Review
I'm a big fan of this series. I think that puzzles and exercises are undersupplied on LessWrong, especially ones that are fun, a bit collaborative and a bit competitive. I've recently been trying my hand at some of the backlog, and it's been pretty cool. I can feel that I'm getting at least a bit better at compressing the dimensionality of the data as I investigate it.
In general, I'd guess that data science is a pretty important epistemological skill. I think LessWrongers aren't as strong in it as they ideally would be. This is in part because of a justified suspicion that people just pour in data and confusion, and get out more official-looking confusion. I'd say that a central point of this series is: how do you avoid confusing yourself with data by actually thinking about things?
There have been a lot of D&D.Sci scenarios, but there's a lot of variance between them in complexity and quality. Some are more difficult, and might not be a good place to start, while others are much simpler - some were very good, while others on reflection didn't flow quite right.
Unfortunately, LW karma doesn't track the quality of these scenarios very well: often mediocre scenarios are higher-karma than better scenarios (whether because they had good writing around a poor scenario, or because people upvoted before playing them, or just because more people happened to be online and see them).
If you're interested in playing D&D.Sci scenarios, but don't know where to start, this index (compiled by frequent authors abstractapplic and aphyer, we'll try to keep this updated going forwards) is a good reference point to make sure you can pick good scenarios at a difficulty level you're comfortable with.
If you're new to D&D.Sci, you should probably start with the lower-Complexity scenarios and move up to the higher-Complexity ones. Scenarios with Quality Rating 1-2 are probably less worth playing, while the higher-rated ones are ones we'd recommend.
If you disagree with any of these ratings let us know, we're happy to review - there were some scenarios where we disagreed on the correct rating while compiling this list, and we'd appreciate your comments as an outside view, especially if you're a frequent player!
Keen-eyed readers will notice a correlation between this column and the 'Complexity' column.
abstractapplic: These scenarios were attempts to convey / demonstrate specific ideas with real-world relevance; I judge that they failed at this; I therefore grade them a little less generously than you might.
abstractapplic: These scenarios were attempts to convey / demonstrate specific ideas with real-world relevance; I judge that they succeeded at this; I therefore grade them a little more generously than you might.
aphyer: I thought this scenario was great, and still do, but given that absolutely nobody but me liked it I am forced to admit that the odds suggest you will not like it either.
aphyer: I'm quite proud of the writing in this scenario, but the actual scenario itself was mediocre.
aphyer: Sadly the difficulty rating for this scenario arises less from complexity and more from tedium: the scenario doesn't have an intricate model with sneaky multivariate effects, it just has way too many simple effects to juggle and dull bits of work to do.