Christian Z R

Karma: 20

Christian Z R 4 Nov 2024 21:04 UTC
5 points
0
on: Why our politicians aren’t Median
Yup, that sounds about right. In Denmark, which have a proportional representative parliament, there recently was a party that tried to combine (kinda-) libertarianism, including support for a UBI with anti-immigration policies. It fell apart after a few years, since that quadrant of the political phase space did not have enough voters for even a small party.
Also, there are parties who goes for the middle of the road. They just cater to the segment of the population who like to see themselves as moderates.

Christian Z R 31 Oct 2024 8:48 UTC
1 point
0
on: D&D.Sci September 2022: The Allocation Helm
Just putting a guess in here, before I go check if it is true:

Actually the ‘Houses’ have no effect, they are just the names of the different groups. In order to get a good rating, the members of each house should be as close as possible in Stat-space, or perhaps all be high in one stat (still experimenting with this). Since the early students were all placed by a functioning hat, each house had a well defining place in Stat space that it would carry on with. But since all current students have been randomly selected, we don’t have to worry about this historical data. Instead, we should try to get the new students as close as possible to the randomly generated spot in Stat space for the current students. As such, I think Serpentyne might become the new House of Integrity. (I do believe a strange thing like this is also happening in real life, and is one of the main ways that political parties gradually change their positions in Stat space).

Christian Z R 30 Oct 2024 11:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: D&D Sci Coliseum: Arena of Data
A thanks a lot. I was actually working through the earlier scenarios, I just missed that I new one had popped up. Subscribed now, then I will hopefully notice the next one.

Also, my approach didn’t work this time, I ended up trying with a way too complicated model. I really like how the actual answer to this one worked.

Christian Z R 29 Oct 2024 12:36 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D Sci Coliseum: Arena of Data
Ah, late to the party, didn’t see this one coming up. Pity.
Anyway, before I check my result I will just try to preregister a few insights and see if they are carried out.
There might probably be some effects in the dataset that are only relevant at lower levels, and so exist mainly as a red herring, since all our fights are between people of at least level 5. I therefore doublechecked everything looking at only the subset of data with all fighters in high level.

The classes seem to work in a such of Rock/Scissor/Paper way, some being much stronger against others.
I plan to try to beat the: Human Warrior with my Ranger / Human Knight with my Monk / Elf Ninja with my Knight / Dwarf Monk with my Fencer.

Christian Z R 28 Oct 2024 12:14 UTC
3 points
0
on: On Shifgrethor
I really do think this term would be very useful if it could be brought into common usage. Here is two examples I met from just the last 12 hours:
Yesterday I was eating tabletop raclette (kind of like mixed grill) with my family, and my wife tried to tell my son that he shouldn’t try to just fry a lot of mushrooms together, that wouldn’t be delicious. He got so sad because his shifgrethor was violated while he was having fun trying to cook real food for the first time.
A few hours ago, my wife told me about an article about proffesional test takers in China, who are paid by schools to take the university entrance exam multiple times, thus artificially inflating the schools statistics. I immediatly annoyed her by starting a long theory about how to optimally game the system, instead of just respecting shifgrethor and saying that it sounded really interesting.

Only look at the spoiled text if you are waiving shifgrethor!

::::spoiler I think the word shifgrethor is too hard to pronounce to ever catch on. ::::

Christian Z R 10 Oct 2024 10:02 UTC
1 point
0
on: D&D.Sci June 2022 Evaluation and Ruleset
Short and very interesting scenario! The fact that the most useful subset of the data was so small (929 people like us getting truly random skills) made me rater afraid that I was fooling myself with random fluctuations. With some very dirty probability I reasoned that the p value for our results for Anomalous Agility + Temporal Distortion was a bit less than 1%, so I went for it.

