design, which is still genuinely unlike anything else on the market (except maybe Gray Zone Warfare, which I'm trying to get into). Whatever else you can say about it, nobody else is making this game. It's a shame BSG is unmaking their game. One step forward, two steps back, toes inside their own ass. I'm too old to deal with that nonsense.

EVE Online had a similar high stress feeling to combat. A loss in battle could cost you hours of your time because your ship is blown up and gone. The salvage from the wreck is now in your enemy's hands. It also had the added horror that large scale wars could erase years of your effort and progress.

It really got the blood pumping. Maybe too much.

The game just keeps teaching you that some answers are better than others, and you'd better figure out which is which, fast.

Well, not fast. The game is way too slow for any such learning to reasonably occur; it's not going to be immediately obvious if you lost on turn 1, and if I have to wait for several hours to get back to turn 1, then I'm going to shut the game off and return to browsing YouTube (which, ironically, is full of just the high points of many, many games).

Apex Legends, for a while, had a "problem" with a certain type of player whose strategy would be- and quite reasonably, I might add- "drop, play, die, instantly disconnect". There's zero chance you'll discover any of the winning strategies organically, especially because menuing (which you have to do in fights to win them) is so inherently clunky that doing it quickly is itself its own skill.

They never fixed that, of course, because having a bunch of people who do this is actually good for the game simply because it ensures action happens early.

There's also a gameplay premium on what military types call violence-of-action.

The games I have the most life time spent in are Call of Duty 4 (with 32 or 64 player servers)/Titanfall and Payday 2 for this reason; there's so much of this, or the potential for so much of this, that you actually can reasonably learn by dying a bunch of times to figure out what works and what doesn't, or actually have fun by using meme strategies.

Playing Tarkov for the first time without watching half a dozen new player guides and keeping a map open on your phone is masochism. The game is ridiculously obtuse about its mechanics. That's not a good thing, but once upon a time, the payoff to all that hard work felt very good. I went from a survival rate of 30% to 60% over 5 wipes, and a KD of 2 to 7, I think. Albeit that includes PVE kills too. I was only above average as a PVP player, perhaps just average when adjusting for playtime.

Then you get a payoff in the form of climactic fights

So the payoff of all the waiting around is that you finally get to play the game.

Waiting around to play the game isn't fun. It's barely tolerable with friends, and that's more in the suffering-through-something-someone-else-enjoys sense than the actually-engaging-for-player sense.

The difference between an extraction simulator and similar open world games where there's a similar amount of walking (or waiting) is that, for the latter, playing the game is more of an incidental (as in, there's more to look at/more to gather, because you're building towards something else- there's no building or measure of permanence in any of these other games).

Tarkov is even worse about that, because you spend a limited resource to have a higher chance of surviving/accumulating further resource, and if you die having done that you're now at a further disadvantage when it comes to playing the game. So the chance you'll actually have any fun in a round is now distributed over several rounds/hours, not just one. And that's not counting the cycle resets that do this anyway.

It's not a game; it's boring, tedious, work to have a chance of making it to the fun part.

The waiting part is a different game; a sneaking game with regards to avoiding unecessary fights with NPCs (or players if you're not looking for a fight that day). There's also the hunting game mechanics; if you're looking to kill some players, stopping, listening for distant firefights, doors, exfils, running... so that you can create as accurate a picture of what is happening before you engage is another kind of gameplay that is enjoyable in its own right, for some people at least.

with regards to avoiding unecessary fights with NPCs

So the best strategy to succeed is to avoid playing the fun part of the game at all costs.

That is certainly a gameplay loop.

You can engage in the NPC fights whenever you want, gear up in consequence with cheap/free gear and go tussle with them. It's fun, and sometimes your goals will align with that. You probably don't want to be doing it with fancy gear because no fancy gear can compensate for the disadvantage of being caught in between the NPCs and the players the noise you've been making fighting the NPCs might have attracted. But anyway, some people, me included, enjoy the sneaking aspect as much as the fights. Sometimes I'm not in the mood to fight at all but I'm in the mood for the survival horror esque aspect of trying to sneak around.

Just finished Stranger Things Season 4, after taking a long hiatus following season 3. I had assumed the law of diminishing returns would apply but was presently surprised that 4, imo, was the strongest season since the first. Taking things in a more horror inspired direction seemed to be just the right move to reinvigorate things while still developing in an organic way from the original premise. I've heard season 5 isn't great; should I end on a high note?

Watching S5 right after S4 is probably the best way to consume it; I wouldn't Episode 2 yourself just because 3 isn't as good.

The problem with S5 is fundamentally that the script is what it would look like if you had ChatGPT re-write S1 by prompting it to continue S4. And I mean that in every sense of the word; it's safe for kids, the villain has returned to being a stock character, the main characters regressed to pre-S1 levels of plot development, and the new developments make zero sense in context.

I would suggest that when watching, the instant you realize you're losing interest in what happens, go straight to the finale and don't watch any of the other episodes. You couldn't do this if you were watching at release and you're not also waiting on S5, which are the 2 dynamics that people who dislike S5 are usually ignoring when they say it ruined the show for them.

Taking things in a more horror inspired direction seemed to be just the right move to reinvigorate things while still developing in an organic way from the original premise

It needed to develop into a "tales of" sort of thing, much like FNAF did (and quite successfully, I might add). S4/S5 would have worked well as a one-shot with a new set of kid actors, and the parts of S5 that involve said actors are still half-decent for that reason. But there wasn't as much required foresight in this case to pull that off, and they were kind of chained to using the old cast far beyond the point it made sense (which completely destroys Will's characterization in particular). But you'll find that out as you watch.

We did the first two episodes of S5 last night. So far I quite like it; I'll try to maintain momentum and finish strong. I definitely know what you mean about the actors. It's not so bad with the older kids, but it can be hard to suspend disbelief when you're watching someone whose in their twenties notionally playing a high school sophomore

someone whose in their twenties notionally playing a high school sophomore

Look at it as a layer of unintentional meta-authenticity. This is the most 1980's thing the series has ever done.

I also enjoyed season 4. Season 5 was lazy slop. But it was at least better than the last season of Game of Thrones and didn't entirely and retroactively ruin the show for me. Its a low bar to clear, but many shows fail it.

I am always surprised at much praise season 4 gets. In my mind it’s the worst of the first four; as it’s a giant retcon/reboot that just creates a new show inside of another one’s skin using the familiarity of the characters to sneak it through.

I think each season is dramatically worse than the one before it.

As for season 5 - go ahead and finish it. However, enjoyers and haters of season 4 alike find it bad. The only camp of fans I think is those who like all of ST uncritically

I've recently been getting into fixed-income investing as a way to learn by doing. I'm investing a little bit of money each month (that I can afford to lose). If my after tax yield is a full 1% higher than I could get from my HYSA over a six month time period, with no principal loss of >5% over any thirty day window, I'll say that I have a layman's grasp on the topic. If not, I'll have to figure out what I did wrong.

So far I've been floored by the complexity of fixed income vs equities. I honestly don't know how people who do it professionally manage.

Does anybody else have an unconventional pastime right now?

Why so few details? Can you share what you’ve learned? Spill it.

What are you buying, and where are you buying it?

I’ve also gotten into active trading. I so badly want to make it a reliable source of income. Sometimes I feel like lately, the market is like a beach wave forming. I need to paddle as hard as I can to catch the wave and ride it to shore, or else the water will swell briefly around me but leave me in the water, replaced by AI.

How far into the journey are you? What style do you focus on? (Day-, swing-, position-trading)?

Thanks for asking. I'm always happy to info-dump about the trading I'm up to. I would also love to hear what you're doing.

I'm focusing on option-selling strategies. Right now that just looks like selling a lot of puts.

I've been learning/trading small for about 3 years, and I significantly increased my account size last summer, so the jury's still out on how successful I'll be. The put-selling is on margin, and for those reading who think that sounds scary, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm borrowing money to trade. But being short puts does mean at any time I can be forced to buy shares of some company, and I definitely do not have the cash to buy all the shares I've potentially obligated myself to buy.

To more directly answer your question, VTI accounts for about 80% of my trading account's net value, and I'm selling puts with the buying power that the VTI position affords me. Other significant positions include:

  • Five short puts on SLV + ~80 shares of SLV (bought with the premium from earlier SLV puts). I'm happy to report I was executing this strategy during the silver bubble's runup and popping last January and wasn't financially ruined.

  • A pretty large position in /MES (micro e-mini S&P 500 futures). This is short puts with a twist. Basically if the market goes up, I make a few hundred bucks. If it goes down 10%, I make a few thousand, but if it goes down 25%, I lose my house (mostly kidding...). If we get another Liberation Day I would have to have somewhere around $20,000 cash on hand to handle the margin requirements to keep this open.

  • Synthetic longs. (Long call financed by a--you guessed it--short put). Right now my most successful one is on Intel. On July 25th of last year I bought a $20 call and sold a $20 put and paid a net of $237 for it. This position is now worth about $7,500. These kinds of positions are always about fantastic strokes of luck, but I never imagined INTC would moon like this.

  • A modest number of short puts on random S&P 500 companies.

Intriguing strat!

I've only just started looking into options. It seems like it will have a lower hit rate but could sometimes be really fun. I might try some leaps, calls and puts at some point. Though these contracts seem like they'll favor inside traders more than anyone. The theta decay looks pretty brutal if you're not pretty spot on with your timing.

When you buy both a long and a put, are you basically betting on increased volatility? Not sure I understand.

I've been learning for 2 years. Ironically my first year was better than my second year. I'm too risk averse if anything.

I'm working on all major aspects of the 'hobby': macro, fundamental analysis, technical analysis and chart studies, the mental part (major focus this year) and also looking at the social/flock/memetics stuff somewhat.

