LessWrong team member / moderator. I've been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I've been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
(Though there might be actions a first-time player can take to help pin down the rules of the game, that an experienced player would already know; I'm unclear on whether that counts for purposes of this exercise.)
I think one thing I meant in the OP was more about "the player can choose to spend more time modeling the situation." Is it worth spending an extra 15 minutes thinking about how the longterm game might play out, and what concerns you may run into that you aren't currently modeling? I dunno! Depends on how much better you become at playing the game, by spending those 15 minutes.
This is maybe a nonstandard use of "value of information", but I think it counts.
Seems big if true and fairly plausible. I'd be interested in chipping in to pay for someone to come up with a methodology for investing this more and then running at it if the methodology seemed good.
(also it's occurring to me it'd be cool to have a "Dollars!/Unit of Caring" react)
I'm not mesaoptimizer, but, fyi my case is "I totally didn't find IFS type stuff very useful for years, and the one day I just suddenly needed it, or at least found myself shaped very differently such that it felt promising." (see My "2.9 trauma limit")
My general plan is to mix "work on your real goals" (which takes months to find out if you were on the right track) and "work on faster paced things that convey whether you've gained some kind of useful skill you didn't have before".
My goal right now is to find (toy, concrete) exercises that somehow reflect the real world complexity of making longterm plans, aiming to achieve unclear goals in a confusing world.
Things that seem important to include in the exercise:
The exercise should be short (ideally like a couple hours but maybe a day or a hypothetically a week), but, somehow metaphorically reflects all those things.
Previously I asked about strategy/resource management games you could try to beat on your first try. One thing I bump into is that often the initial turns are fairly constrained in your choices, only later does it get complex (which is maybe fine, but, for my real world plans, the nigh-infinite possibilities seem like the immediate problem?)
Lots of people have mentioned various flavors of roguelikes. One of my goals is to have games in different genres. I agree that roguelikes are often a good source of the qualities I'm looking for here but part of the point is to try applying the same skills on radically different setups.
Another thing I'm interested in is "ease of setup", where you can download the game, open it up, and immediately be in the experience instead of having to do a bunch of steps to get there.
One note: custom levels now exist and you can go browse them directly even if you've beaten the game.
I do agree that this exercise, as-worded, probably nudges towards a flavor of "explicit thinking", which I don't think is even necessarily the best strategy for Baba is You overall.
I don't think this exercise necessarily says "think explicitly" – the section on metacognitive brainstorming is meant to fuzzy/experiential/"go-take-a-shower"/"meditate" style options.