Christian Z R

Karma: 37

Christian Z R Feb 27, 2025, 11:25 AM
12 points
2
on: You can just wear a suit
I did the same during my last year of high school and first year in university! I even got a second hand trouser press so I could make sure the creases were sharp.
However, I stopped it in the end. I think most observers thought I was either some sort of neoreactionary or just a plain weirdo. Almost nobody asked me why I was wearing it (this was Scandinavia, so pretty normal to not ask other people why they are doing weird things. We are a bunch of quiet, private people). At some point I realized I was using mental energy by the entire thing, being less able to relax in social situations.
Then, I changed to wearing a shirt + sweater + tweed jacket, with slightly longer hair and more stubble. This still gave me a certain style satisfaction, but in more muted way. And finally, by now, I always just dress to stand out as little as possible, since I have found that not thinking about my own appearance gives me more energy for interacting socially with others. Also, after having been in full dress to a couple of renaisance fairs, I started realizing that modern people are actually doing a lot of work to make sure they all wear period appropriate clothing, and it started to seem that me not doing so was like a reenactor putting a 14th century houbbelande on when everyone else was wearing 15th century clothing.

Christian Z R Jan 7, 2025, 2:04 PM
5 points
0
on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament Evaluation & Ruleset
Wow, I think got more luckier than I deserved to.
This was really interesting, I could see that there must be something complicated going on, but I never got close to guessing the actual system. Encounters alerting other encounters is both simple and feels intuitively right once you see it.
After stealing most of my ideas from abstractapplic (thanks) I spent most time trying to figure out which order to put the C-W-B-H. I found that having the toughest encounters later worked best, which must be an effect that is actually caused by the random players putting their strongest encounter in room 9, so a strong encounter in room 6 or 8 will help alert this final encounter. So even though it is not built in, the other builders preference for putting dragons in room 9 makes strong encounter more valuable for the later rooms. Luckily this caused me to switch from C-B-W-H-D to C-W-B-H-D, so the Boulder trap alerted the Hag, giving me the final 3 points.
I guess this says something about emergent effects can still be valuable(ish) even when you haven’t grokked the entire system...
Anyway, thanks a lot for an enjoyable challenge.

Christian Z R Dec 19, 2024, 9:32 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Christian Z R’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
So my plan is:
CWB / OOH/ XXD

Christian Z R Dec 19, 2024, 9:31 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Christian Z R’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
Some more insights:
I assume that Adventurers can’t walk diagonally. In that case we can try to look at dungeons where the same encounter is present in room 2 and 4 (or in room 6 and 8), so the adventurers must pass through that exact challeng. I then make a linear model on this encounter + include room 1 and 9 in order to control for the fact that dungeons with strong encounters in one room is more likely to also have them in others.
Looking at both the case where Enc2==Enc4 and the case where Enc6==Enc8 I got an agreement between the difficulties of the encounters (Nothing < W < G < B < O < S < H=D ). Clay Golems however differed.
It also seemed that in general meeting a tough challenge later would make a bigger difference than meeting it early.
So my plan will look the same as Abstractapplics for pretty much the same reasons, except I will place the Boulder Trap after the Whirling Blade, since Boulder Traps seems to be more challenging, and so should be encountered later.
What links here?
- aphyer's comment on D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament Evaluation & Ruleset by aphyer (Jan 8, 2025, 3:29 PM; 4 points)

Christian Z R Dec 18, 2024, 10:24 AM
1 point
0
on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
A few notes about strange phenomenons in the scores:
1) As already pointed out there is a clear jump in scores by around one point around tournament 3400 (the jump is too small for me to be quite certain when it happened). This might be because of a small change in the rules. So conclusions drawn by data from before this point might be flawed.
2) The scores are either whole numbers, or fractions ending in halfs, thirds or quarters. So they might be from taking the mean of either 1, 2, 3 or 4 whole numbers. It is inherently tricky to find out how a given whole number came about. Also the half points might be the mean of either 2 or 4 numbers.
However there seems to be some time dependence in this. The scores ending in .333… or .666… are slightly (but statistically significantly) more likely to be found in the earlier tournaments than the scores ending in 0.25, 0.5 or 0.75. (40% of thirds happen before tournament 3400 compared to 35% of quarters.). This might very well be related to the rule change happening around tournament 3400, so later tournaments were more likely to have 2 or 4 judges instead of 3.

3) The mean score of Scores ending in 0.33.. and 0.66.. seems to be almost the same as the mean for scores ending in 0.25, 0.5 or 0.75. so it can not be only the change in number of judges that led to the change in mean score.

Christian Z R Nov 21, 2024, 8:32 AM
1 point
0
on: What are the good rationality films?
Riders of Justice: imdb.com/title/tt11655202/
Recognizing patterns in a mainly random world, psycho-therapeutic hacking strategies. Can’t say much more without risking spoilers.

Christian Z R Nov 4, 2024, 9:04 PM
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 Oct 31, 2024, 8:48 AM
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 Oct 30, 2024, 11:24 AM
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 Oct 29, 2024, 12:36 PM
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 Oct 28, 2024, 12:14 PM
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 Oct 10, 2024, 10:02 AM
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 Oct 3, 2024, 10:00 AM
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 Oct 3, 2024, 9:48 AM
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 Oct 2, 2024, 12:33 PM
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 Sep 30, 2024, 11:14 AM
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 Sep 30, 2024, 11:03 AM
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 Sep 27, 2024, 1:27 PM
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 Sep 26, 2024, 7:51 PM
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 Nov 2, 2023, 8:34 PM
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.