It's definitely worth getting familiar with options. It seems like you already know the basics, and I believe everyone can benefit from understanding their risks and benefits.

The theta decay looks pretty brutal if you're not pretty spot on with your timing.

Yeah, and you can benefit from this by selling those options. Then you have theta decay on your side. Check out tasty trade on Youtube.

When you buy both a long and a put, are you basically betting on increased volatility? Not sure I understand.

Assuming you're referring to my synthetic longs, I'm selling a put and buying a call. It's combining two bullish positions to take advantage of their leverage and different cash flows (one uses cash to open and the other generates cash to open). Buying one call with the money received from selling one put will simulate the risk profile of owning 100 shares of the underlying. You're exposed to all the downside and all the upside.

But, yeah in general having a long put and a long call would need to count on a big move or an increase in volatility to be profitable.

Doesn't this expose you to potentially unlimited downside? If the company were to go tits up after you sold those put contracts, you would be obligated to buy a lot of horrible shares, no?

Ask yourself: if you had the cash you needed to actually buy 100 shares of something you thought was a good hold, would all this worry about exposure to the downside suddenly disappear?

If so, then it’s not the downside risk that you’re worried about; you’ve been through market volatility without panic selling. You’re worried about your cash position. Cash can be managed! Positions can also be managed to minimize chances of assignment. There’s recourse. Worst case, you wake up with 100 shares of some piece of crap and you owe your broker thousands of dollars. You can simply sell the shares to pay back the broker, and you may have to eat whatever loss makes up the shortfall. You just make sure you can handle that loss. And at the end of the month you pay the $4 in tax-deductible margin interest.

So why not use the money you set aside for the risk on even more call options instead? Does selling puts really make your bet more +EV?

More comments

If I understand it correctly, the loss is at least capped at the original value of the 100 shares. Basically, you gain the advantage of owning stock without having to put up the same investment up-front, but you should have at least have a substantial percentage of the money for those 100 shares lying around in some way regardless so that you don't have to take a loan if things go south. But if you do this with multiple investment schemes that are in theory un- or only weakly correlated, then you can use the same stack of money as a guarantee for all of them without ever going negative.

This is basically correct. The maximum loss is the strike price of the put x 100 for one contract. Offset by whatever premium you sold the contract for (which you keep).

Why so few details? Can you share what you’ve learned? Spill it.

  1. I'm hesitant to give anybody the impression that I'm someone they should listen to.
  2. Some of it is geographically sensitive and I don't want to dox myself.
  3. My bar for success is low, so it's nothing particularly impressive. I'm basically using this as a learning opportunity in the hopes that I can have a tier of risk and return that sits between a HYSA and equities.

With that out of the way:

  1. I'm buying bonds directly through my brokerage or at auction.
  2. Bond funds are though my brokerage
  3. Treasuries are through Treasury direct.

What I've found so far:

  1. Municipal bonds are a better deal than their headline yield would imply. Being exempt from both state (if they're issued from my state) and federal taxes gives an increase in the final yield, when you'd normally see a decrease. The default risk is also fairly low. The biggest risk is duration. If your state has a municipal bond fund, you can mitigate that a little through the fund having a rolling portfolio.
  2. Collateralized loan obligations are pretty interesting - I have some money in JAAA and it's doing fairly well. Once again, it beats a HYSA, the duration is low, and it's insulated from some default risk by being last in line to default.
  3. Active bond funds usually do better than passive ones, in contrast to equities. It's enough of a difference that they usually justify the expense ratios.
  4. International bonds are kind of a pain in the ass for taxes, even if they're at arm's length in a fund.
  5. Treasury derived income is usually state tax exempt, which is a nice bonus.

JAAA

See I currently have my spare cash in SGOV which is supposedly super safe, but I don't need it to be that safe. JAAA is a good callout, and I'm curious what resources you're using to explore this part of investing.

what resources you're using to explore this part of investing.

I actually ran into JAAA in an argument on the bogleheads forum, of all places. They're one of the few places left that hasn't gone all in on long degeneracy.

Treasury direct

What's the advantage of Treasury Direct for anything other than IBonds?

If you're willing to manage it yourself you can get a few basis points over a fund.

It's not worth much, but I wanted to know how it worked

Oh you’re into credit markets! I’ve studied this stuff pretty extensively and know a couple of people in high finance (one in particular who works the sell side in DCM and has gotten rich via distressed debt investing); and have a few very distant relatives in IB. The industry has changed quite a bit since the early days of the Internet. Derivatives trading in the classical sense is going the way of the dinosaur. People tell me if you’re looking to really “get into it,” beyond the horizon of an ordinary retail investor, what you really want is a job in “structuring.”

Fixed income (i.e. bonds, credits) are several orders of magnitude larger than equities markets. I’m not exactly going to pitch myself as a person chalk full of solid advice on complex investment strategies (disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor or professional analyst), but I invest myself, and follow that side of the industry pretty closely. I’ve also been studying the equities of energy markets both international and domestic for the last few years, due to climate change trends and have discovered some pretty interesting things.

I can recommend plenty of resources your way, if you’re into that (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

Thanks!

People tell me if you’re looking to really “get into it,” beyond the horizon of an ordinary retail investor, what you really want is a job in “structuring.”

Just make sure you're not committing the federal financial crime named "structuring" too. :)

This is structuring meaning making a virtual non deposit taking bank. Where the financing for the virtual bank can have significantly higher credit score than the loans the bank holds as assets.

I've also been investing! I have a blend between individual stock picks, index funds and fixed income. I was originally investing in individual CDs, which are about the same as a HYSA, but I've since diversified to some high-yield bonds and ETFs. Happy to chat more if you want!

What does your process look like when it comes to picking which individual stocks to go for and timing your entries and exits?

Is it just me, or do mortgage backed securities feel like they aren't as radioactive as they were ~20 years ago? The underwriting requirements for mortgages are lot more strict these days, and the systems in place for what happens on a default are more robust.

I've been using a strategy right now of mostly purchasing things that have multiple layers of backstopping. Municipal bonds are another - in my state, if the municipality fails, the state takes it over. If the state fails, at least for the ones I've bought, the feds take over. If the US government fails, I'm not going to be worried about my bond yields. The tax exemption is a nice bonus on those too.

The last couple years I’ve delved more into emerging markets to see what the next hot areas are going to be. Malaysia has recently caught my focus for its developing importance as a digital services hub in that particular region. Kuala Lumpur has also become an attractive destination for some people seeking greater financial freedom and investment opportunities.

Paging @ToaKraka, since you're the resident civil engineer/rules aficionado, I have a question about construction zone safety, and what I can do to combat the rash of confusing and/or nonsensical flagging situations that seem to have proliferated in the past year or two. Last night I was sitting at a 5-way intersection in the southbound center lane, intending to continue on the same road. There is also a left turning lane for those making one of two left-hand options, as well as a lane for those turning right. The lane I was traveling in, on the far side of the intersection (about 200' away), was blocked by construction vehicles, a sign saying "Road Work Ahead", and two flaggers, one with a flag and one with those light batons. The opposing lane of traffic had cars sitting at the light traveling northbound, and at some point one of the flaggers waved them through. The light was operating throughout this whole time so I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to follow the light or the flaggers, but when I had the first cycle of green there was nowhere for me to go so I just sat there watching the flaggers who, mind you, were 200' away from me.

At one point the guy with the light batons, who was standing near the trucks behind the guy with the flag, started doing some dance that I at first couldn't tell if it was because he was trying to direct traffic or because he was bored, but it soon became obvious that it was the latter. Then the guy with the flag started making a waving motion that was so vague I couldn't tell which cars he was waving through or where he wanted them to go, but given that I had been sitting there a while and the northbound lane was clear I interpreted to mean that that lane was available for southbound traffic. Of course, as soon as I start heading for the open lane the guy starts yelling "No" quite loudly, and I have to beat a retreat to making a right turn, which was only a minor detour but still irritating given that I knew as soon as I saw the construction that I wasn't going to be given any straightforward instructions.

To summarize: There were two guys controlling a road at an intersection with four approaches, two of which were too far away to see anything clearly, the other two with bad sight lines. One of the guys was treating his traffic control device like a toy. There was no signage indicating that the southbound lane was closed, or any posted detour. A simple sign indicating that the road was closed would have been sufficient, but instead they seemingly decided to create a situation that was intentionally confusing in the hope that people would just not bother. I was half tempted to pull up and roll down my window and demand to speak to who was in charge of this and see a safety plan, lie about being an engineer from PennDOT and make up a state law saying that the contractor had to have a copy of the safety plan on site that was available upon request.

If this were an isolated incident I wouldn't care that much, but something similar has happened about a half dozen times, all in the past year or two, once last summer at the exact same intersection. I don't recall it happening at all in the previous 20 years of driving, so either I'm getting dumber or people are getting more lax. I'm sure there's some way to lodge a formal complaint, but that's no fun. I want to know what the actual regulations and best practices are so I can go into full-blown dick mode the next time this happens and have some ammunition to back me up. I can understand if this was some kind of emergency repair but they repaved the entire road last summer and have been doing more work for the past week.

five way intersection

Half assed construction

Tell me you're in Western PA without telling me you're in Western PA.

They’ve got plenty of 5-point intersections where I come from, and I’m nowhere near PA.

I want to know what the actual regulations and best practices are so I can go into full-blown dick mode the next time this happens and have some ammunition to back me up.

I was a designer who drew up traffic-control plans, not a construction engineer who oversaw the actual implementation of those plans, but I'll do my best.

MUTCD chapter 6D (Flagger Control):

The STOP/SLOW paddle should be the primary and preferred hand-signaling device because the STOP/SLOW paddle gives road users more positive guidance than red flags.

