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Much lower stakes, reminds me when I worked on app store optimization

Minor changes in your rating had a huge impact on organic registrations

Naturally is the obvious move is show everyone an in-app five-star picker, and only take them to the app store if they choose five stars

But app stores became wise so you're not allowed to do that

So what you do is run experiments to figure out the optimal moment to ask a user to rate you

This modeling can be taken to great extremes

So then all the apps have five stars, the ones with the most capacity to run these expe... (read more)

I think this is a beautiful sentiment, particularly the Lewis quote

Something I find though so much today is trying to force me to pay attention

Every meeting someone is trying to cojole you into seeing things their way

Every piece of media online has been self-selected for this

I think something about that tendency causes this knee jerk desire to ignore most things

Very interesting point I hadn't put together before.

It's so eerily reminiscent of COVID. You try so aggressively to prevent something so catastrophic, dedicate immense resources to it and to prevent it (up to the point of generating your exact fear in extreme detail to be able to defend against it) and then hmmmm, well that's odd... what's this? what, what is this? hmmm

Many games already implement some type of "long tail cutoff"

e.g. the aforementioned Risk starts to exponentially (ish) jack up the card values to force people to kill for cards and to tip the scales faster and faster as the game goes on

However often friends and I would intentionally not do that because it's more like approach a 50-50 chance with more randomness

So we would cap it at some point or apply some other control to allow the game to remain "fair", but then it takes an eternity

This feels like an interesting alternative

A more interesting way to operationalize this I think would be to roll a die and then accept the results.

e.g. 85% resignation -- we roll, if number is 1-5 you win, if number is 6 I win

So there is still a winner / loser it is just massively accelerated

I've thought about this problem a lot.

I think the reason behind it is fundamentally open-ended problems without clear end points. Where it's possible (due to non-transitive preferences / opinions on when something is done / what to focus on) to infinitely loop over the same parts without making a lot of headway.

The way that I approached solving this meta problem is by trying to come up with a consistent way to tackle anything that can be executed with maximum speed. (i.e. where I don't have to kind of passively "feel" that I am done and have clear completi... (read more)