ErickBall

I am currently a nuclear engineer with a focus in nuclear plant safety and probabilistic risk assessment. I am also an aspiring EA, interested in X-risk mitigation and the intersection of science and policy.

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Real can of worms that deserves its own post I would think

I think in this case just spacing them out would help more.

Downvoted because I waded through all those rhetorical shenanigans and I still don't understand why you didn't just say what you mean.

Separate clocks would be a pain to manage in a board game, but in principle "the game ends once 50% of players have run out of time" seems like a decent condition.

Oh, good point, I had forgotten about the zero-sum victory points. The extent to which the other parts are zero sum depends a lot on how large the game board is relative to the number of players, so it could be adjusted. I was thinking about having a time limit instead of a round limit, to encourage the play to move quickly, but maybe that's too stressful. If you want the players to choose to end the game, then you'd want to build in a mechanic that works against all of them more and more as the game progresses, so that at some point continuing becomes counterproductive...

Would a good solution be to just play Settlers, but instead of saying "the goal is to get more points than anyone else," say "this is a variant where the goal is to get the highest score you can, individually"? That seems like it would change the negotiation dynamics in a potentially interesting way without having to make or teach a brand new game. Does this miss the point somehow?

So, then it seems like the client's best move in this scenario is to lie to you strategically, or at least omit information strategically. They could say "I know for sure you won't find any fingerprints or identifiable face in the camera footage" and "I think my friends will confirm that I was playing video games with them", and as long as they don't actually tell you that's a lie, you can put those friends on the stand, right?

You say that lying to you can only hurt them but "There is a kernel of an exception that is almost not worth mentioning" because it is rarely relevant. I find this pretty hard to believe. If your client tells you "yeah I totally robbed that store, but I was wearing a ski mask and gloves so I think a jury will have reasonable doubt assuming my friends say I was playing video games with them the whole time", would you be on board with that plan? There must be plenty of cases where the cops basically know who did it but have trouble proving it. Maybe those just don't get to the point of a public defender getting assigned?

That's like saying that because we live in a capitalist society, the default plan is to destroy every bit of the environment and fill every inch of the world with high rise housing projects. It's... true in some sense, but only as a hypothetical extreme, a sort of economic spherical cow. In reality, people and societies are more complicated and less single minded than that, and also people just mostly don't want that kind of wholesale destruction.

I didn't think the implication was necessarily that they planned to disassemble every solar system and turn it into probe factories. It's more like... seeing a vast empty desert and deciding to build cities in it. A huge universe, barren of life except for one tiny solar system, seems not depressing exactly but wasteful. I love nature and I would never want all the Earth's wilderness to be paved over. But at the same time I think a lot of the best the world has to offer is people, and if we kept 99.9% of it as a nature preserve then almost nobody would be around to see it. You'd rather watch the unlifted stars, but to do that you have to exist.

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