Use of flags should be limited to emergency situations.

When flagging in an emergency situation at night in a non-illuminated flagger station, a flagger may use a flashlight with a red glow cone to supplement the STOP/SLOW paddle or flag.

§ 6D.05 ¶ 5 includes detailed instructions on hand movements when using flags rather than a stop/slow paddle.

However, it looks like PennDOT is much less strict than the feds on the usage of flags over stop/slow paddles. See the text that I have italicized below. (This is novel to me. NJDOT Standard Specifications § 159.03.08 item A prescribes the use only of paddles, not of flags—even though NJDOT still calls them "flaggers"!)

PennDOT Publication 408 (Construction Specifications) § 901.3:

According to Publication 212, Publication 213, and the MUTCD.

Install and maintain traffic control devices as indicated on the TCP [traffic-control plan]…

Provide flaggers that successfully completed a flagger-training course within the last 3 years that complies with the Department’s minimum flagger training guidelines described below. Assure that flaggers carry a valid wallet-sized training card containing the name of the flagger, training source, date of successful completion of training, and signature; or provide a roster of trained flaggers to the Representative before the start of flagging operations that contains the names of flaggers, training source, and date of successful completion of training. Minimum flagger training guidelines include the following…

Publication 212 (Official Traffic Control Devices) § 403:

Plans for construction projects must either reference or include a temporary traffic-control (TTC) plan, which must consist of one of the following:

(1) A reference to a specific figure either in the MUTCD or in [Publication 213] that properly depicts actual site conditions.

(2) A copy of a specific figure either in the MUTCD or [in Publication 213] which has been modified to depict actual site conditions and the necessary traffic-control requirements for the specific project.

(3) One or more detailed plan sheets or drawings showing the actual site conditions and the TTC requirements for the specific project.

§ 412:

A red flag shall only be used to control traffic in emergencies when a Stop/Slow Paddle is not available or at intersections where a single flagger is used within an intersection.

Publication 213 (Temporary Traffic Control Guidelines) § B-14:

A red wand (flashlight) may be used to supplement the stop/slow paddle or red flag. The flashlight shall have a red glow cone and emit a steady-burn (non-flashing) light. The red wand shall not be used by itself to control traffic.

Last night I was sitting at a five-leg intersection in the southbound center lane, intending to continue on the same road. There is also a left turning lane for those making one of two left-hand options, as well as a lane for those turning right. The lane I was traveling in, on the far side of the intersection (about 200′ away), was blocked by construction vehicles, a sign saying "Road Work Ahead", and two flaggers, one with a flag and one with those light batons.

A flagger-controlled alternating-traffic setup beginning at a four-leg signalized intersection is covered by Publication 213 figure 110-Q or 110-R. (For a five-leg intersection, the designer or contractor would have to draw up a custom, but largely similar, traffic-control plan.) Both figures put a paddle-wielding flagger at the end of the road narrowing that isn't at the intersection. To cover the other three approaches, figure 110-Q puts one flag-wielding flagger in the middle of the intersection, while figure 110-R uses three paddle-wielding flaggers (one on each corner). You can see how a contractor might prefer to cut his labor costs by using 110-Q over 110-R.

There was no signage indicating that the southbound lane was closed, or any posted detour.

If there were two flaggers, then the setup was supposed to be alternating traffic with no detours (figure 110-Q), not full closure with a "road closed" sign and detours (figure 215).

So, in sum:

  • From your description, it sounds like the overall traffic-control setup was standards-compliant as originally designed, but the flaggers were badly trained (one was standing on one side of the intersection, rather than in the middle) and incorrectly equipped (the other was holding only light-up cones, rather than a cone supplementing a flag). You can try complaining to PennDOT that it should follow NJDOT and abandon the use of a flag-wielding flagger standing in the middle of an intersection to control multiple legs of that intersection simultaneously, but you probably won't have much success.

  • MUTCD § 6D.05 can be pointed at in order to explain how a flagger is "treating his traffic control device like a toy" and "making waving motions that are vague".

Note:

  • It's very possible that PennDOT has guidelines regarding when 110-Q is unsafe (e. g., due to high traffic volume) and 110-R must be used, and I just failed to find those guidelines.

  • This may have been a local jurisdiction that should be following PennDOT standards but is just too lazy to do so.

Whether the problem is with the design of the plan or the implementation is not my concern; a plan is useless if you don't follow it. The flagger was not in the middle of the intersection but directly in front of the construction equipment, where he was a distance a way from me and at such an angle that he would have not been visible to the other three legs. I talked to my PennDOT engineer friend again and he said that I should call District 11 on Monday and explain what happened because if nobody complains then nothing will get done. He also told me about how he sort of impersonated a PennDOT engineer years ago (he was working for them but was in a different district) when he came across a construction zone that was set up incorrectly. He said he was from PennDOT and told them what they needed to do to rectify the situation, and they told him that he needed to call their supervisor. He said that if he made any call it would be to the police to shut the job down, and they apparently made the changes he requested. He said that whether or not the police would do anything about it depends on the department, but calling the district office is always a safe bet because few enough people call about tuff like this that they can take all of the citizen complaints seriously.

This has resurfaced and been trending for a while

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

Currently at 42.1% red and 57.9% blue.

What would you choose? (See also r/slatestarcodex discussion)

I was motivated to post because I have a convincing argument for blue:

  1. Stupid people will choose blue. You may not care about the disabled, elderly, generally moronic, etc. but this includes children and people who are "too generous": nice, but emotional, and devote their lives to charity

  2. Thanos snapping a decent amount of the population (including random children, and biased towards selflessness) will probably overall negatively affect society

  3. I probably won't die because most people choose blue, as evidenced by the poll. Even if I do, it may be preferable to living with the survivors (point #2)

Something something time preference.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where red won. Sociologically it would be an interesting question of how a society which thanos snapped itself would cope. Rugged individualism? "They were stupid and weak for picking blue, we're the smart ones."?

I think that kind of attitude is shortsighted.

Consider that you're currently living in a world where red all but won (we are ruled by massive nation-states and corporations that live according to the principle of preserving themselves first and promote people who do that for them), and the percentage of those really willing to take major risks for others is quite low when put to a real test. Conversely, there must be many decent people who would vote red yet aren't complete insufferable psychopaths and egoists (if only because ~45% of voters on a major twitter poll probably aren't completely insufferable).

If you hold people to the standard of them being willing to risk their own life to save yours, you'll likely find yourself disappointed. (Not just risk, in fact - risk implies some measure of the risker's skill and agency mattering - but gamble.)

I think people are acting more selfless than they really would be, and ofc voting was influenced by surrounding discourse, and of course the scenario is that red won, so some <50% of the population picked blue and died. The plurality of less-selfish people who voted blue, who then get thanos-snapped, were probably load bearing to some degree. I think there are a lot of negative externalities to red winning that red-pressers aren't considering.

Would you still answer the same way if the poll showed 42.1% blue and 57.9% red? Like, are you actually willing to commit suicide to not live in such a world?

Because I'm not. If that's the way the world goes then that's the way the world goes, I'll still choose to be here until I die.

Also 40% isn't too far off from the Black Death's estimated toll of 30% to 60% of Europe's population. Is modern society too much of a fucking pussy to survive what Europe survived a few centuries ago? I doubt it. We're going to bounce back fine in the long-run. The intervening years will suck, but that's no excuse to give up on civilization rebuilding. (And maybe they won't even suck! The cost of labor went way up after the Black Death, so surviving craftsmen did pretty well.)

STOP DOING THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

  • FAKE THINGS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE DISCUSSED SERIOUSLY
  • MILLENIA OF HYPOTHETICALS yet NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND for discussing made up scenarios
  • Wanted to talk about something that hasn’t happened for a laugh? We had a tool for that. It was called GUESSING.
  • “Yes please give me A WORLDWIDE VOTE USING A SET OF BUTTONS THAT HAVE THE POWER TO INSTANTLY KILL PEOPLE BASED ON WHAT BUTTON OTHER PEOPLE PRESSED.” “Please give me A TRAIN TRACK THAT FORKS IN TWO, SOMEHOW IS UNABLE TO STOP, FOR SOME REASON FIVE PEOPLE ARE TIED TO THE TRACKS AND ONE PERSON TO ANOTHER ONE, AND FOR SOME REASON YOU HAVE A LEVER TO CHANGE THE TRACK THE TRAIN IS ON BUT CANT JUST UNTIE THE PEOPLE” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

LOOK at what Philosophers have been demanding your respect for all this time, with all the books and charts we built for them.

This is REAL philosophy done by REAL philosophers (and internet wannabe philosophers)

Chinese_room.jpg

Violinist.jpg

Veil_of_ignorance.jpg

“Hello I would like to talk about what I think I would do in an entirely impossible imaginary scenario”

They have played us for absolute fools

context

A true utilitarian/consequentialist should vote with whatever you expect the majority to be.

The only time your red vote matter is if there is a red majority. The only time a blue vote matters is if there everyone else in the world perfectly ties and your vote is the tiebreaker to blue. This is absurdly ridiculously unlikely, however in the event it happens it's absurdly ridiculously impactful. If you assume everyone else in the world is going to vote blue with probability p, and actually run the math, then you save the maximum number of lives by voting with whichever side of 50% that p is on. If the world population even slightly favors red then there is ~0% chance Blue will win and your vote has astronomically tiny chances of winning (billions of lives saved divided by quadrillions to one odds of it mattering). In this scenario, you aren't sacrificing your life to save anyone else, the children will die no matter what you do. In the original scenario, there is no communication or time to communicate, everyone is presented with the scenario and votes. If the world leans red, you either die for no reason or you live and try to pick up the pieces left over after however many people die, die. You cannot save them.