Christian Z R 3 Oct 2024 10:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quiet_NaN’s comment on: How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy
‘I simply believe that assigning truth values to moral sentences such as “killing is wrong” is pointless, and they are better parsed as prescriptive sentences such as “don’t kill” or “boo on killing”. ’
Going to bring in a point I stole from David Friedmann: If I see that an apple is red, and almost everybody else agree that the apple is red, and the only person who disagrees also tend to disagree with most people about all colors and so is probably color blind, then it makes sense to say that it is true that the apple is red.
-Jesus, Muhammed and Luther:
Muhammed did support offensive warfare, but apart from that his religious rules might have been a step up from earlier arabic society. I have noticed that modern Islamic countries actually doesn’t have a lot of peacetime violence or crime, compared to equally rich or developed countries. And Martin Luther was opposed to rebellions exactly because he thought anarchy and violent religious movements were worse than the status quo. He did support peaceful movements for peasant rights.
_________________
Finally, why would spirituality only help you overcome ‘maladaptive’ trapped priors? Might it not just as well cure adaptive, but unwanted ones?

Christian Z R 3 Oct 2024 9:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: zhukeepa’s comment on: How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy
I think you accidentally pointed the link about geeks, mops, and sociopaths to this article. I googled the term instead.
It does a really good work of explaining what happened in most religions in late antiquity, for evidence about Christianity actually being a better subculture than paganism back then you just have to look at how envious the last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, was of their spontaneous altruism.

Christian Z R 2 Oct 2024 12:33 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci December 2022 Evaluation and Ruleset
Thanks for the great work. Found out that a simple Random Forest model combined with avoiding everything Crumbly bagged me 20 snarks with a 72.5% survival chance. So expected number of snarks would be 14.5. Looking at it afterwards this seems like actually the worst and most suicidal way to attack the problem. But, hey, at least I got made Boatmaster.

Christian Z R 30 Sep 2024 11:14 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci April 2021 Evaluation and Ruleset
Alas, you got me with the two different kinds of merfolk, ended up greatly overestimating crab people and underestimating the merfolk. Grat fun, and very interesting dataset to go throuhg

Christian Z R 30 Sep 2024 11:03 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci April 2021: Voyages of the Gray Swan
My guesses after some pretty dirty analysis:
By looking at the data, squinting at some sumcurves, fitting some very speculative lines and sacrificing a pidgeon to the diviners I guess that of the 2300 ships that were lost were caused by:
1000 were due to Crab people (whose damage distribution doesn’t look like any of the others’, so I am guessing 50% of their attacks do more than 100%)
700 were due to Demon Whales (Looks like at least ²⁄₃ of their attacks do more than 100% damage)
300 were due to merpeople (their damage might have 10% above 100)
200 were due to Nessie (seems around 15 − 20 % of damage above 100)
The last two are the most imprecise. None of the remaining encounters look like they could have any serious chance of sinking a ship, so let us leave the last 100 or thereabouts to them.
Judging by this I will suggest getting Armed Carpenters, 20 Oars and either 3 cannons or bribe the merpeople. I wil swing with the cannons, since Varsuvius law tells me that fewer merpeople means more other monsters, potentially Demon Whales. At last, if less damage is more important than saving money we could get foam swords, they won’t save our lives but might save on the ship repair costs in the long run.

Christian Z R 27 Sep 2024 13:27 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci: Whom Shall You Call? [Evaluation and Ruleset]
Thanks for a good one, where I finally could use a bunch of linear regressions. Steamrolling! (I was sure there would be some devious trap, but I guess sometimes the basics actually do work, which is how they became the basics)
One thing that perhaps would make it easier was if the web interactive could tell whether or not your selection was the optimal one directly, and possibly how higher your expected price was than the optimal price (I first plugged mine in, then had to double check with your table out here)
Anyway, greetings, and looking forward to seeing the next one. Will train on the older ones until then

Christian Z R 26 Sep 2024 19:51 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci Alchemy: Archmage Anachronos and the Supply Chain Issues
Okay, I might be late, but to test myself I will post my solution here before checking the right answer:
First I find the subset of recipes that produce a Barkskin potion. By examining this I find that they all need Crushed Onyx and Ground Bone. I make a subset of recipes with only the ingredients at hand AND using both Crushed Onyx and Ground Bone.
We now have two very manageable dataframes, 42 succesful and 152 unsuccessful recipes based on C.O and G.B. Looking at them I quickly realize that all the recipes have some chance of failure. Make a simple script to identify the unique recipes that worked, and figure out how often they failed. At last I am left with the best recipe, which is C.O, G.B, Demon Claw and Vampire Fang. This has produced the right potion 19 times and produced Inert Glob 10 times. So I rate it to have a 65% chance of success.
Then I go here to check my recipe, and whoops, the smarter people all seem to have figured out that I am actually being tricked into a Necromantic Power potion. Well, looks very convincing but too late for me. Better find a safe place to hide...

