If orchestral jobs for violinists are so scarce, what do you think about the options of branching out? Playing with a band, going into pop violin, etc.

I think Scott's original story described scissor statements a bit differently. The people reading them thought "hmm, this isn't controversial at all, this is just obviously true, maybe the scissor-statement-generator has a bug". And then other people read the same statement and said it was obviously false, and controversy resulted. Like the black and blue vs white and gold dress, or yanny/laurel. Maybe today's LLMs aren't yet smart enough to come up with new such statements.

EDIT: I think one possible reason why LLMs have trouble with this kind of question (and really with any question that requires coming up with specific interesting things) is that they have a bias toward generic. In my interactions with them at least, I keep having to constrain the question with specificity, and then the model will still try to give the most generic answer it can get away with.

Yeah. To me your post first read like it was making a historical claim - about gradual voluntary self-disarmament. But maybe I misread and you only intended to make the smaller point about "getting epsilon more from participation", in that case yeah, my criticism is off target and sorry.

”this system was designed such that every participant was getting an epsilon more from participation than they expected from breaking its rules”

I do agree with this as stated. But a system can be very coercive and still meet the letter of this (by making "what is expected from breaking the rules" really bad). So maybe you need a stronger statement.

You don't need to weaken your views, they can be criticized just fine as they are. My main criticism is that you believe in a kind of social contract that includes and benefits most people, but I think in reality there's much more coercion, much more rules that benefit the powerful at the expense of everyone else. For example, the whole system of land ownership and rent would look very different if it was designed with majority interests in mind.

I like reviews of imaginary books as much as the next guy, but I'm a bit miffed that you didn't do it the cool way: by recounting a point from the book and then saying "the author is wrong and a moron, actually things are this way", then doing the same for the next point and so on. This way the review wouldn't come off as being fawning toward your own ideas (which let's face it is a bit weird), and also the readers would get a valuable rationality exercise in figuring out who's the moron in each instance. Bonus points if you yourself genuinely don't know who's the moron - that can elevate the whole thing into art.

Yeah, this works.

I'm a bit torn on where fairness should be properly placed. For example, if Alice is the only one deciding and Bob has no power to punish her at all, it seems like fairness should still come into Alice's consideration. So maybe it should be encoded into the utility function, not into the strategic behavior running on top of it. But that would mean we need to take actions that benefit random aliens while going about our daily lives, and I'm not sure we want that.

Yeah, that training took some time, but it worked. I can now write melodies and chords from imagination pretty easily. Have had this skill for awhile now. It's very useful, though of course not a golden ticket.

My current challenge in music is just coming up with interesting stuff, I think this challenge isn't gonna run out anytime soon.

I think in music you quickly learn to hear and play the right notes, and then it's just never a problem anymore. The real difficulty is having something to say. In writing and visual arts I think it's also like that: you learn a basic level of skill, and then it's all about what you say.

It is fun, but there is only a certain amount I can use my hands before I get RSI on any given day.

Might be worth experimenting a bit with finding more comfortable ways to play. Lots of people (including me) can play the guitar for many hours every day with no problems. But it's hard for a teacher to tell from outside what's crampy and what isn't, you need to rely on your feelings for this.