On the other hand, if the world leans blue, then you should vote blue. There is a tiny chance your vote matters, but also a tiny chance that through randomness you die voting blue, and it ends up being just barely worth it for non-selfish people.

If you have absolutely no idea how the world leans and p could be anything then you've got about a 50-50. There's a 1/2 chance voting blue kills you, and a 1/(world population) chance you are the tiebreaker and save half the world's population, meaning an average of 1/2 life saved. In this case, I think blue is probably better because of the second order effects of losing half the world's population and the ramifications that would have on society.

However, importantly, we DO have some idea on how the world leans. A significant fraction of people are mean and selfish. A significant fraction of people aren't willing to sacrifice themselves to save random strangers. Half of people have an IQ below 100 and are just going to press the red button because that's the simple, safe answer for themselves. If educated, western, liberal, rational people are arguing about this and half of them are red and half are blue, what do you think all of the poor people in third world countries are going to vote? What do you think people in foreign nations with foreign religions and cultures are going to vote? What do you think they're going to think we are going to vote? What do you think they think their next door neighbors who they have been warring with for thousands of years are going to vote? Are Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Algeria/Morocco, Iran/USA going to vote blue, suspecting that their hated enemy is probably going to vote red? Or are they going to fear that billions of people living somewhere else that they don't know are going to vote red, and use that to justify what they secretly wanted in their hearts which was to vote red. Voting blue requires sacrifice, willpower, courage, and also to think that everyone else shares those virtues with you. I think there are a lot of people like that, but not half. Blue is an unstable Schelling point, because any doubt or uncertainty makes people think that other people think that.... Red is stable. And therefore red is correct in the world we actually live in. For empirical reasons.

I'm still on Team Blue. This is a coordination problem. You need to get close to 100% of people to pick Red in order for Red to be non-horrifying. Blue only needs 51%. As long as some significant portion of the population are picking Blue, and I don't think it's possible to change that, Blue is the only option that prevents atrocity.

The good endings here, so to speak, are 100% Red, or 50+% Blue. The latter is achievable, and the former is not.

Is this stupid? Yes. If everybody were rational, we could all just pick Red and we'd be fine. But unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that irrational or foolish or unlucky people should all die, even 80-20 in favour of Red, or 90-10 in favour of Red, is a nation-wrecking calamity.

But unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that irrational or foolish or unlucky people should all die, even 80-20 in favour of Red, or 90-10 in favour of Red, is a nation-wrecking calamity.

Consider that bullet bitten.

I am sick and tired of being dragged down by the irrational, the foolish and the unlucky. Myself included.

Red, and be done with it. Come what may. Everything else is retarded mind games.

I'd argue that in terms of pure self-interest, you should vote Blue, because even supposing that the majority of Blue voters are irrational idiots, the deaths of the dumbest 40% or so of society will drag you down. You should expect significant suffering as a result.

If the dumbest 40% of society are going to die, so am I if I vote with them. Am I missing something here?

Pretending to be retarded so I can be a part of a mass suicide doesn't seem like a great strategy; if it turns out to be actually so terrible (which I strongly doubt), I've certainly got personal options for dealing with a life-not-worth-living due to inadequate idiots in the world.

The empirical evidence seems to be that Blue wins anyway, but put it this way. If the vote is anywhere near close, then I think it is vitally important to get swing voters to pick Blue. A narrow win for Blue is fine; a narrow loss for Blue is the worst thing that has ever happened in human history, perhaps rivalled only by mass mortalities like the Black Death.

If the vote is not going to be close, then sure, pick Red. If it's a decisive win for Blue then whatever, we're all fine. If Blue cannot crest 30% or 35% or so, then you voting Blue would accomplish nothing but your own death.

However, judging from the Twitter poll, we seem to be in a world where Blue is winning with roughly 55-60% or so, and in that world... just keep Blue on top. Everything is fine as-is, and there is no reason to try to drag the Blue percentage down below that crucial 50% threshold.

Twitter is not the world though -- maybe Twitter should actually run the experiment, with the consequence to being a losing Blue a permaban!

But seriously, Twitter has like half a billion MAU -- even if we accept the poll-takers as representative of Twitter, there are another several billion humans out there for many of whom "if you press this button you might die, if you press this one you won't" is a compelling case.

Again: Retarded mind games.

I'll take those deaths. And the suffering. I'll take those rather than be badgered into a stupid decision by the stupidity of others. I've had quite enough of "You've got to save the self-destructive!" rhethoric, and as far as I care it's all ideologically motivated manipulation attempting to exploit the self-sufficient in favor of the self-destructive.

My point is that your response makes you one of the self-destructive, because if some significant sub-50% chunk of the population all die, even if you picked Red, you will get to sit there smugly assured of your intelligence while watching civilisation collapse.

Frankly, I very much do not care. I am responsible for myself and my child (who, no, will not get to decide on her own which button to press), and everyone else can die in a fire if need be, I won't gamble our lives on the galaxy-brained actions of others.

Is this stupid? Yes. If everybody were rational, we could all just pick Red and we'd be fine. But unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that irrational or foolish or unlucky people should all die, even 80-20 in favour of Red, or 90-10 in favour of Red, is a nation-wrecking calamity.

I think the reason this hypothetical annoys me so much is that it's essentially set up to permit suicidally stupid people to morally and emotionally blackmail the rest of us by the threat of their own self-harm, and then self-righteously preen about it afterwards. It teaches bad - ruinous! - habits.

Real life coordination problems do not look like this! Real life coordination problems are made massively worse by this sort of intellectually cancerous SF Rat crap. Real life coordination problems instead look like "If you push red, the criminal goes to jail and then doesn't commit more crimes. If you push blue, we let them free and then they rape and murder a random person selected from among the reds and blues".

Unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that stupid, or irrational, or congenitally anti-social criminals need to go to jail, then you are a nation-wrecking calamity.

...sure?

I am fully in favour of sending criminals to jail. That is a different hypothetical, though.

Sorry, I meant to rephrase that so it was more clearly ranting at the hypothetical in general, and not you in particular.

I like this variation: same exact framing, but if you press blue, a random person dies, unless 50% or more press blue.

Morally, it seems like it has most of the same forces involved: there will be idiots or psychopaths who press blue, but if society can coordinate to get to 50%, no one dies. It adds some skin in the game for red: voting red doesn't give you safety, though it increases your chances of survival infinitesimally.

But I think this would drive more people to choose red, because it makes the sacrifice of voting blue not yourself but instead another person (extremely likely).

This is weird too me: if all lives are equally valuable, then which of the two scenarios shouldn't change whether you choose red or blue.

In that scenario, I’d still choose blue.

Still some (colorblind, dumb, or psychopathic) people will choose blue, some will choose red. If most of the remainder choose blue nobody dies, if most choose red a decent fraction of the population dies.

And I don’t know if enough people will choose blue (for this or another reason), but if red ends up winning, final society may be so apocalyptic that death isn’t. For example, maybe the person I would’ve saved (by pressing red) would’ve died quickly anyways in the aftermath.

And I don’t know if enough people will choose blue (for this or another reason), but if red ends up winning, final society may be so apocalyptic that death isn’t. For example, maybe the person I would’ve saved (by pressing red) would’ve died quickly anyways in the aftermath.

Not to pick on you, but I think this is a pretty weak line of argument, as unlike in the original problem, under this one the blue sacrifices are a random selection from all of humanity. So it's not a case of all the altruists killing themselves leaving behind a world full of psychopaths, it's a random cull of (at most) 50% of humanity, saints and sinners alike. Which is bad, but there are historical parallels, like the Black Death which killed 30-60% of the population in some places. Was life after the Black Death so bad as to not be worth living? Maybe for a modern human; we have grown pretty soft. But the recovery was reasonably swift.

I quite like this twist as it inverts the moral valence of the original problem. You can press blue out of pure self-interest (you might be one of the people who would've been killed if blue fails to clear 50%) or if you think risking innocents is justified for the greater good (on, e.g., utilitarian grounds). Otherwise, if you value someone's personal autonomy it's quite hard to justify pressing blue.

Back when this question first came out I unhesitantly said Red. Now that I am older and wiser I would likely choose blue, purely because of the framing of the question. Frame it as red:live vs blue:potentially die and I'd still choose red:live.

In addition to other comments about how phrasing the question biases the selection, I'm curious how much impact the red/blue color of the button are subconsciously influencing people's decision on what button to press.

Also, I believe that vote count was influenced by the reply to himself indicating "Blue voters hanging on by a thread currently." That might have given enough push for people to be willing to press the blue button to end up with the 42/58 split instead of something closer to 49/51 as it was before the comment was made.

I'm also curious if there is any data on the demographics of the people that would press each button. I think it's very likely women are much more likely to press the blue button, and men are more likely to press the red button. If the men who would press the red button was conscious of this, would they be more likely to change their mind? For example if 70% of women pressed the blue button but 80% of men pressed the red button, that would mean the surviving men now have to live in a world where there are only 3 women for every 8 men. For the red button pressors, does the possibility of having to live in such a world impact your decision in any way? If you knew this possibility was made aware to all red button pressors, do you think it would impact enough red button pressors to become blue button pressors that could change how you perceive blue button pressors?

What if the question was modified so that the death/survival put you into random groups of X number of people? Or more simply, rather than this being a game of everyone, this is a game of a set number of people e.g. 10,000 or even just 100. At a low enough number, your chances of dying if you pressed blue actually increases significantly, if we assume the 42.1% red to 57.9% blue ratio holds true (it likely won't and I already expressed some skepticism at that number being a "true" answer). I presume red button pressors will always press red regardless of the size of the group. Are there any blue button pressors that would press the red button in smaller group sizes? For red button pressors, what if it was a small group e.g. 100, and within that group is a friend or family member that you know would likely press the blue button. What if this button was presented strictly to people in your family (or people in your friend group). Would you be more willing to press the blue button?