Christian Z R 2 Nov 2023 20:34 UTC
2 points
on: Spaghetti Towers
Sometimes changing such spaghetti towers can become a beautiful art all in itself. Like a combination of Jenga, Mikado and those mind boggling topology riddles.
Take for example the rules of D&D. They started simple, then new rules was added in the most spaghetti like way imaginable (Okay, you can play a wizard. But then you are not allowed to wear any armor! You can still wear a backpack because otherwise it is inconvenient. And no Backstabbing with a longsword!) The problem is that for every arbitrary spaghetti rule, somebody will have build a beloved around it. So you got to admire the game designers who untangled the spaghetti tower of rules version 3.5 into the slightly less tangled and more playable version 5 without hurting anybody’s feelings too much.

Christian Z R 11 Sep 2023 13:20 UTC
2 points
1
on: Recursive Middle Manager Hell: AI Edition
This sounds really interesting! Generally it seems that most people either believe AI will get power by directly being ordered to organize the entire world, or it will be some kind of paper-clip factory robot going rogue and hacking other computers. I am starting to think it will more likely be: Companies switch to AI middle managers to save $$$, then things just happen from there.
Now one way this could go really mazy is like this: All AI-models, even unique ones custom made for a particular company are based on some earlier model. Let’s say Wallmart buys a model that is based on a general Middle Manager Model.
This model now has the power to hire and fire low-level workers, so it will be very much in their interest to find out what makes the model tick. They can’t analyse the exact model (which is being run from a well guarded server park). But at some point somebody online will get hold of a general Middle Manager Model and let people play with it. Perhaps the open-source people will do all sorts of funny experiments with it and find bugs that could have been inherited by the Wallmart model.
Now the workers at Wallmart all start playing with the online model in their spare time, looking around AI-forums for possible exploits. Nobody knows if these also work on the real model, but people will still share them, hoping to be able to hack the system: “Hey, if you try to report sick on days when you anyway had time off, the Manager will give you extra credits!” “Listen, if you scan these canned tomatoes fifty times it triggers bug in the system so you will get a higher raise!” Etc.
The workers have no way to know which of the exploits work, but everybody will be too afraid of loosing their jobs if they are the only one NOT hacking the AI. Wait for a few years and you will see the dark tech-cult turning up.

Christian Z R 10 Sep 2023 9:47 UTC
1 point
on: The Power of Positivist Thinking
Going off on a tangent here about the ‘religion of peace.’
When discussing migration to Europe the relative crime rates of muslim immigrants often pop up, so once I decided to sit down and look them over. In Denmark, which keep pretty meticulous statistics, migrants from muslim countries have a roughly 2.5x higher violent crime rate than the mean. This might sound like a lot but then I started comparing it with other countries:
If we just look at homicides (the crime statistic that most people care about and which is hardest to fake), Denmark has a very low level (1 pr 100 000 inhabitants pr year), and most middle eastern countries have one of 2 to 3 if we exclude the ones currently engaged in civil war. So the rate of migrants was actually exactly what you should expect if people kept to their cultural norms.
Now compare this to places like the US ( 6 pr 100 000), or mexico (almost 30). Even if we look at the state of Minnesota which was mainly settled by Scandinavians we find a rate of 3, higher than most peaceful middle eastern countries.
If you look further east to Malaysia and Indonesia you will find even lower homicide rates. Malaysia has around 1/5th the rate of neighboring Thailand.
Though there might be more reasons for these statistics, it does strike me that Islam might be a religion of peace in as far as it has found a simple ‘peace heuristic’ that make people less likely to kill each other than in other comparatively wealthy or well functioning places.