I am Andrew Hyer, currently living in New Jersey and working in New York (in the finance industry).
aphyer
Karma: 4,952
It looks like your spoiler didn’t come out quite right, could you try to edit it?
There are ten silver pieces to a gold piece. I’ll edit that into the doc.
D&D.Sci Tax Day: Adventurers and Assessments
The phrase “Robbers don’t need to rob people” is generally accurate.
But saying “Robbers don’t need to rob people,” and writing a long argument in support of that, makes it seem like you might be confused about the thought processes of robbers.
To get the virtue of the Void you need to turn off the gacha game and go touch grass. If you fail to achieve that, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.
Even if you accept that insects have value, helping insects right now is still quite questionable because it’s a form of charity with zero long-term knock-on effects.
...to my confusion, not only do both of those look fine to me on mobile, the original post now also looks fine.
(Yes, I am on Android.)
On mobile I see no paragraph breaks, on PC I see them.
Edited to add what it looks like on mobile:
If there’s less abuse happening in homeschooling than in regular schooling, a policy of “let’s impose burdens on homeschooling to crack down on abuse in homeschooling” without a similar crackdown on abuse in non-home-schooling does not decrease abuse.
You can see something similar with self-driving cars. It is bad if a self-driving car crashes. It would be good to do things that reduce that. But if you get to a point where self-driving cars are safer than regular driving, and you continue to crack down on self-driving cars but not on regular driving, this is not good for safety overall.
Apropos of nothing in particular, do you think that abolishing the Dept. of Education would make things go better or worse?
Buying time for technical progress in alignment...to be made where, and by who?
Mostly fair, but tiers did have a slight other impact in that they were used to bias the final room: Clay Golem and Hag were equally more-likely to be in the final room, both less so than Dragon and Steel Golem but more so than Orcs and Boulder Trap.
Yes, that’s a sneaky part of the scenario. In general, I think this is a realistic thing to occur: ‘other intelligent people optimizing around this data’ is one of the things that causes the most complicated things to happen in real-world data as well.
Christian Z R had a very good comment on this, where they mentioned looking at the subset of dungeons where Rooms 2 and 4 had the same encounter, or where Rooms 6 and 8 had the same encounter, to factor out the impact of intelligence and guarantee ‘they will encounter this specific thing’.
(Edited to add: actually, there are ~100 rows in the dataset where Room2=4, Room6=8, and Room3=5=7. This isn’t enough to get firm analysis on, but it could have served as a very strong sanity-check opportunity where you can look at a few dungeons where you know exactly what the route is.)
I think puzzling out the premise could have been a lot more fun if we hadn’t known the entry and exit squares going in
I think this would have messed up the difficulty curve a bit: telling players ‘here is the entrance and exit’ is part of what lets ‘stick a tough encounter at the entrance/exit’ be a simple strategy.
The writing was as fun and funny as usual—if not more so! - but seemed less . . . pointed?/ambitious?/thematically-coherent? than I’ve come to expect.
This is absolutely true though I’m surprised it’s obvious: my originally-planned scenario didn’t quite work out as intended (I’m still trying to assemble mechanics for it that actually work the way I want them to) and this was my backup scenario.
imo a 4x4 or 5x5 dungeon would probably have been easier than the 3x3, especially for reliably distinguishing between hypotheses A and B
Interesting. I trimmed it down to 3x3 as part of Plan ‘Try Not To Make Everything Too Overcomplicated’, trying to use the smallest dungeon that would still make pathing relevant in order to avoid dropping 16 separate encounters on players.
There was one aspect about which I have unreservedly positive feelings: the chrono effects, the hag poem and the varying numbers of adventurers were all excellent red herrings, seeming like they might hint towards subtle opportunities for performance improvement (and/or a secret Bonus Bonus Objective) but being quickly dismissable as fingertraps.
This...is not really quite how those were intended. The intent was something more along the lines of ‘Easter Eggs’.
D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament Evaluation & Ruleset
Here’s a third paper, showing that sports betting increases domestic violence. When the home team suffers an upset loss while sports betting is legal, domestic violence that day goes up by 9% for the day, with lingering effects. It is estimated 10 million Americans are victims of domestic violence each year.
I was suspicious of the methodology here (e.g. the difference between ‘when the home team loses violence goes up by 9% if and only if gambling is legalized’ and ‘when the home team loses violence goes up by 10% if gambling is not legalized but by 10.9% if it is legalized’ is something that I don’t trust sociology to track honestly).
I went to take a look at the paper, and do not think it really supports the argument at all.
The relevant charts I believe are on p26 here. The first one shows how intimate partner violence (IPV) varies with ‘expected outcome of game’ and ‘actual outcome of game’:
Note that ‘expected outcome of game’ is the thing that actually seems predictive, not ‘actual outcome of game’. When the home team is expected to lose, domestic violence is high even if they win. When the home team is expected to win, domestic violence is low even if they lose (though even lower if they win).
This looks to me like a study that’s been massively confounded by other effects. Perhaps good sports teams tend to be favored to win, and also to be in wealthy regions with little domestic violence? Regardless of the reason, though, this makes me very suspicious of anything this study claims to show.
The second chart shows how IPV varies with the outcome of the game based on whether sports betting is legal:
This does, indeed, show that areas with legalized sports betting had higher rates of domestic violence when the home team lost (~0.45 vs ~0.43). However, it also showed that they had lower rates of domestic violence when the home team won, by more. (~0.38 vs ~0.42). If we assume that half of games are wins and half are losses (seems...pretty reasonable?), I believe this chart depicts legalized sports betting lowering domestic violence (though again I don’t know if I believe that either due to how obviously confounded this data is).
Somehow we seem to have gone from “a clearly confounded paper that (if you believe it) shows sports betting on average lowering domestic violence” to “there is strong evidence of sports betting increasing domestic violence”.
I find this somewhat depressing.
The dungeon is laid out as depicted; Room 3 does not border Room 4, and does border Room 6. You don’t, however, know what exactly the adventurers are going to do in your dungeon, or which encounters they are going to do in which order. Perhaps you could figure that out from the dataset.
(I’ve edited the doc to make this clearer).
D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
I think you may have mixed up the ordering halfway through the example: in the first and third tables ‘Emma and you’ is $90 while ’Emma and Liam’is $30, but in the second it’s the other way around, and some of the charts seem odd as a result?
Huh. Could you try copy-pasting the spoiler block I have below and see how it comes out for you? It looks like somehow you’ve ended up with quote blocks instead of spoiler blocks. If this doesn’t work, we can go harass LW tech people :P
I see this text as being inside a black spoiler block
And this text too.
If you copy-paste this, does it paste for you as a spoiler?