What if the percentage of people that needed to press the blue button to survive was increased to 60%? 75%? 90%? Most of the provided reasons for pressing blue still holds true because none of them take consideration any calculation on what percentage of people one might believe to press blue to warrant pressing blue. For the blue button pressers, is there a number at which you would change your mind? There has to be a number, because if the requirement was 100% of blue button pressors must press blue for blue button pressors to survive, knowing there are people that would press the red button even if the number was only 50% required would make any rational actor press the red button instead.

If the group was smaller but still random, it wouldn’t change my reasoning.

If the % required to press blue was higher it would make my decision less sure (it’s already not very sure), until eventually I’d choose red.

What if the percentage of people that needed to press the blue button to survive was increased to 60%? 75%? 90%? Most of the provided reasons for pressing blue still holds true because none of them take consideration any calculation on what percentage of people one might believe to press blue to warrant pressing blue. For the blue button pressers, is there a number at which you would change your mind?

Here is my post about it from when it was last discussed 2 years ago:

Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.

If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.

In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.

It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.

I think 60% might be enough to make me switch, but this is influenced by having seen polling where even in randomized polls targeting the general public blue only gets 74% of the vote if you exclude those who responded "I don't know" and 63% if you don't. (I think the general public is more blue than internet voters because this is one of those cases where instincts usually give a good answer but then people can talk themselves out of it based on stuff like half-remembered game-theory puzzles.) The 60% threshold would have to induce 19% of blue voters to switch to drop from 74% to 60%, it's hard to guess if that would happen. Originally before seeing any polling I think I would stick with blue at 60% and switch at 70%. Of course this is assuming it is a surprise and there's no opportunity to do stuff like talk about it, orchestrate pro-blue government advertising campaigns, and hold public-results rehearsal polls beforehand. Very high thresholds would be viable if we could do stuff like that.

The crime example seems to imply the opposite of what you're getting at. Yes, crime is self-destructive, and it appears that the optimal way to deal with crime is to destroy criminals even further, hopefully deterring some, rather than pour the efforts of 50% of society into a vast project of reeducation and reconciliation that gets abused unless it works just right.

The key difference is the level of coordination required. Having police requires 50%+ coordination, otherwise they can just vote to legalize crime or have the police become an extension of organized crime. Similar to how the two arguments for red are the ultra-optimistic "100% can just save themselves by pressing red" and the pessimistic "we can't get to 50% coordination on blue so we should cut our losses", two parallel arguments against police would be "100% can just decide to not commit crime" and "we can't trust a 50% majority with the power of policing, we're better off with anarchy where everyone buys a gun and defends themselves even though there will be inevitable losses". Yes they aren't identical - for instance a draw for crime is people who (usually falsely) believe it will benefit themselves, while a draw for blue is people who believe it will benefit others - but they both reflect the difference between the unrealistic idealism of 100% coordination and the everyday practicality of 50% coordination.

vast project of reeducation and reconciliation that gets abused unless it works just right

Reeducating criminals to not be criminals doesn't solve criminality because even a tiny minority who don't listen to you can commit a lot of crime. We already teach the majority to not be criminals, it's just that the leftovers don't need a majority. Societies pull off that level of coordination all the time, even armies don't have 50% desertion rates. The button scenario doesn't have the opportunity to explicitly communicate and coordinate beforehand like the military does, but it's also an easier scenario where 50% provides 0 casualties, unlike knowing that coordination will still result in a large percentage getting shot.

That's a good enough margin for blue to take away most people's excuse for not voting blue.

It should converge to blue, because people have loved ones, and the recursive "what do I think they think I think they'll press" combined with enough shared cultural sentiment of "I wouldn't want to live in a world without my loved ones" = Blue wins

but personally, like @sun_the_second , if I'm being brutally honest with myself, I value my own survival above others'. I'm a rationalist, not a romantic. I'd pick Red. Extrapolated out, maybe Red wins

(no, I don't have kids)

The blue button is the optimal choice here. Either it gets 50% of the vote and nothing happens, or it fails and I get to go to Heaven, because risking my own life to save the lives of all the people who don't understand Monty Hall problems is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice.

Question as phrased, blue, because lots of people will look at that question and press blue.

More evil variant:

You are told that you will be presented with two buttons, one red and one blue. If you press the red button, you will survive and no additional people will be told about the buttons due to your actions. If you press the blue button, the question will be presented to two other random people in the world (unless no people remain who have not been asked the question). Once this process completes, the votes will be tallied. If strictly more than 50.0% of the people asked pressed blue, everyone survives. Otherwise, everyone who pressed blue dies.

What's the ethical thing to do here?

Red because most people won’t understand the question and will just hear “you will definitely survive” and “nobody you know and love will probably be in the 2 random people asked next”. The original question works ‘better’ because it’s more intuitively understood by the average 85 IQ human being on earth.

Alright, variant for you:

Instead of being drawn from the global population, additional people are drawn from the set of people who have ever argued with someone about (explicitly) decision theory on the internet.

(also, I think I found a situation where FDT performs worse than naive CDT - naive CDT + not arguing about decision theory will always achieve outcomes that are strictly not worse than FDT in this scenario)

There are two ways to phrase the question. This way is phrased here basically demands Blue.

Rephrase it like this and I think there would be more Red pushers:

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. Everyone who presses the red button will live with no risk of death. If you press the blue button, you will die unless more than 50% of people also press the blue button.

Phrasing this way demonstrates that the blue button pressers are creating a risk of death which doesn't really need to be there.

But what about kids? I think adding a (those who are incompetent or underage will have their button pushed by their parent/guardian) parenthetical would change it even more.

Because consider the parent now. If you asked a parent, "Which button would you press for your kid, the one where they will always survive or the one where they might die?" I think most parents would press the red button without a second thought.

Basically this. If you don't immediately perceive that a vote for blue is a vote to be killed, perhaps you deserve that outcome.

This kind of clause defeats the point. The point is everyone gets the question at the same time and must decide instantly. In that context your choices are:

  1. Press Red, guarantee your survival, hope everyone you love also chooses Red or that enough people choose Blue. If Red wins, live with knowing you might have had the defining vote (assume nobody knows the exact split of the final outcome) however unlikely.

  2. Press Blue, either die instantly with a clean conscience or everyone lives.

Why do you assume it's an instant death and not a slow drawn out painful death?

How do you even know the button did anything then? That's just the normal end we all get.

I mean, if five minutes after pressing the button 40% of the worlds population started dying of radiation sickness and over the course of weeks to a couple months everyone slowly died that would be a sign it was the button.

Nobody can agree on all cause excess mortality statistics, and whether its a signal, noise, or potential causes. We already lived this.

Thanos snap people turn to dust or everyone pretends nothing happened.

I think there is a related interesting question here if red merely has a high probability of survival (99%, say), but blue has better/guaranteed odds if you solve the coordination problem.

The phrasing of "everyone is presented with the option to walk into a woodchipper (or not!), but it'll jam if 50%+ of the population all decide to walk into it together" is a similar phrasing that'll probably lead to fewer choosing blue.

This question feels like something out of a Kung Fu drama. The philosopher king knows red is the correct answer but because the people are dumb he must pick blue. End with thousands of swords flying towards him.

I think the difference is, a kid will see that a woodchipper is scary, but a kid might see a blue button as enticing.

I think most people who answer blue are thinking of children (maybe?) and most people who answer red assume children wouldnt' be asked.

most people who answer red assume children wouldnt' be asked.

I think a lot of people who would answer red assume children old enough to understand the question and to press a button would be asked, but that enough children could be convinced by their parents to seriously, not joke around, just press red. Now if you assume babies who don't understand the question and are unable to push the button as a deliberate act are included, then blue is a more reasonable answer.

I think adding a (those who are incompetent or underage will have their button pushed by their parent/guardian) parenthetical would change it even more.

Then I agree with you, but also, I’d say anyone “competent” in this situation (and not suicidal) would press red

I think that almost everyone with young children, and who can comprehend the question (can more or less than 50% of human adults even do that?), is pressing blue. I certainly am.

Aside from that though the real interesting part of this, which has mostly gone unexplored afaict, is how the question changes depending upon the group under consideration. If it were just my church, I'd have zero concerns about pressing blue. If it were my whole county I'd still feel pretty good about it.

But 'everyone in the world' forces me to ask some hard questions about the psychology of foreigners and I find myself a lot less certain.

(The other difficult question is which button I coach my older kids to push.)

I've also had a lot to think about since the first time we've had this question. My current honest thought process is that if the question is asked to "everyone in the world" I'd feel confident in pressing Blue. However if the question gets asked only to people in Quant Finance there's no way in hell I'm pressing anything other than Red.

My position, which seems to annoy both blues and reds, is that blue is the "altruistic" choice, but advocating or recruiting for blue is evil. If you want to press the probable-suicide button because there's a chance it might save some lives even though it certainly risks your own, OK, that's your business, and I can at least respect the courage that takes even if I think it's dumb and almost certainly doomed given the parameters of the hypothetical (it is asking literally everyone in the world, not just a Twitter bubble), but where it crosses the line is when you try to pressure others into pressing the suicide button alongside you through either manipulation or coercion: I have seen quite a few tweets about blues fantasizing about hunting down and purging all the reds once blue "obviously" win, which, to be frank, is not great optics.

Blues who threaten and coerce others into voting blue don't seem to seriously grapple with the possibility that blue won't win. They claim that reds have "blood on their hands", but convincing someone to vote blue and then losing is more fraught, morally, then opting to not partake. And the act of advocacy and coalition building is so obviously self-interested it diminishes the "altruism" in pressing blue.

Blues generally want to see themselves as saviors or martyrs, then fantasize about killing reds (or positing hypotheticals where the buttons are secretly switched and all the "anti-social reds" exterminate themselves, or where your choice of red or blue is actually made public); this is actually more cynical than the red perspective in many ways.

So there are broadly four categories of voters. You have people who advocate red and press red: their priors are that blue won't clear the threshold and pressing blue is suicidal. They argue for their family and friends to press red to save themselves. The presence of "randomizers" (toddlers, confused people, the colorblind or whatever) is unfortunate and it means that "everyone presses red" is not a possible outcome, but one can at least reduce the death toll by converting blues to reds.

Then you have the people who advocate blue and secretly press red. These are the "free riders" who benefit from the virtue signaling of claiming blue allegiance but don't actually bear any risk. I think this group is unambiguously the most evil, and, crucially, it's impossible to distinguish from a self-proclaimed blue-presser.

Then you have people who advocate blue and press blue. They want to build a large enough coalition to "win" and save everyone. This is noble in intent, but if the blue cause is actually doomed then they're just recruiting people into their suicide cult. Given that blue doesn't win in a landslide in an internet poll where the incentives are strongly oriented toward signaling cooperation and altruism, I'm not optimistic about blue's odds when the stakes are real. Plausibly these blues actually do believe that they can pressure and guilt enough reds to secure a victory. In any case, they're gambling with other people's lives and I think they're worse than "honest" reds.

The final group, which may not even exist, is the population that advocates red and then presses blue. This seems inherently self-defeating (as they're actively reducing the chance they survive) and suicidal, but if you're unsure whether blue will win and uncomfortable asking or coercing others to risk their lives, then this is at least a coherent position. This manifests as imploring your wife and children and anyone of sane mind to press red then solemnly entering the voting booth and pressing blue, expecting to die but unwilling to risk the possibility that your red vote could kill half of humanity. They would believe that pressing blue is a choice you have to make of your own volition: pressing blue because you're worried that the blue death squads will hunt you down in a post-button world isn't altruism, it's just a red who read the room.

Blues generally seem to believe that a blue victory is possible because humans are fundamentally good, or because we live in a high-trust society, but I'd argue that the highest trust society looks more like everyone independently choosing that last group -- advocating red then pressing blue because their conscience won't allow them any other option. A "fun" thing to consider is how many people might choose this path: how many of the filthy reds the blues fantasize about exterminating will waver in the moment and press blue? The discourse surfaces what people claim and the nature of the secret ballot means that just as the advocate-blue-press-reds are indistinguishable from blue's strongest soldiers, the reverse is also true.

I think that red pressers are unambiguously worse people than blue pressers. Blues are trying to make a better world - maybe they fail, but they're trying. Whereas those who press red put themselves first, even if that means it costs other people.

Agreed, but there's also a vast contingent of people who imagine they'd push blue right up until they're actually making the choice, at which point red becomes irresistable.

Yeah, I agree with that. It is only once you face the test in the moment that you truly know how you will respond. There are any number of things where I hope I might handle it in a certain way, but I won't know for sure until I come to the choice for real.

I disagree that simply persuading people to choose blue is unethical. Ultimately it’s their decision, and it’s not obviously wrong.

But

I have seen quite a few tweets about blues fantasizing about hunting down and purging all the reds once blue "obviously" win

A way to lose in real life is to get worked up over a silly hypothetical.

I disagree that simply persuading people to choose blue is unethical. Ultimately it’s their decision, and it’s not obviously wrong.

An example to demonstrate my point: there is a cult leader who has spiked the Kool-Aid with lethal poison. He genuinely, 100% earnestly believes that everyone who he convinces to partake of this drink will go to heaven; after he's tended to his flock he intends to follow them. Is it unethical to convince people to join him? He is genuinely acting in what he believes is their best interest. I think this figure is tragic, delusional, and dangerous, but, if he's a true believer, one could argue that he isn't unethical, though he is, at the bare minimum, projecting his utility function onto others.

Now, let's change the parameters: the cult leader is no longer certain that everyone who drinks the poisoned Kool-Aid will go to heaven. He's actually only about 50% sure. Maybe drinkers will go to heaven or maybe they'll just die. Nevertheless, he continues trying to convince everyone to take this gamble -- and he knows it's a gamble. Can he ethically advocate for Kool-Aid drinking? I think this is a decision that everyone should make for themselves after being informed of the risks, and that persuading people to drink the Kool-Aid (by asserting that their family and friends are going to drink it, for instance) is dubious and paternalistic. The strongest argument I think he is ethically permitted to make is something like, "I personally believe there is a 50% chance that drinking the Kool-Aid will get you into heaven; I believe the reward outweighs the risk and encourage anyone who agrees to follow me voluntarily."

This is not quite isomorphic to the button problem as posed but there are strong parallels. It is pretty close to the button problem where the results are already determined -- that is, no matter how many people you convince, the outcome won't change, and it's worth noting that this is the most common case: your advocacy is unlikely to change enough votes & minds to swing the results one way or the other. "The votes have already been tallied and one side has won by a significant margin: you and your family are the last ones left. How do you vote, and how do you instruct your family members to vote?"

I suspect people get worked up because they know that a person who presses red is also a person who is very likely to defect in other scenarios requiring everyone to work together for the good of the whole, and they want to get rid of those who would benefit at the expense of others. But as you said, it's a hypothetical and it's best not to get worked up about it.

Every poll on this I've seen has shown significant split between the two choices, at most maybe 70-30 one way. This has convinced me that, if this were done IRL, there's basically no way that Blue would get 50%, and I'm skeptical it'd get over 20%. If the voting is split when there are no consequences and you can choose whatever makes you feel virtuous knowing that you won't ever have to walk the talk, then in a situation of fatal consequences, there's simply no plausible way that the "don't die" button wouldn't have overwhelming victory. Given that, I don't see how I could justify adding one more body to the pile, instead of gritting my teeth and accepting the responsibility of keeping society running after it's been approximately decimated.

There's no person in the world I wouldn't prefer to outlive rather than die. In addition, many of my friends I've polled vote red and they're not that bad to spend the thanos snap apocalypse with.

If Twitter is that close, and assuming that Twitter selects for caving to social pressure and aggressively pro-social signaling, then I don't have high hopes blue wins overall.

Funny thing, I recall that last time this was dropped I was arguing for blue.

I have always found this question to mostly assess which individuals have such strong feelings of personal moral culpability that it will push them to make objectively irrational decisions. My answer is clearly and obviously red, because my individual vote does not count and is unlikely to sway anything when everyone in the world is taking the poll. That is 8.3 billion people. The outcome is dichotomous. There is, for all intents and purposes, zero chance my vote will influence the end result at all, and so it's literally just a choice between "Live/Possibly Die".

No-brainer, to be honest. The only way anyone can even begin to mount a convincing argument for blue is by explaining how my vote will have a material effect on the final outcome, and I doubt you can argue that.

My first immediate reaction is to press blue. My second reaction is that I hate voting. The larger the franchise, the more I'd push for me and everyone I know and love to vote red. If the people I love insist on voting blue, id do it too.

The obvious reason to choose blue is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose blue, and do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose red?

is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose blue

My condolences. It must be a terrible fate knowing your friends and family are blue pushers.

The obvious reason to choose red is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose red, and do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose blue?

If everyone commits to pressing red, everyone lives. If you leave it to "push blue?" then there's a good chance people die. If you want to maximise your own chances of survival, push red.

do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose blue?

There is no world populated entirely by people who chose blue.

Obviously this is a coordination problem that presupposes that everyone is presented with the problem and must choose instantly without speaking to everyone they know and love (otherwise we could obviously all agree, as the human race, to choose red, and all definitely live).

It only works if you don’t know what your parents, children, spouse and friends have picked or will pick.

It's more that I was trying to point out that if you are a blue, then yeah you'll think reds are bad, just because they're red. But if you're a red, then you'll think blues are bad, for the same reason: just because they're blues. You need more of a convincing reason than "ugh, those people, do you really want to be in the same hemisphere as those stinky losers?"

If the majority of the population are going to be blue, maybe I would prefer to be dead!

If everyone commits to pressing red, everyone lives.

This is outside the bounds of the thought experiment (children, mentally infirm, etc.) and so irrelevant.

Does it specifically say children, the infirm, etc. are included? It just says "everyone who pushes this colour, this thing; everyone who pushes that colour, that thing". You can just as easily argue that children and the enfeebled are not going to be permitted to push buttons and so they don't come in to the experiment.

Indeed, if only the button pushers die, then everyone who doesn't push a button probably lives anyway, so red or blue doesn't apply to them.

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

Here is the prompt again, emphasis mine.

Not accusing you of this but a whole lot of people are somehow reading it as 'mentally-competent adults' which is not what it says.

Right, it does say "everyone in the world" which presumably includes children. I think the problem is we instinctively go "well clearly not babies, babies can't press buttons" etc. and that leads to the "does this really mean children, how old is the child" and so on.

I feel like this line of thought has to be post-facto rationalization that people are doing to justify their choice to themselves. Yes, obviously it's inhuman and cruel to force children, the mentally handicapped, etc to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. It's also obviously inhuman and cruel to summon any significant fraction of the world's population to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. There is no scenario in which this game is being run ethically.

Oh, all these thought experiments are set up to run you along the rails to the One Acceptable Conclusion, so I don't put any credence in them and have no problem diverting to the No You Can't Choose That! option. If you leave it as an option, hell yeah I can choose that.

Finished watching Jaws on Netflix before it went off the air. I found it disappointing, which is surprising considering its reputation (the first summer blockbuster, recommended by both Roger Ebert and Critical Drinker, etc.)

I think the problem is that I couldn't connect to the characters. Chief is too much of a coward, both morally (fails to stand up to the Mayor) and physically (afraid of water). Quint has potential, but in the end he comes across more as a greedy asshole than as a truly passionate shark hunter. And the research dude is just there. I don't care what happens to these people; none of them are awesome enough to keep my interest. Combine that with the slow pacing (the shark is famously not shown until the final act to build suspense) and I was left looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie would be.

It only really gets good in the last twenty minutes when they are directly battling the shark, and by then it is too late.

Chief is too much of a coward, both morally (fails to stand up to the Mayor) and physically (afraid of water).

Being afraid of water but working in a coastal town is funny, though. And the kind of tough choices you might have to make in the real world: if the best (or only) job you can get is a tourist town by the sea, then that's the one you take. Same with standing up to the mayor: how does he do that and not blow up his career? If the shark isn't a real danger, he looks like a fool who created a panic for nothing. If he scares everyone off, then the summer business that the town relies on dries up and people are still going to blame him when their businesses go bust because now, not only did they lose out on this year's revenue, the town has a reputation that scares off people next year and the year after. If nobody dies, then everyone is going to go "see, there was no danger in the first place".

It's not realism, but it's realistic: the shark hunter is an asshole, but that's why he's the only guy willing to take on the job. The marine researcher can only do so much, and his main contribution is "well research says sharks do X and not Y". The chief is trying to meet the demands of the job, the town, and the danger, and juggle it all so he can come out at the end with some career left.

Being afraid of water but working in a coastal town is funny, though. And the kind of tough choices you might have to make in the real world: if the best (or only) job you can get is a tourist town by the sea, then that's the one you take.

I wonder sometimes about all the people who got impressed into service aboard naval vessels who couldn't even swim, and what that must have been like. But also, why would you not, at that point, learn to swim‽

Think about it. You're already on board a ship. How are you going to learn to swim? Yeah, there's the sea, but if you go into the sea then it's "man overboard" and the ship might well go so far past you, you are lost. Stop and drop anchor? so the new crew can learn to swim? Do you not know there's a war on?

For you see, sailors often leave the ship at ports, which as a rule have good water access.

I think if I've been impressed against my will, should I get to a port my main objective is "get the hell off this ship and flee" and not "time to book some swimming lessons".

Even crazier, I believe many old-timey sailors considered it bad luck to know how to swim. I suppose because you were acknowledging the possibility of going over.

My mum told me she'd heard that, if you end up in the north Atlantic, you're pretty much guaranteed to freeze to death in a matter of minutes. Being able to swim would just prolong your agony.

Depends a lot on latitude and season. I've swum in the Atlantic and it's not pleasant but felt like I could sustain it for a long time, and that was a lot colder than I assume the water in Rio de Janeiro is. But yeah much of the Atlantic will kill you very quickly.

Sorry, I should have specified that I was talking about Irish fishermen. Even going a few miles off the west coast, if you fall in the drink you will probably freeze very quickly.

If you went over the side it'd only delay the inevitable.

If you went over the side yes. But it was not unheard of for ships to get blown onto a lee shore in the age of sail. Provided there were not crazy breakers on the shore, knowing how to swim might have made the difference in survivability in that case.

Would being able to swim even save a sailor if he were washed overboard in a storm? I feel doubtful.

I expect naval vessels didn't have swimming pools in those days.

It was actually fairly common for ships to lower a sail into the water to create a safe, shallow pool for the sailors to swim in when they had good weather on a leisurely Sunday. At least according to Patrick O'Brien.

Yeah, but I imagine they spent a significant amount of time in ports or around beaches. When the ship is anchored for a foreseeable amount of time, they would have had a chance to learn it.

I know that since most didn't learn it that it probably somehow made sense to them not to learn it anyway, but it's hard to explain from my perspective too. I learned as a kid and it felt pretty much effortless, but maybe it's harder for an adult to learn it. And it's not like it's very likely to save your life; from their point of view, it's likely if you fell in the drink it was in a situation where swimming wouldn't help much (ship just got sank, big storm). Maybe it'd mean additional dangerous tasks might be asked of you if your superiors find out you can swim.

Very interesting. I watch it every year. There are to my mind some absolutely brilliantly constructed scenes. When Alex Kintner gets eaten, that whole set-up prior (the sounds of the beach radios disappear as the camera goes out to Alex's distance, returns when the camera is back on the beach, etc ) is so well done. The whole movie is so full of granular detail of this sort that when I hear people say they dislike it I wonder if either they're watching a different film or they are used to more, I don't know, motion or action. I love JAWS , almost as much as I love Close Encounters. The same things are happening in that film. The cuts, the shot setups, it's just so rich. If you didn't like the JAWS film characters you should definitely avoid reading the novel.

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike these films, but to me they're both eminently rewatchable.

I found myself similarly disappointed. Although my impression was just that it was poorly made. In the same way that CGI or fight choreography from old films is just bad compared to modern films, Jaws felt sloppy and amateurish.

Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved. Compare the fight scenes in Enter the Dragon to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; or the battle scenes in Zulu to Saving Private Ryan. Incomparable.

I'd put "The Longest Day" ahead of "Saving Private Ryan" as a D-Day war movie, personally. And Kelly's Heroes remains one of the great comedies/heist films of all time.

Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved.

For me, I think this mostly just applies to movies made in the late 60s-70s. It's dated now, but I find that a lot of movies before that period don't have the same problem with filmmaking that the 1970s stuff did - for example Hitchcock's oeuvre for the most part feels like the work of an extremely competent and confident filmmaker with a large amount of control over the medium. Even as late as 1966, I find many films to be eminently watchable (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for example).

It was when New Hollywood started really exploding in popularity that I truly find films start appearing very overly indulgent; apart from a select few movies that are classics, there's an almost intolerable amount of sloppy poorly-framed low-budget guerrilla cinematography passed off as grittiness, horrible audio mixing that renders the voices barely audible, bloated pacing that includes extraneous shots of lazy improvisation and oceans of irrelevant dialogue that are kept for "authenticity's sake", and other such elements that make them difficult to watch. Say what you want about the studio control of the Golden Age and how it Stifled Revolutionaries, I think that era reined in the worst impulses of auteurs and forced them to become a bit more economical and deliberate with their filmmaking.

That being said, nothing is worse than the overly-saturated, uniformly-lit, plastic CGI look that modern Hollywood specialises in.

It was when New Hollywood started really exploding in popularity that I truly find films start appearing very overly indulgent; apart from a select few movies that are classics, there's an almost intolerable amount of sloppy poorly-framed low-budget guerrilla cinematography passed off as grittiness, horrible audio mixing that renders the voices barely audible, bloated pacing that includes extraneous shots of lazy improvisation and oceans of irrelevant dialogue that are kept for "authenticity's sake", and other such elements that make them difficult to watch.

What are some of the offending films you have in mind here?

In spite of its critical and commercial success I think The French Connection (1971) epitomises a bunch of the worst tendencies of film of this era, I have never been able to get into it. The extremely shaky, low-quality and chaotic cinematography is relentless, and gets tiring to look at after five minutes; in similar fashion the audio is very crunchy. Pacing and plot-wise, it's an otherwise uneventful police procedural that's often disjointed, drags unnecessarily and is saved every now and then by brief spurts of action (I did not actually make it to the famous car chase scene, because I was so underwhelmed by the rest of it). I'm sure this film has its lovers here, but so much of the filming and pacing felt so undercurated that it came off almost like a B-movie at some points.

You can even see some of these tendencies show up in blockbuster crowdpleasers of the era like The Sting (1973). It's not nearly as bad technically and definitely is paced far better, costuming and set dressing is nice, but there's a sort of 1970s stink to it still: it generally feels like it lacks a huge amount of intentionality in the staging department, it's packed full of dialogue that - in its attempts to be authentic/gritty - falls into a middle ground that's neither realistic enough to be believable or dramatic enough to be charming, and just feels like a rather simple caper movie that moves a good bit slower than it should. I am sure time has hurt both of these movies, and I am sure someone else here enjoys these for the very reasons I don't. But referring back to my previous example of Hitchcock, Psycho is old and cheesy as hell, and yet I still find myself thinking "That's some nice framing and presentation" at multiple points during the film (e.g. the shot of the water swirling down the shower drain, which fades into Marion's lifeless eye staring at the viewer while the camera twirls). Also, the man knew how to fucking block a scene. 1970s movies, on the other hand, are just lacking in this same kind of deliberateness.

It's obvious that films of the era were trying to incorporate more subversive elements and experiment with innovative approaches to filmmaking. But there's a fundamental identity crisis at its core, where much of it maintains the quality of trying to be viscerally crowdpleasing while at the same time incorporating some superficial aspects of art cinema into it (slow pacing, lingering shots focusing on small details, irresolution and nonlinearity) without the precise, fine-tuned control and stubborn commitment to a deeply individual aesthetic vision that makes art cinema fascinating even if you end up bouncing off the film. A lot of it is just a very unhappy middle ground for me.

I think lots of modern viewers have trouble with how non-optimized older movies are, and it's not necessarily an attention span thing. Almost every scene or bit of dialog in modern movies is Doing Something or Establishing Something. There's very little fat. Many older movies have stretches that are doing nothing but hanging out with a character or doing some non-essential worldbuilding or spending time on a sideplot that ultimately goes nowhere. This was taken to extreme lengths at times (like The Deer Hunter or Heaven's Gate) but many 60s-70s films have stuff like this. This is probably not applicable to you if you enjoy films like Psycho or The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

I'd be curious what you thought of any Robert Altman movies you've seen. His audio mixing is atrocious and his pacing is all over the place, but it's usually intentional. His framing, presentation, and scenes can all be top-notch.

I've always found The Sting to be stuffy and airless. It's a big studio crowd-pleaser that sanded off too many rough edges to hit the mass-market middle ground (and box office receipts show they nailed it). Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid had amazing scenery, great cinematography, a script by William Goldman, and the ridiculous chemistry of Newman and Redford, whereas The Sting was trying to get by on the latter. I agree with the 70s stink on that one.

There are a number of cop movies from the 60s-70s that suffer from "one-hour police procedural stretched into 2 hours." Bullitt is the prime example. I don't think I'd say French Connection is like that, but maybe it feels that way when the first half-hour of a 1:44 movie is a bunch of stuff establishing what kind of person and cop Hackman's character is.

I've always found The Sting to be stuffy and airless. It's a big studio crowd-pleaser that sanded off too many rough edges to hit the mass-market middle ground (and box office receipts show they nailed it).

Maybe I am the mass market moddle ground, but I loved it. It's probably got some of my favorite twists, and the con scenes are pulled off very well.

I actually agree about The French Connection. The wife and I couldn't get past about 30 minutes of it since there was basically nothing going on.

There's definitely some gems among 70s films nevertheless, like The Conversation which feels excellently paced and realistically characterized.

As a confirmed Breaking Bad hater, I have read the AV Club's "The case against Breaking Bad" article many times, as it articulated almost everything that I disliked about the show, including its cinematography. Even fans of the show have acknowledged how silly the "Mexico is yellow" thing is, but this was the only source I've seen that criticised the overuse of jitter cam, something I found really annoying and distracting:

But even in the look of the show, clichés abound. In Breaking Bad, the sky over Mexico is always yellow. Much of the show, including its quietest moments, is afflicted with an unmotivated camera shudder that will date the show as badly as the excessive use of zooms dates many films from the early '70s.

Once this was pointed out to me, it became hard to unsee. Last October I compiled a list of "classic" horror films I'd never got around to seeing, including Black Christmas. I did enjoy it (if for no other reason than my enormous crush on the young Olivia Hussey – my word, just look at her), but that specific thing where a character delivers a line of dialogue accompanied by an extremely slow zoom-in on their face is such a 70s trope, and almost always comes off as incredibly corny and immersion-breaking. You rarely see it in movies made before or after the 70s.

Check out a couple of clips of The Shield on Youtube for the most relentless and egregious use of camera movement. It's almost unwatchable.

I will never understand people who say that Nolan is a competent director of action films. Nauseating disorientation =/= excitement. Paul Greengrass has a lot to answer for.

At least action scenes have the excuse of trying to convey the fast pace of the action. The Shield insists on using the same optical restless leg syndrome whether they're tackling an armed robbery or typing up the report afterwards.

The action parts of Nolan's films are by far the worst parts. The snow battle scene in Inception drags the film to a total halt. I was bored senseless during the tunnel/truck chase scene in The Dark Knight. It's almost impressive how his action scenes can be so dull.

Don't get me started on the zoom-ins of the 70s, one of the corniest filmmaking devices employed in that era. Jittery handheld style is all over many films of that era as well, for what it's worth, especially those who wanted to emulate the new wave feel.

I liked Breaking Bad enough but the cinematography was not the strong point. Some of the filmography on Gilligan's new project Pluribus possibly surpasses the lows of Breaking Bad, this scene in particular where Carol is on the rooftop reminds me of The Room; the green screen is executed so sloppily that Carol outright does not have a shadow. Then there is this, which is somehow even worse. The per episode budget was $15 million.

Some of the filmography on Gilligan's new project Pluribus possibly surpasses the lows of Breaking Bad, this scene in particular where Carol is on the rooftop reminds me of The Room; the green screen is executed so sloppily that Carol outright does not have a shadow. Then there is this, which is somehow even worse.

Jesus Christ, you weren't kidding. I have seen AI slop which looked more convincing than the latter clip.

Yeah, I saw it for the first time a few years ago and felt rather underwhelmed. If compiling a list of my favourite Spielberg films it certainly wouldn't crack the top five. (I did enjoy it more than Close Encounters, though.) Definitely a film which fell victim to the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" effect, where it's hard for modern viewers to appreciate how inventive it must have seemed on release.

A classic line:

“My son,” said the old Gascon gentleman, in that pure Béarn patois of which Henry IV could never rid himself, “this horse was born in the house of your father about thirteen years ago, and has remained in it ever since, which ought to make you love it.”

What does the original French look like?

―Mon fils, avait dit le gentilhomme gascon—dans ce pur patois de Béarn dont Henri IV n'avait jamais pu parvenir à se défaire—, mon fils, ce cheval est né dans la maison de votre père, il y a tantôt treize ans, et y est resté depuis ce temps-là, ce qui doit vous porter à l'aimer

1,2,3

If you glance through some amateur French stories, it's rather hilarious to see different authors use three different quotation styles—the two illustrated above, plus «guillemets». (What is this, Japanese?) In contrast, amateur English is dominated by the USA's “double quotation marks”, and the British ‘single quotation marks’ have fallen by the wayside. (Some amateur authors use single quotation marks to denote internal monologue, or to differentiate scare quotes from dialog. I find both practices quite annoying.)

1Fun fact: The leading dash used in this quotation style officially is supposed to be, not an em dash (Unicode character 2014), but the separate "horizontal bar/quotation dash" character (2015). The two characters look identical in Arial, though.

2It's time for the daily Two Minutes Hate against translators/localizers/paraphrasers who take unjustified liberties with the source material. "Said" rather than "had said"? "Old gentleman" rather than "gentleman"? Commas rather than em dashes? No repetition of "my son"?

3When you need to add attribution or a footnote to an inline quote, it normally goes after the quote. However, treatment of blockquotes is more complicated. (a) Placing the attribution before the blockquote is inconsistent with the treatment of inline quotes; (b) placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote makes no sense semantically; and (c) placing the attribution after the blockquote creates an ugly short paragraph. Overall, I am inclined to think that option C is the best and option B is the worst.4The Pennsylvania Supreme Court uses option C. The US Supreme Court uses a weird variation on option B: placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote, but putting quotation marks around the actually-quoted material, so that what we've been calling a "blockquote" actually is just indentation with no semantic meaning whatsoever. The New Jersey Supreme Court uses a different weird variation on option B: placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote, but in its own paragraph and enclosed in square brackets. Obviously, both of these variations are better than the basic version of option B (since they eliminate the semantic issue), but still worse than option C.

4There's another topic: Should footnotes be capable of containing multiple paragraphs? The in-progress CSS standard to which I pointed previously allows both single-paragraph (inline) and multi-paragraph (block) footnotes. But the standard footnote notation puts the footnote pseudo-heading inline as part of the first paragraph, implying that there really should not be more paragraphs past the one in which it is embedded. Compare that to the standard section notation, which puts the heading as its own pseudo-paragraph lording it over all the real paragraphs.

Commas rather than em dashes?

For the love of God, Montresor. You can't seriously think that punctuation rules don't vary between languages and should be transcribed verbatim when translating!

“My son,” said the old Gascon gentleman—in that pure Béarn patois of which Henry IV could never rid himself—“this horse was born in the house of your father about thirteen years ago, and has remained in it ever since, which ought to make you love it.”

I don't think people would call this bad English punctuation.

It's time for the daily Two Minutes Hate against translators/localizers/paraphrasers who take unjustified liberties with the source material. "Said" rather than "had said"? "Old gentleman" rather than "gentleman"? Commas rather than em dashes? No repetition of "my son"?

This week I was reading my bible in greek and noticed that in Matt 15:17 uses the word ἀφεδρῶνα (toilet). Sadly, none of the popular translations like NIV/ESV actually include this word in their translation :(

Russian usually uses quotation dashes for dialogue and guillemets for internal monologue and nested direct speech. If guillemetted direct speech is broken by the words of the author, it's quotation dashes again, but only if it's surrounded with direct speech on both sides. The full rules for punctuating direct speech with guillemets are so baroque and obscure that I have to keep them open in the browser to consult them when writing, even though I have no problems with punctuation in Russian otherwise.

Here's what the guillemets style looks like:

Alice asked Bob: «What's for dinner?» — «Burgers, — replied Bob and added: — Medium rare». — «Oh, just how I like them! — exclaimed Alice. — Thank you, Bob!» — «My pleasure», — he smiled.

And here's the more common quotation bar style:

Alice asked Bob:

— What's for dinner?

— Burgers, — replied Bob and added: — Medium rare.

— Oh, just how I like them! — exclaimed Alice. — Thank you, Bob!

— My pleasure, — he smiled.

P.S. I actually found an error in my punctuation as I was copying these examples into the comment.

Wow. The first example is pretty interesting. So the dashes separate both direct speech from different people and the author’s voice, while the guillemets can be unbroken when they surround the author’s voice provided that it’s clearly delineated by the dashes. Weird, but fun. And confusing, even though it’s obvious enough to read, to write.

Your Two Minutes Hate quote from Nabokov is great. I've noticed myself that I often prefer the clunkier fan translations of Japanese visual novels to the elegant modern localisations, especially that of Fate Stay Night where the writing is fairly execrable at least in English. Lots of repetition, fragments, and clunky sentences - "People die when they are killed." - but there's an interest to it that gets lost in the polished remake.

«guillemets». (What is this, Japanese?)

I thought Japanese uses「this」『type』.

The joke is comparing the three French quotation styles to the three Japanese writing systems (kanji, katakana, and hiragana).

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats