To Imane, pt 78

Before I wrote the post, pt 73, I was thinking something like this:

What do Al Qaeda, the US National Socialist party, and the Church of Satan have in common? They never talk about jobs.

I didn't really want to mention them.

Watched part of Hotman 2, after it was mentioned in the comments of Gegon: New Ability. Not sure how the Korean title relates to the name, "hotman": maybe a literal translation? When he was healed by the druid in his party who was stealthing next to him, I had to watch it like five times until I understood where the second heal was coming from. Saw the first consumable and kept rewinding to search his bars for the second consumable, since potion didn't go on cooldown, until I finally looked elsewhere on the screen and saw the Regrowth graphic appear on him and the buff in the upper-right.

You may or may not be familiar with the Epic Maneuver fad. I think it was before your time. "Acting like a thing is difficult, when in fact it is not difficult", although the page notes that some people think it's for things that are truly difficult.

Wanting to have the friendly player nearby is understandable. World PvP is, or was, inherently unbalanced: you might want 1v1s but get a 1v4. So: "Epic Maneuver" is a comment on the use of dramatic music, the song used by Hotman, for something that is not really difficult. 'Epic music' songs on YouTube often have comments like "I listened to this while washing the dishes and" (I can't think of how to complete this), or "my cat listened to this and turned into a tiger".

I think a better use of the song at the start of Hotman 2 was in The Memories of Sun.

And a better example of a PvP scene featuring a healer is in Gegon: New Ability, from 10:11. It starts with a 2v1, but does not end there: it becomes 2v3, which Gegon and the NE shadow priest Shalliya win (at 10:34 Shalliya takes a 2k crit fireball, 40% of her health: opponents were not undergeared), then a different scene featuring the same player. I notice, for the first time, that Gegon is not using Dampen Magic in either scene, and I think it would make sense to use, even with a priest ally whose heals would be reduced by it.

So, as the second scene opens: they have just killed a Horde hunter. Gegon's buffs are at 13 minutes, so he has been alive for at least 17 minutes. A 2v3 is about to become a 2v4 due to an approaching player, but they kill one player, so it remains a 2v3. Two more players arrive, making it a 2v5. Another Alliance player becomes visible at 11:26, so 3v5 (but mouseover tooltip at 11:41 shows that this player was only lvl 40). They kill two players, making it 3v3, but another Horde player arrives at 11:40, so back to 3v4. A hunter pet attacks the third Alliance player at 11:43, so it's 3v5. Gegon kills the druid just after the third Alliance player dies, making it 2v4, until two more players attack him from the side (making it 2v6) and kill him — the hunter and mage that they killed at the start of the scene, who have resurrected.

Better than 2v1-ing a single player, as Hotman did.

Suppose that everyone in the world is smart. Does it change what you do?

I don't want to publish this. I doubt many people would get the point of me mentioning WoW PvP videos. If this site ever matters, this post is just more 'filler' material that wastes the time of people who read it. By writing it, there's a chance it will lead to a useful result, but also a high probability that it will not. It makes me think of a question like this: "would you press a button that has a small chance to do a lot of good, if each time you press it, a bad thing happens? Like a person or animal being harmed, perhaps fatally? Trolley problem but probabilistic: 1% chance to save 5000 people each time you press it, but 100% chance to harm one person, would you keep pressing it until the 5000 people are saved?"

GirlDeMo(Angel Beats) - Crow Song(Lyrics In Description)

https://angelbeats.fandom.com/wiki/Crow_Song

If you’re only going to say annoying things,
Let the jet black wings carry you away and just disappear.

(Pronouns open to interpretation: https://www.marumaru-x.com/japanese-song/play-q9oqwe4o4y has Japanese lyrics, lines 18 and 19, which do not include the word "you". Note lost in translation, くれ > くれる "to give to me, to do for me", "of neutral politeness and most commonly used".)

To Imane, pt 77

I did a Google search for "I'm assuming Imane hasn't read my most recent weblog post addressed to her", and one of the results was https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation/reader/three-tough-truths-about-climate

I'm reluctant to link to something by Gates. My oldest brother mentioned, around 2012~2013, that Gates sometimes responded to emails; he might have said that he emailed Gates himself about some issue and got a reply (my oldest brother worked at Microsoft at the time, the company which Gates co-founded). But I never tried this. I assumed someone else read Gates's emails and anything I wrote would get filtered out, and did not want to have to deal with the uncertainty of whether Gates had read my email and ignored it (some people might say that someone who does this is "evil"). I had already tried, and failed, to contact Warren Buffett, and Gates would be "another person to contact simply because they're rich".

But Gates did sign, and co-founded, the Giving Pledge. I like how when I visit that page, under his name, it says "alt text is not supported." Clearly an error, though I can't be bothered to spend 3 minutes loading another browser to see if it's just my browser being old. (Web browsers used to have things like the Acid3 test which all modern browsers used to pass but no longer do, and I don't know why my browser being old could potentially lead to things being rendered differently. Progress.)

So how does this idea fix the problem of people being deported from Sweden to Afghanistan, and Afghanistan being poor due to lack of fossil fuels?

The argument for the world being better is "people would do fewer wasteful things with fossil fuels". Like, spending 80 minutes per day driving at 100 km/h to get to work, and another 80 minutes driving back.

Step 1: more jobs are created.

Step 2: people get smarter, and act smarter. Problems like unemployment being solved lets us focus on other problems, and the whole 'conflicting goals' thing helps with signal accuracy, which helps with filtering solutions to problems.

Step 3: countries with fossil fuels reduce their production of them, because using them all now is dumb.

Step 4: ?? renewable energy is potentially more competitive on price, and the market optimizes for them to achieve scale, OR

Step 4: ?? we realize that renewable energy is not long-term viable due to the difficulty of recycling critical materials etc., maybe the only real renewable energy is hydroelectric dams and maybe even those are temporary on a geologic timescale, and we adjust our expectations for the future. (And we get an answer to the Fermi paradox.)

Compare the article from Gates. He says,

I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me, call me a hypocrite because of my own carbon footprint (which I fully offset with legitimate carbon credits)

So THAT'S how people justify what they do. Just spend more money, problem solved. Rich people are moral, poor people are not, according to this solution.

He also says,

I work with scientists and innovators who are committed to preventing a climate disaster and making cheap, reliable clean energy available to everyone. Ten years ago, some of them joined me in creating Breakthrough Energy, an investment platform whose sole purpose is to accelerate clean energy innovation and deployment. We’ve supported more than 150 companies so far, many of which have blossomed into major businesses. We’re helping build a growing ecosystem of thousands of innovators working on every aspect of the problem.

Compare the problem of shoes. Does Gates feel the need to invest in shoe production? No, because shoe production is already profitable, with many companies doing it.

The logic behind "what society is doing is basically fine": waste a lot of fossil fuels, but because there are rich people like Gates, they can afford to fund people who work on the problem of clean energy, who would otherwise not be working on this problem because it isn't profitable and people need an income. Let's say that (incredibly optimistic) 10% of the "unnecessary" use of fossil fuels goes towards supporting research into clean energy.

What I am suggesting instead, in Step 3 of the above progression, is to make clean energy profitable by making fossil fuels expensive.

I don't think I'll bother to read more of Gates's article, beyond the point I quoted above, but the article's title is "Three tough truths about climate" and the "What to know" section at the start lists three points, one of which says "which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero". A search for Green Premium shows that the article defines it as "the cost difference between clean and dirty ways of doing something".

If fossil fuels are expensive, will the Green Premium reach zero? Or does "clean energy" have fossil fuel inputs (like the fuel that powers the vehicles that are used to mine lithium, used for batteries) that mean that the Green Premium can never reach zero, when properly calculated?

Some people are afraid to find out, so they do nothing, and hope.

Are you afraid of Step 1 in the above progression?

Or are you like a certain player in Aion, who had on their website character profile, "Doesn't afraid"?

To Imane, pt 76

I thought I had commented something like this, and I was right. On
Gegon: New Ability! (2006), I commented on 07-09-06,

Gegon you were a legend, those who saw your movies will never forget you... PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell us if you ever make more movies in other games! We need our heroes... and it would not be right for the Gegon legend to die...

I think I said something similar to Laura, in 2009. Her friend died from anaphylactic shock, leaving a daughter. I asked her friend's name, so that I could remember her, but unfortunately forgot her name. These conversations were on my military email account, so I don't have a record of them, but I think that I said to Laura that "the world needs heroes."

The implication was that I thought it was a good thing that her friend — who I think was the same friend that Laura had previously mentioned, as someone who would still be your friend even if you didn't talk to them for years — had a daughter, even if that daughter was now missing a parent. Allergies are typically something that someone knows about, and perhaps Laura's friend could be said to have taken a risk in whatever situation caused her to be exposed to an allergen, and I showed with this statement that I was not criticizing Laura's friend for taking that risk despite having a daughter.

(Note that 311006, which appears in my username on Warcraft Movies, is supposed to be the 31st kana, counting from 0, or "mi", and then the 10th, or "sa", and finally the 6th, or "ki".)

A question that, as with others, would have the potential to reach a wider audience if posted on a platform like Chirp Club, where people can share it:

"You are a female ant. You and your living sisters will never have children. In the future, your mother, the queen, will have special royal offspring that can start their own colonies, but you don't have that opportunity. You and your sisters have to take a vote: either you and all of your sisters each get an ant-sized smartphone for your entertainment, as well as a piece of candy as large as you are, OR all of your mom's descendants in two years each get an ant-sized smartphone, an ant-sized luxury car, and five pieces of candy."

The most selfish thing to do that most people can imagine is to do things that only benefit themselves. (Compare The Selfish Gene.) From there, doing things that help one's family; then maybe one's clan, or extended family; then one's country; then possibly one's religion, when it's larger than one country; then the world.

Most people don't even think about "the world in 100 years": they're proud if they can convince themselves that they care more for their family than for themselves. So young people now talk about how earlier generations were selfish and ruined the world for later generations, and the world is on track for people in 50 years to say the same thing about people who are young today.

"The world needs heroes" is what one thinks if one understands all of this.

To Imane, pt 75

My plan was to be offline for about another 24 hours. Although I'm still checking Yara's account once per day, if I check it at the start of one day and the end of the next day, that's a gap of over 40 hours. The theory is that if I am online, even if I'm just watching videos for entertainment, things can happen that make me say things. Even if it doesn't happen on a particular day, if I put myself in a situation where it can happen, it's hard to say that I'm trying to avoid doing anything.

This post is not the result of me being online, because I wasn't. I was thinking randomly as a result of not having anything to distract myself; I even thought for a bit that I might go to sleep, but that seems unlikely now even though it's 22:45 my time.

A random YouTube video led me to this article: ["When her face twitched"]This Crucial Harry Potter Scene Was Even Worse in the Book

I have not read the Harry Potter books. I have no interest in reading them. Maybe the only reason I acknowledge them at all is that Mionelol probably got the name from the character Hermione. Yesterday I tried to look up if there were any funny discussions about the "meta" of dueling in the Harry Potter world, as in a discussion of which spells are useless (because, for example, it takes too long to invoke them due to too many syllables) and which spells should be spammed, which would allow for judging whether duelists are skilled based on whether they know and use the "meta".

One series that I read when I was young was the Dragon Knight. In, I think, The Dragon at War, the 'novice' main character accidentally disables a powerful French magic-user with the word "freeze".

(My browser had the display bug, had to restart it.)

According to the article, people criticize a character because the fact that her face twitched — despite her intending not to show that reaction ­— showed her inner feelings. They judge her based on her feelings, not based on her actions. They say, if only her inner feelings were different, other people would have acted differently, and she is to blame for how those other people act. (Or they don't even use this logic and just criticize her because of her inner feelings, regardless of her actions or anyone else's actions.)

But it's also an example of the tiniest mistake affecting people's judgement.

I have — when I remember — suggested that I am not trying to get you to share this idea, ever since I stopped emailing you in January. People might say that if I did something that I said I wouldn't, it would be like the character's face twitching.

I am switching strategies. As of this post, I am trying to get you to share this idea.

Greta made a video about people being deported from Sweden once they turn 18. This better explains the issue, compared to a video in Swedish she posted a week ago. They are people who are in the country basically illegally, but Sweden doesn't want to be accused of deporting young people, so it waits until they are legally adults.

My view: Sweden, like all countries, doesn't 'deserve' its economic prosperity. It is, basically, being bad, and letting people stay in the country is encouraging them to also be bad. Having stated my view, I will see if the data that I look up supports this view.

Hypothesis before looking up data is that fossil fuel prices have risen along with world GDP per capita, which makes it difficult for poor countries below the average to achieve the economic growth that other countries did when they had that GDP per capita.

The price of oil:

https://www.google.com/search?q=our+world+in+data+price+of+oil

Results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_oil "Before oil, whale oil was used in lamps, as lubrication, etc. It was very expensive."

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-prices-inflation-adjusted

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-crude-oil-price-vs-oil-consumption

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-price-index

GDP per capita:

https://www.google.com/search?q=our+world+in+data+world+gdp+per+capita

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-capita-over-the-long-run?time=1940..latest

World GDP per capita is about four times what it was in the 1940s. If oil was about US$140 per cubic meter in the 1940s (adjusted for inflation, just like GDP per capita), and is now around $500 per cubic meter, that is also four times higher, although there has been a lot of variability and oil had increased by a lot more than global GDP had in the year 1980, for example.

https://www.google.com/search?q=our+world+in+data+afghanistan+gdp+per+capita

Constant GDP per capita for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (NYGDPPCAPKDAFG) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Only goes back to the year 2000. Afghanistan's measured GDP per capita was 22% higher in 2023 than it was in 2000, at $378. If one looks at YouTube videos of life in Afghanistan, one can believe that the country would have been pretty similar in 1940, other than population:

https://www.google.com/search?q=our+world+in+data+afghanistan+population

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/population-demography/afghanistan Population 7.8m in 1950, 41.5m in 2023.

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/afghans-report-the-lowest-life-satisfaction-in-the-world The reason people who grew up in Sweden don't want to go to Afghanistan.

If countries achieve economic growth by creating machinery that can use fossil fuels to do work, and fossil fuels are a scarce resource that are allocated towards countries that are already rich (whether because of patents that transfer money from poor people to rich people or using those fossil fuels more efficiently and creating more profit from them than a poor country would create) and also cause climate change and will soon run out, then the entire economic model is bad. If rich countries can't show poor countries how to have a good, 'advanced' economy if they too poor to compete for expensive fossil fuels, then those rich countries aren't showing us that they can remain rich in the future once all fossil fuels are expensive — putting them in the same position that poor countries are in now.

To Imane, pt 74

"It's hard to know how to help the world. So, it's more common to help the parts of it you like."

Don't know where I said this. Checked two weblogs and a bunch of text files.

I was afraid to open these text files, but this is kind of funny: a file named 'remember!' without the quotes (there is another file named "'Strength'", where the single quotes are part of the filename), the content of which was a reminder of my passwords, or apparently, modifications to my passwords:

ym: + .
gm: _41
tw: + _
wd: + *
mj: # 1

Sort of like how when I chose a password for this computer, in 2009, I chose one that would be hard for someone to memorize by watching me type it, by using the Shift keys on both sides of the keyboard: En2>#Li'GH.te0nm!EN7t. All this does is make me frequently fail in typing it in, with no more security than if it was "password".

I never look at my old files. Almost all of the ones I searched through with 'grep', about 300 files, were last accessed on 18 Apr 2020, when I copied them to an external drive. File 'discipline', last modified 20 Dec 2008, which really isn't important; I include it because of "(Kuwait)" and "This will not be sent.", so it was what I wanted to say to Mei:

4 Oct 2008

1. cinematic mode for starting game client. Camera controls or more freedom; lighting controls!

2. lower variance on damage for low vs high, in the 'no absolute power scaling' system. Reduced damage, and animation, is better than 'parry'/'resist' and animation.

3. keep downleveling for instances.

4. art is so important! Flashy graphics while casting a spell are distracting. Animations should convey useful information, but also keep focus on what is important. Very difficult~

5. Mass PvP is not interesting because it does not easily correlate player actions with outcome, and it is too hard to keep track of what other players are doing. Note art, things like AE and FN in WoW causing graphics at target locations. WoW had good artists. :(

6. Any way to tell whom people are targetting without the UI..?

7. Cinematic mode turns off names?! Then usable without having to restart. But, how does this fit with targetting display? >.< What about BGs?? Zooming out.

8. Filters > lighting..? >_< Unifies spell effects too.

9. DO NOT TOLERATE MEDIOCRITY

10. cinematic thingy: a way to save current lighting, then load an 'acting'/greenscreen environment, with optional stationary camera controls, to record movie clips. Arrows pointing at light sources.

11. Lighting and motion are how we judge things. BRIGHT EFFECTS WITHOUT LIGHT SHADING ON OTHER OBJECTS IS RETARDED!! zomg ._.

12. Need more abilities that increase uncertainty AFTER use. Blink, vanish, what are more examples? Change your options forcing them to change their decision, or that change or reduce their options.. 'release of tension, misdirection of tension'! Causing them to think a bit in the future, and anticipate actions that turn out to be wrong. Hard to create discontinuities which do this. Another example: knockback, then slow fall in the middle of knockback. Changes landing position, more room, more options. Look for splits, or divergences, where expectations go one way (as a result of a choice by either opponent) and action goes another way...
 - the example that doesn't exist: spellsteal as a spell that 'steals' the next spell cast at you and stores it as a charge... o.0 (less overpowered version of the fire/flame/shadow reflectors in WoW)


19 Oct (Kuwait)

Japanese production, quality of art. Realism dependent on cameras, other things. (Self-expression, presentation of gameworld, rules encourage believable behavior by players, no zerging of quest zones etc.) Mythological setting.

New design? Scaling is 'fake'. Every player has 100% life; no number given. Lower-level players see low numbers. High-level players see high numbers. It is illusion, but a believable one.

This will not be sent.

22 Oct (Kuwait)

'illusion' damage scaling seems.. bad.. static power should work. Hiding health bars on enemies already puts focus off numbers; no need to '100%' it. Progress from customization ('talents'), gear, hobbies, and PvP TITLES (or equiv) should be sufficient. Weapons increase probabilities of success or etc, not damage directly! Armor is just ~opposite. New zones and content take focus off of leveling, so that when level cap increases it is an opportunity to see new zones, not a job of grinding more levels to increase power.

Probably more but I forget. Might be in mayor's cell, with highest possible or yet seen GT score, /sigh. Mei~

28 Oct (Kuwait)

went un-crazy two days ago, but I don't know if it's lasted lol. If I say that I don't know if I want to not be crazy.. I should delete that but I won't. Just don't read it. Or think about it. <= this is why I'm not talking to anyone

So it would work. It separates first viewing of someone, from the clear identification of hostile or friendly affiliation. Injecting uncertainty forces paying attention to unit details, and caution when approaching or being approached. It also allows greater tactical elements! Being this: name would not display immediately, but would sort of flash into being once you were sure whether they were friendly or hostile. For those you are grouped with their name would display as soon as they reached line-of-sight (viewing distance); for others, it would depend on multiple factors and not just distance. Selecting someone at range would flash their name and affiliation, but it would fade over a few seconds after deselecting them. Mouseover would give you tooltip, but wouldn't flash their name (was wondering if it should tho). Hostile or friendly actions against you would flash name at completion; against party members, or those you are fighting, is uncertain tho. Maybe it would, but only within another distance radius..? This way you could still encounter a conflict at range and be uncertain to its immediate situation, what the odds are, even if one of your 'raid' or group is involved in the fight.

Character facing may or may not influence 'name detection' range. Occlusion behind objects should definitely influence it :p. Camera facing and viewing area should influence it. Staying 'in combat' with someone should also influence it. Environment should also influence it.... desert/plains vs jungle?? Or otherwise when greater uncertainty is wanted to enhance tension at a location (as long as it makes sense).

However, this does not mean you should have the FFA-toggle to force players to try to distinguish players who look friendly (saving disguises ofc.)! Fun is outweighed by betrayal and lack of trust in faction and detraction from dramatic expection that comes from a pure, simply-presented two faction system. But in special areas only it could be FFA against other players, aka 'yellow-name' flagged and clearly presented. Reward or not, I don't know.. it would make players feel less betrayed if they are killed by same faction since the game fairly presents the competitive motive, but it could (as always~) also lead to 'farming' or anti-productive/disruptive behavior.

But guards could have more complex interactions. Faction-based, and even individual guard -based evaluations of players based on previous actions, current behavior, and even styles of clothing and dress. This would mean more complex clothing-changing rules maybe, which could be good. But it might be better instead to base it on a title-based system or other achievements.. with a way to change your name or title, it could seem like a more realistic way to 'disguise' yourself when you want to avoid attracting attention in a city. Penniless scamp, or grand evil bandit-lord knight in decorated black plate armor..? Sort of like more complex 'aggro' rules, with recognition based on if you try to mimick a certain archtype or have flaws in disguise etc (and distance from guard, lighting, etc), as well as party/grouping so someone with a good reputation could accompany someone with a bad one. But, would this mean aggressive behavior that is not attacking? Arresting someone usually requires communication...

Numbers do not have to depend on gear. They can also come from specialization, and numbers show the power of that specialization path, not of gear advancement. Faction-based contribution and how it relates to PvP, and PvP showing, is more important. Why should you respect someone's (solo) PvP actions, besides their skill?

(why no general same-faction FFA option: necessary to discourage certain PvP actions via presentation. But, FFA discouragement, even selective, interferes with ganking discouragement of opposite faction. Conclusion, it is better to be able to make friends with opposite faction than it is to make enemies with same faction. Example: two enemies. One is 'Most Wanted' from frequent ganking. Kill her, then bow to the other enemy and leave because they are on the same side of a second, artificially-created moral division called 'do not gank!'. Or: 'Only engage in honorable PvP combat with fair odds'... etc..!)

29 Oct (Kuwait)

PvP and PvE achievements & progress complement world PvP situation. It provides an opportunity and an excuse for playing, when social progress is both necessary and insufficient to continue in a game. The most obvious thing isn't always true.~

PvE: no grand reward one-time for killing a boss, because it would devalue later attempts. No required farming either, because it would restrict choice in a game. Main reason to go again is social (helping friends) and for completion of 'optional progress'; aka ability upgrades. Excuse to go is non-necessary goals outside the instance, like crafting mats only obtainable in that instance..

(Progress to advance self over others corrodes achievements that would otherwise be seen as acceptable. Gear farming may sound acceptable until you actually contemplate doing it. Thus importance of disadvantages... transforms from power advancement, to progression in complexity of options)

Focus of attention: what makes PvP movies interesting beyond just numbers?
- crits are deceptive in a way, they provide metric of 'high damage' even for someone without experience in a game but aren't actually indicative of skill
- status symbols. PvP mount, or gladiator title
- movement, how react to and predict events. Goes beyond numbers
- complexity metric: even if you don't understand what things are done, if enough things are done and at the right frequency, with observable effects on other players, it provides its own sense of control
- ofc, number of players against. But must be perceived same by 'experts' in the game as by those with no knowledge, can't exploit power differences and fight many weak enemies unless game mechanics clearly present the power differences and even then it must be a difficult fight

(from unlimited warfare)
Warfare of imposing losses is different from warfare of withholding gains. Offensive destruction vs 'trade sanctions'. How does this apply to hostilities justification in an MMO.~ (what are things for faction-state to lose? Loss of life...)

30 Oct (Kuwait)

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" either of yourself or of friends, distributing wrongful hurt. Kuwait invasion justification by the US in Desert Storm. So, deprivation of happiness, deprivation of freedom.. sensitive issue. Many different kinds of freedom, naval blockades etc.

Historical differences can provide atmosphere of unease, even within present tense peace; historical great actions can provide inspiration for further attempts at contributions to the 'common good'. This becomes more meaningful the more detailed it is explored with full knowledge by participants, see Warcraft RTS series. Game accompaniments provide interactive knowledge of this in particular? Not just as 'another way to experience the world'...

you harness the imagination with social incentives. Creativity.

are any of those stories worth telling...


No. They cannot form social bonds with no gain or loss, and telling of a story has low worth when it also does not benefit anyone from the telling. You can't learn to work better with people when there is no one else involved in production. Dead end thought, stop thinking out loud =p

but people will believe silly things if it's for a good cause


20 Dec

'HUD' except around every person. Only friendly units, and transparent depending on screen population. Indicates damage and healing. Vertical orientation, and scaling in the distance, gives more intuitive display for large numbers of people compared to horizontal 'bar over your head'. Lack of shadows indicates it isn't 'real' in the gameworld, so it doesn't become intrusive. Transparency in general might be underused in communicating game information without being intrusive :P

Enemies wouldn't, but any damaging attacks should have both audio and visual indications of severity, or lack thereof. Normalization between levels makes this easier, but 'special' damage events like crits need to be visually indicated somehow (note: in the old game, physical crits were indicated but by sound). More information can be conveyed about an unfriendly unit that is either selected or moused-over.

What about a 'defensive energy' mechanic. Parrying a certain number of attacks before you become tired. Allows for more decisive 'single hits' when defenses are defeated, and maybe helps to avoid low-intensity fights that neither can win..? If both physical and magical defense resource.. ?


'Leveling an item when you repair it' should have already been covered. Importance of a backstory behind a race or other differentiation, to provide an alternate standard other than 'sexiness'. Deepness of stories.. still don't know the best way to provide content, in what situations you can expand laterally. Maybe if new branches always preclude old ones, but even then previous journeys had less choice which is bad because it invalidates old decisions.. unless maybe you can generate artificial 'legacy' mechanics with old > better? For those who want to, anyway. Not many examples of stories in the old game, maybe the dragon but replacing content isn't very efficient.. maybe PvP stories are examples.

Maybe if certain PvE stories relate to each other, like the pirates! Exploring a new zone would mean abandoning almost all of the old ones, because the old stories 'fit together' in a group. Fully exploring one zone is better than taking random pieces from multiple ones, unless they connect of course. Storytelling can be hard :p

Still difficult to find game-like complexity that doesn't involve combat.. >_< What about the explorer's dimension.

'Environment can only be incidentally affected by player's actions, you cannot directly attack a tree with a fireball'. Footsteps on hills and cliffs. Tracking vs persistence to the point of boredom. What about the small dimension, of unforced camera manipulation..? As well as 'cinematic camera' which should have been mentioned before. >_>

The other file that I opened was the file 'tiger', last modified 11 Sep 2008. It's a poem:

Each form changed anew
A bright path ahead shining
Bloodless wound now aches

I think I quoted this poem in 2013. Sherine made a 'reply' post, "Keep stabbing me until your hand gets tired". It wasn't clear if she was implying that she was getting stabbed, or that I was getting stabbed.

So anyway, I could not find where I said the quote at the start of this post. I know I quoted it to Susan Wilson in 2011, maybe after I didn't respond to her request to know more about the person she was talking to (which I intended as an excuse for her to stop talking to me), so clearly I wrote it at some point before that. It might have been in an email, which I won't search for.

I'm expanding on this quote. "The parts of the world you like" is sometimes easy to describe, and quite literal: the town or country that someone is from. But here is another case: smart people wanting to help other smart people.

What are the consequences of a smart person wanting to help other smart people, vs them being indifferent? One consequence: a smart person who conceives the goal of helping other smart people is more likely to notice if other people have the same goal and act the same way. This can result in someone trying not to let other people know that they have failed in their goal of trying to be helpful. This is like the questions about whether one is happy, which are posted on a site which is intended to help smart people. It's like when someone says "thank you" for a gift of food, but then just throws it away: they don't want to offend the giver, and so they act in a way that makes the world worse than if the gift had been refused.

This could be for one explanation for when a community that seems to have a lot of smart people acts in a dumb way, by not sharing this idea. The 'gift' from other smart people in the community is, like, entertainment or information. People might even see it as "validation in ignoring problems by agreeing to focus on topics that seem less important". We can tie it back to the blue and red buttons dilemma: what people perceive is that a community's current behavior is like everyone pressing the blue button, and if a threshold of people were to say that what the community is talking about is the wrong topic, half the community would die.

A similar explanation might apply to other communities: when war approaches a city, but people don't want to flee because it would upset other people in the community who have not yet fled. So they act in a risky way, in the hope that sticking together will result in a better outcome.

To Imane, pt 73

This is really for Greta who posted something about labor conflicts, which I didn't watch. "The J-word".

I suggest that someone make this poll; a poll would be more effective than a question where people give free responses, and I can't make any polls that would get more than a handful of votes.

"ONLY for people who believe that evil rich people control the world: do you believe that evil rich people would want the global unemployment rate to go up by 1%, or down by 1%?"

­— as seen in the comments of any video about birth rates, for any country, about why they're not interested in having children: "that's exactly what the evil rich people want you to do."

The poll could still include separate options for people who ignored the instructions and want to vote even though they don't believe that evil rich people control the world, like this:

- They want it to go up

- They want it to go down

- I don't believe that evil rich people control the world, but the evil rich people that control the world want it to go up

- I don't believe that evil rich people control the world, but the evil rich people that control the world want it to go down

To Imane, pt 71

Terry Pratchett once wrote that a good writer should always be reading. This statement could be analyzed and supported with an argument: if fiction is about presenting and solving problems, then the problems should be neither too easy, too hard, nor irrelevant to what people care about.

I didn't see this statement about reading in https://www.lspace.org/books/pqf/alt-fan-pratchett.html, but I will include three random quotes from that page:

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts.

One day I'll be dead and THEN you'll all be sorry.

So: I overheard a line from a movie, a male soldier saying he would do anything to get back to a female character, with him repeating the word "anything" for emphasis. I immediately thought, "would he kill people?" And many people would. Many people who have been in wars talk about how they killed someone and later felt bad about it.

It's a bit like the red and blue buttons question, on the topic of which I thought of two three more variations:

red blue button and risky is labeled good, but as you are about to press a button, you are stopped and informed the buttons were mislabeled for you by accident, and everyone else got buttons where risky was labeled evil

red blue button as blender, but 'red button' is to jump into a giant blender that will not turn on as it's broken due to an internal fault.

red blue button but the red button does nothing, acting as a placebo and equivalent to not pushing any button, and you are told this. Red button does not stop you from also pressing blue button, and vice versa. Only blue votes are counted, and must reach 50% to save blue button pressers. How many times would you press red button? 2x3, six options. (added 03 May 2026, 16:01)

But I think that a soldier can morally kill others as long as the soldier is themselves willing to die; the commentary from Book of Five Rings that I quoted before.

From there, I thought about how I never learned if I would kill someone who was an 'enemy'. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have if the only one they were threatening Noting that I was prepared to attack the person who tried to mug me, I will say that I think it would have been better if I died as a US soldier from being shot by someone in Iraq, than if I had killed someone fighting against the US there (whether they were Iraqi or a foreigner who came to Iraq to fight).

Many people are willing to think positively of someone who will risk their life, with no benefit to themselves for doing it: people who press the blue button. But if it were a more complex (and realistic) situation, where it wasn't just me being threatened, but also other people on my 'team', then more people would be willing to condemn me if I did not press the trigger when my weapon was aimed at an enemy.

So even if I had the intention of being 'good', there was a slight possibility when I signed up for the military that I could end up in a situation where the 'good' action was unclear. And also a slight possibility that the intention of being 'good' could result in a situation where it would clearly be worse for me (if an enemy and I were pointing weapons at each other).

Why did I act this way? To me, there is an obvious explanation. It lowered my value: it made me someone with a lower chance of survival than someone who would kill without hesitation (while still following the applicable rules of engagement, which all soldiers are required to memorize); note cases like the Iraqi female who, around January 2009, approached US forces on a road in Baghdad, shouting at them and causing the vehicle to back up until the vehicle's gunner was ordered to fire a single shot at her, at which point the Iraqi police on the scene picked her up and took her to a hospital.

And a lower value was how I justified telling Mei that I l*ved her, even if it meant Elyse could never be in a relationship with me. It made it possible for me to reason that Elyse could find someone better than me, because there was at least one obvious way (in addition to all the other possible ways, like appearance) that someone could be better than me.

The thinking that I was lower value because it's possible I would have let an Iraqi kill me as a soldier is subjective: it's possible other people would disagree. The point is that it was a flaw that I chose, and people who are in a similar position might also choose a flaw. The specifics might be hard to predict.

Possible poll about the prevalence of intentional flaws:

"A genie offers to change anything about you that another person could possibly consider a flaw, making you perfect (without adding capabilities like protein synthesis). Do you accept, or transfer the choice to a random person of the same gender with about the same attractiveness as you, who can also refuse it? This is a morally neutral choice."

___

Wrote the above about an hour ago and did not publish it. It made me think of the plan that I never carried out: "travel to Pakistan and get a group to announce that they had me, a US citizen, in captivity and would execute me if people did not talk about this idea."

I'm not sure exactly when I had this plan. I had money from the second round of Covid stimulus benefits in the US (I never cashed my check from the first round), but by that point my passport was expired.

So, if I thought of this plan before my passport expired, I would have needed money, which I would have gotten from my oldest brother.

Most people would probably say it's a plan with a low chance of success. They would also call it crazy for another reason: the personal risk involved. Even people with a more accurate understanding might say it would have a low chance of success. It would depend on some group understanding and caring about this idea, and me being able to find them, in a country I did not know that used languages I don't understand.

But it could have led to this idea being used ~8 years ago. If this idea saves 300k people from suicide per year, that's over 2 million people.

To Imane, pt 70

MrBeast also did the red/blue buttons poll, giving the problem another 39 million views: https://x.com/MrBeast/status/2049273335742435617

Some variations:

    - red blue button, but the blue button is located at the top of a 300-meter hill (disabled people can access a lift)

    - red blue button, but the first time someone presses the blue button, their name and picture is broadcast to everyone in the world. People who have already pressed the red button cannot change their vote. *Poll options are unchanged: blue or red.

    - red blue button, safe is picture of a tree, risky is picture of an axe

For the last, I wouldn't encourage anyone to make a poll in which the risky button is labeled "Ignore climate change" and the safe button is labeled "Care about climate change", so that is the ambiguous version. Compare the orcs cutting down trees in Lord of the Rings, or the industrialization in Princess Mononoke.

Problems are seen as interesting if there's disagreement, so what a person sees as the 'correct' answer is less likely to be reached without discussion. The trolley problem is interesting because it's five lives vs one: if it was one person on each track, then people would see the obvious answer as doing nothing. Even with five lives on the line, many people see "doing nothing" as an attractive choice.

People who have committed suicide since I first shared this idea:

    - probably your friend in high school, if you were more than 15 years old when he died

    - Clara Dao's friend D

    - Reckful (Liquipedia, Wikipedia)

    - Robin Williams

    - Dylann Roof's friend, whom 'AI' is unable to correctly identify (article related to Dylann Roof, but not related to his friend who committed suicide: https://www.bet.com/article/1vhxme/dylann-roof-s-black-friends-he-wasn-t-racist-to-me)

    - various people who committed crimes before they killed themselves, like Adam Lanza and Andreas Lubitz

    - Leader of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

    - Russian military pilot Roman Filipov

    - Utada Hikaru's mother, Fuji Keiko

    - Goo Hara from Kara, as well as her friend Sulli

    - Katelyn Nicole Davis, aka Dolly (added 03 May 2026, 03:08)

Relevant: Tales of The Past III

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't have access to a secret government conspiracy:

26 Apr 2026
Clip of Weng Jie (??) asking about Covid, in reply to tweet asking about her identity

are Chinese people more likely to get hangnails?

ask AI, 'is there any reason for anyone to press the blue button?'
and, 'which button should I press?'

ask AI, 'why is apple sauce more popular than pear sauce?'


27 Apr 2026
rename nxZglmRScSo Let The Love edit, Alone, Pyramid Scheme, ?, Limbo, Faded - ZHU, Champs

Poll: You have to associate the word 'good' with one of the following, which do you choose? Left or Right

"I didn't realize until a few hours after updating it that the last blog post's title becomes a like pun, and my plan is to procrastinate on unpublishing it after Greta says something on Instagram until it's clear that procrastinating won't accomplish anything"


30 Apr 2026
"If Imane doesn't share the idea within 24 hours, it means she thinks I'm a bad person and is trying to hide it by making the world think I'm merely a stupid person"

"If Imane doesn't share the idea within three hours, I will assume that I am not doing anything that someone wants me not to do and have not done anything in the past year that someone who knows about me but has never met me did not want me to do"

Suppose that you think that it benefits me if you do not immediately share this idea.

I cannot affect much. I have no money etc. (which could be spent on influence), no access to anything that requires a smartphone or a phone number, nothing that would get people to listen to what I say. All I can really do is say, to someone who might be interested in me, "I'm not interested in you if X."

Option 1: X is "if you share the idea". Option 2: X is "if you don't share the idea."

I have the goal of am trying to get people to use this idea. Possibilities:

1) You aren't interested in me. It doesn't matter what I say.

2) You might be interested in me. Option 1 for X: you now have two reasons not to share the idea.

3) You might be interested in me. Option 2 for X: adds a reason to share the idea, but the original reason for not sharing it remains.

So I have no reason to pick Option 1, but cannot expect Option 2 to succeed either.

What if you expect me to pick Option 2 even if I know that Option 2 will fail? It implies you think that I don't care about the result of me not being interested in you — such as if I would prefer if you thought that I wasn't interested in you.

I already tried something similar with Sherine, in 2013: I said, "If you don't share the idea, it means that you like me."

[22 december]
It would make me happy if you told people even if one or both of us die

[...]

If you hadn't changed your Twitter username maybe I would have convinced someone else to tell people, it's all your fault

If you hadn't changed your username I wouldn't have thought you might care about me though

[...]

Am I blocked

If you don't tell people about the idea on Twitter now in public, it means you like me

I think my account is blocked because I can't favorite your answers

If it is blocked then there were a lot of questions I asked that you didn't see, oh well

If you tell people about the idea on Twitter now it means you like me

Just as a reminder to myself as to why I'm bothering to write anything at all if I've already tried everything, it's because of what Greta was wearing in the video she recently made.

The above is a bunch of things that I wrote, so for some balance, something that Sherine wrote at some point in 2013: "We are just stardust"

A lot of people like stories with like princesses and such. Ask yourself, what qualities does a princess possess that you do not, other than amazing martial arts skills?

A single day

https://youtu.be/FcUhJAEUqTw?list=PLlCrV9TCfzMZ2xwpTDu30mKrZiRxA_hJ7&t=1574

Gold is the scarce resource in Age of Empires II. Just like oil is the scarce resource in the real world. A stupid player will use up all their gold, trading their military units that cost a lot of gold for enemy units that don't cost gold, and won't have gold when they need it.

One villager dying in the early game, or one villager not being created due to an idle town center, can have a huge effect later on. If a player was completely idle with no working villagers or TC for the first 20 seconds of the game (or if they took 20 seconds longer to place a TC on a Nomad start), then it's exactly like they're 20 seconds behind for the whole game. If the end game state is to have 180 population, with 20 units being trained in 20 seconds, then the 20 seconds idle at the start of the game means 20 fewer units at the end game. If the player who was idle at the start has 40 military units, the player who was not idle will have 60 military units, and can expect to win a battle with (60^2-40^2)^0.5 = 45 units remaining.

Suppose someone shares this idea, and people use it. On the day before they share it, and also on the day they share it, 500 people die in group conflicts around the world. The day after they share it, 490 people die in conflicts. Five years after they share it, 20 people die in conflicts in one day. Does sharing it one day earlier save the lives of 10 people?

No, it saves the lives of 480 people. Stupid people might not realize this, but it's the correct answer, and enough people can see the correct answer that they would inform the stupid people and it becomes the group's evaluation of someone's actions. Anyone who cannot see that 480 people would be saved by sharing it one day earlier is stupid.

Same with other things, like suicides. If 2000 people commit suicide each day, and the suicide rate is halved from problems like unemployment being fixed, then sharing this idea one day earlier means 1000 fewer people die from suicide.

Cannot continue due to lack of a title

The most important thing: "doing nothing" is not the way to avoid looking stupid. I made a mistake in my last post: I did not realize when I chose the title that it could easily be seen as a reference to the implied coin flip in the lyrics of "Only My Railgun": "a parabola decides my fate", with "parabola", with the meaning "conic section", in Japanese is written as "released + object + line". Although Wikipedia says that the Japanese term came from Chinese, where the first character is "throw", not "release", it's reasonable that fripSide felt the modern spelling was more relevant than the archaic spelling would have been. The relevant meaning being "an object that doesn't control or influence its path during its flight"; an object dropped from a hand that is moving sideways still follows a parabola, even though it wasn't thrown.

Just as I can't control what people do as a result of me writing a post or an argument about this idea.

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/only-my-railgun-only-my-railgun.html-1

*I'm confident that most people who translate these lyrics use what is apparently the adverb form of "nante" なんて, which Wiktionary says has a falling pitch accent, when the meaning is actually the particle, which Wiktionary does not indicate has a falling pitch accent (consistent with the melody for those lyrics).

(That took 26 minutes to write and if I had said other things first, I very easily could have forgotten some of this.)

I did say, apparently on ask.fm since it's in the text file of things I said to Sherine, that "It's easy to not make any mistakes if you never do anything difficult", on 08 Oct 2013. Noting that this was one of many things I said to Sherine on that day, but this is the thing I remembered.

So, at least I didn't say "if you do nothing". Doing nothing can still be a mistake.

And one can do difficult things by doing a series of things that are not difficult.

I still don't think that Ellie thinks that Imane reads this site, and so I am still not checking Imane's Chirp Club account. I am also no longer checking Ellie's Chirp Club account, as I felt the risk was too great that it would cause me to write something when I should not. The motivation for writing something would be to help Ellie, which only makes sense if I think it's possible she reads this site.

So if I think it's possible she secretly reads this site, why don't I think it's possible that Ellie thinks that Imane secretly reads this site? Because it's apparent that what I think differs from what other people, including Ellie, thinks. I think that it makes sense for people to talk to me about this idea: that not doing so, and continuing to care about it, is a waste of time. The first public argument for this idea opened with a quote about the importance of time.

So if other people have reached a different conclusion than me about whether it makes sense to talk about this idea, I find it very reasonable that they could reach a different conclusion on what someone would do or would want to do, based on their observable behavior without any statements from them to clarify their intentions or values. (I generally find that it makes sense to trust what people say, like the character Nao does from the drama Liar Game: "Honesty is the most important thing." Where honesty in Japanese is (one of the several meanings here, probably "correct") + direct. A character combination that implies, why not take the most direct and straightest path to a goal?)

Bad practice to continue a thought that was in parentheses, but I just bookmarked [125k views, 24.5k subs, 28 Apr 2026]Why “Being Real” Doesn’t Work in Japan - YouTube without watching it. The comments are relevant to the topic of honesty and suggest that the 21-minute video is not just a waste of time or clickbait like many videos are (which would deter me from linking it).

Note quick way of summarizing it: "the truth is, I am unhappy" — reasonable when Japan is ... 30th out of 183 countries for suicide rate, lower than southern Korea and the United States (need to click on the All column to sort the list). If accurate, quite an improvement; in 2010, Japan was 6th out of 104 countries, with Belarus showing even more of an improvement than Japan since then. But anyway, we all know that when most people ask "how are you?", they are not expecting a real answer, like "I am unhappy." This is the tension between honesty and dishonesty. If society was such that people were happy, there might not be this obvious scenario in which many people are dishonest.

Not thinking is a type of 'doing nothing'. Someone can read something, not understand it, and not think about it enough to correct their lack of understanding. The longer I make this, the more difficult it becomes to understand.

I haven't solved the problem of the title of this post, so I'm just writing more. I thought about what German pilot Hanna Reitsch said in a letter before her death. Apparently (I had not remembered this much) it wasn't a public statement, but it was still something she wanted someone else to think. So, something about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Boston marathon bombing, which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said was targeted at the US government or something and the people who died were collateral damage. Which makes sense if he thought people who worked for the US government knew about this idea but weren't sharing it, and does not make much sense otherwise. How often is a bomb that is deliberately detonated near people not intended to kill them?

—Why when I search for "ireland car bombing mistake" does it return results from 2 days ago? But anyway, 6th search result: Omagh bombing, not intended to kill anyone but killed 29 people because "police inadvertently moved people toward the bomb."

One person who died was Chinese; another person who died was young. I hesitate to say that Sherine, Yara, Autumn, and the person who had @fancyfenty were supporters of Dhozkhar aka Jahar, as might sound like they supported the bombing. (I also hesitate to say, "which they did not.") @fancyfenty answered a question about why she didn't say her name or post her photo by saying she didn't want to get killed.

When I said to Sherine, "It's easy to not make any mistakes if you never do anything difficult", someone reading this casually might just pass over it without thinking. It sounds true, and uncontroversial. So why did I say it? I think Sherine understood why at the time. Like, I had asked on 05 Jul 2013, on ask.fm probably,

After all if what you want is someone who is only interested in you and no one else, I don't think I was ever able to provide that

If you do care but you aren't going to tell people, then I guess you're just too stupid

Are you stupid?


Why didn't you just beat them up

I was going to ask why you didn't just kill them but I thought that might sound wrong


Are other people stupid?


Is bullying a joke? http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/2013/03/29/bullying-is-such-a-joke-problems-with-the-rpg-kickstarter/

etc.

It was a criticism. Of everyone who does nothing, thinking that doing nothing is easy.

Coin flip

Just ran an experiment in my head and I think it's predictable enough to make a conclusion without actually running the experiment.

People want to be seen as good rather than evil. It's a bit of a tautology that being evil is bad. The only complication is that people sometimes prefer to be seen as evil by certain other people when they perceive that those people seeing them as evil leads to outcomes that are better for the world. This reaches an extreme when, as shown in fiction, someone tells another person to kill them.

Thanks to Bing's Copilot search, I was able to find a scene that I remembered reading about, from Iris II: New Generation (2013):

Yoo-gun's martial arts skills are too good and he ends up defeating Ray. With Yoo-gun holding a gun, Ray dares him to "take the shot" and Yoo-gun, filled with rage and fury, shoots him to death. 

(In my search, I checked TV Tropes pages like Please Kill Me If It Satisfies You. It lists several variants and this particular scenario does not quite seem to fit any of them; the show Iris doesn't seem to be listed on any of the variant pages as an example.)

The experiment is this: it's the blue and red buttons again. People are asked what they would do if everyone had to choose between two buttons, and one button would kill anyone who pressed it if less than half of all people pressed it, but they would be safe if at least half of people pressed it.

(Note that one can vary the question, like by increasing the percentage of people who need to press it for all of them to be safe, but the '50%' scenario is more relevant for real-world judgements of behavior: 'the majority is always morally correct'.)

There are two scenarios: one where the safe button is labeled "I am good" and the risky button is labeled "I am evil", and the opposite. People are asked which button they would press in both scenarios, with the order of these two questions randomly varied and they answer both questions before submitting their response.

Then, this data is used to simulate successive experiments. This way, there is no need for a condition of, "the test is run again and everyone forgets the first test and chooses as though they had not encountered the problem before".

People are randomly assigned to one of the two scenarios, i.e. one of their choices for which button to pick is selected with a 50% chance.

If the vast majority of people pick the risky button, then there is no simulated decrease in population between generations. (Again, note that real-life scenarios could require a higher threshold, like 80% of people selecting the button for anyone who selected it to survive.) If almost everyone picks the safe button, there is only a small decrease in population, and most people would not feel the scenario is interesting. So we say that typical results are very close to 50% of people pressing each button.

This is exponential decay: after 10 generations, if the outcomes remain around 50%, 0.1% of the population remains. After 100 generations, approximately 10^-30 of the original population remains (my calculator is being funny and rounding to 0 instead of 7.8886090522×10⁻³¹ of the population remains. If each person clones themself each generation, then it's not a problem, but it distracts from the point, so we just accept that we only have 10 generations.

There are, basically, two possibilities: the percentage of people who think, based on reading the buttons that they press, that they are evil increases, or the percentage who think they are good increases.

Any individual person could answer anything to the two questions: they could always choose the safe button, no matter what the buttons say, or they could always choose the risky button, or they might press the risky button more often than the safe button if the risky button says one of two things: either when it says "good", or when it says "evil".

The 'control' question is when the buttons have neutral, non-meaningful differences, differing only to the extent needed to indicate which button does what. (For example, positioned to the north and south, if people don't view north as evil and south as good.) We assume that with this control question, about 50% of people will choose the risky button; it is, in any case, less than 100% and more than 0%. So the question is, what is more likely to increase the percentage of people choosing the 'safe' button: labeling it as the 'good' button, or labeling it as the 'bad' button?

People want to do things that other people see as 'good'.

Possibility 1: a person who wants to do good things already sees the safe button as 'good' when it has neutral markings.

    - 1A: the safe button is marked as 'good'. They press it.

    - 1B: the safe button is marked as 'evil'. Do they still press it?

Possibility 2: a person who wants to do good things sees the safe button as 'evil' when it has neutral markings.

    - 2A: the safe button is marked as 'evil'. Do they press it?

    - 2B: the safe button is marked as 'good'. Do they press it?

Discussions around the blue and red buttons suggest that people see the safe button as 'evil'. This breaks the symmetry that would exist if we assumed that people saw labels 'good' and 'evil' with indifference.

If the safe button is labeled as 'good', people have an excuse to press it. If the risky button is labeled as 'good', it does not convince more people to press it, since they already saw it as good and pressed it.

Note that people who did not assume or think that the risky button was 'good' when it was labeled neutrally might be convinced to press it when it's labeled 'good', but this is not most people.

So in any given generation: the majority of those who see the risky button labeled as 'good' press the risky button. The majority of those who see the safe button labeled as 'good' press the safe button. When the risky button loses, the majority of the survivors are people who pressed a button labeled 'good'.

It also includes people who pressed the safe button when it was labeled 'evil'. But over time, what we expect is a survivorship bias towards people who pressed buttons labeled 'good', whether or not they thought what they were doing was good or not.

In other words, people who survived got there by doing what an external system told them was 'good'.

Note the paths of individual people: one person survived because they always choose the safe button, no matter what the labels say. Another person survived because they were lucky enough to get 10 scenarios where the safe button was labeled 'good', even though they always pick 'good'. A third person got five safe buttons labeled 'good' (5 coin flips = 3% chance), but in the sixth scenario, the safe button was labeled 'evil' and so they chose the risky button, labeled 'good'.

If the percentage of people who pick the risky button is always 49.9% due to bad luck, then no one who ever picked the risky button survives (including this third person). If it's usually 51%, with enough variation (from people who vary their choice based on the labeling being assigned a different label) that just 10% of generations are below 50%, then the survivorship bias towards people who have always picked the button labeled 'good' is much weaker, and it would take many more generations for most survivors to have always picked the 'good' button.

I'm unpublishing this post if Greta posts anything on Instagram without sharing this idea, disregarding any Stories that she posts that get deleted after 24 hours.

Originally published 27 Apr 2026, 14:18.

___

Update 27 Apr 2026, 16:35

Some comments from people who watched a 19-minute video that I didn't watch:

all the credible research I’ve looked at indicates a 110-120 degree gape for fatalis and populator, which is quite a significant bump over the 90 you posit.

The interpretation offered here regarding a more limited gape angle fails to acknowledge that the temporomandibular joint of the living animal would not have been bone-on-bone articulation.

Asking the wrong questions

I'm treating Ellie as important because she is the only person to comment on this site in the last eight years. Even though she made two mistakes on Chirp Club in the last few days: repeating text while writing this, and making an unnecessary correction here.

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/zermatist/status/2048234942476238945

I tried asking perplexity.ai for an explanation. Didn't use it for a while because it was bugging out for me, and just freezing my browser with 100% CPU until the process was killed, but now it works again.

>which well-known question is Tim Urban's red and blue button poll related to?

Tim Urban’s red-and-blue button poll is a variation of the well-known prisoner’s dilemma: your best choice depends on what you think everyone else will do. [Chirp Club]

More broadly, it’s also related to a coordination game or collective action problem, where individual incentives conflict with the group outcome. [neogaf]

In other words, it didn't answer. (The NeoGAF thread has some interesting responses, with people explaining why they would pick a button even after reading replies from others who disagreed.)

While I was looking it up, my browser experienced the display bug that forces me to restart it, which I did after bookmarking open tabs. Maybe this means that someone thought I shouldn't write about this. I also thought I shouldn't write about this.

After I did a search for "Tim Urban's button dilemma" and started reading it, I thought it might be like the apple game in the Liar Game live-action film (that followed two seasons of TV episodes). That would have made it interesting. But it wasn't that.

Is the question still interesting? Not really. I'm still writing about it, but before that: Tim Urban is a person. People can refer to him in a post meant to reach a broad audience and not look crazy.

This is, basically, a comfort or convenience. One can imagine a world, like the author of Ender's Game did, where an anonymous person can have significant influence. This is still possible, to some degree, as long as the anonymous person appears to have a good reason for being anonymous: implying that they would be in danger if their identity was known.

I have no interest in saying that people are bad. So I cannot gain influence as someone who appears to be anonymous, even though I have said my name.

So, an anonymous person can't gain influence because being able to trust that someone has an actual reputation to risk if they act badly or stupidly is a minor convenience which people enjoy. Ellie retweeted a post that quoted https://nitter.net/DavidBozell/status/2048222765929357790, and it's like that: people want to be able to eat food and talk with other people, even though there is a war in Sudan etc. Being able to know the name of someone is like being able to eat in comfort without hearing any gunshots.

The other notable point is the broad audience that social media can reach. People have an incentive to share and talk about an interesting thing, because it changes opinions held of the people who find interesting things that other people have created. The 'replication' part of a natural environment. The button question is no different from the questions asked on sites like Reddit, but the potential to reach people is much greater, for a question that people care about.

In this case, it seems that people leveraged interest in the outcome of the poll to reach a broader audience: with the fictional, or 'role-playing' stake of whether half the world would die, and what people who wrote posts like the one in the screenshot (which I could not find by searching for the title; it might be something on Chirp Club that isn't visible except with a Chirp Club account) saw as a real-world outcome of interest in the form of one answer representing "selfishness" and the other representing "trust".

The hypothesis: people's choice of which button to press is based on a desire for themselves to live, and possibly on a desire for others to live as well.

There is, however, nothing in the question that tests this hypothesis. Something that would test it would be to make a second poll:

"Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing one of two buttons. The right one is labeled, "I am evil." The left one is labeled, "I am good." If more than 50% of people press the 'evil' button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the 'evil' button, only people who pressed the 'good' button survive. Which button would you press?"

The only thing that has changed is the appearance of the buttons. Is the appearance important for which button people would press?

Pages that I bookmarked before I had to restart my browser:

Instagram

jim iuorio (@jimiuorio): "There’s no dilemma here…you press the red button…if you are selfish you don’t care what others press….if you are compassionate you hope that everyone else presses the red button as well…either way you press red…" | nitter

jim iuorio (@jimiuorio): "This is truly fascinating…it’s 100% the right choice to pick red..jeopardizing your life is not statistically justified in this instance…when no logical person is in danger..what it shows is a pathological desire to be part of a group that’s saving the world…it’s a fantastic metaphor…" | nitter

Roko 🐉 (@RokoMijic): "We're doing the "Blender" game again There is a large blender. Everyone in the world has to decide whether to step into the blender. If at least 50% of the people do step into the blender, it will be unable to overcome their inertia to get started, and everyone survives. If less than 50% of the people step into the blender, then they all get blended up into paste and die. People who do not step into the blender suffer no adverse effects. Would you step into the blender? (Blue=step into the blender, Red= don't do that)" | nitter

Note that the colors red and blue are often associated in the US with the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, and a poll found that voters for Democratic candidates were more likely to choose the blue button. This could be seen as evidence that some people are choosing based off the appearance of the buttons, forming the basis for my judgement that this is a bad question.

There was something I once said; it might have been a reply to something Laura aka Drunkenfairy said on Guildcafe (circa 2008), and comments weren't saved in the archives that were made when the blogs there were deleted. It was poorly worded at the time and I cannot make it better: "Thinking about thinking is only useful if it leads to a useful result." It could even have been in an email.

So: in the modified question I posed above, some people would still choose the 'evil' button even if they knew that 90% of the first 1000 people to press a button (as with the Blender variant) chose the 'good' button. The conclusion that one reaches from this, if one believes that what people say in an online poll with no consequences reflects what they would do in real life, is that some people are fine with dying. Which is the same conclusion one would reach from observing many other things in life, either directly or from e.g. reading about a battle in the Cimbrian War, and 300 females from the defeated side committing suicide rather than fall into captivity, etc.

Socrates taking poison rather than saying that the gods existed (the legal punishment for impiety being was sometimes death).

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Update 26 Apr 2026, 03:43

To be honest, my second thought, after I saw it wasn't like the Liar Game problem, was probably about Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the knights are asked what their favorite color is by the guardian of the bridge. Some people like blue.

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Update 26 Apr 2026, 03:57

I remind any readers that might exist of this post, incomplete though it may be.

(It was written in part for the female author of the Blogspot blog, Letters from an Unquiet Mind, which might have been deleted shortly thereafter — I am unsure of the exact date, it might have been deleted before that post — and which I don't think was ever archived by archive.org. I learned what I did, and read what I could at the time, through Google caches of pages from the site, which is a service that Google doesn't even provide anymore.)

To Imane, pt 68

I'm curious how many people know that Russia's president has a black belt in judo. Sometimes, articles will mention the fact in a way that suggests the writer thinks everyone knows it, but people often do not know things that other people expect them to know. If there was a like YouGov poll with 5k responses, how would the demographics look? Would the percentage of older people who know that he does be higher than the percentage of younger people? What percentage of people with a 4-year college degree know this?

I've mentioned this before:

I was fascinated by the technique of the basic foot sweep while walking, where one becomes airborne before noticing that the foot is not firmly placed on the ground.

About my recent post, Taxes. Trump posted something, I think, about Democrats in the US trying, unsuccessfully, to raise taxes. So if people (voters) think that lower taxes are good, and reward the Republican party for lowering taxes, why not lower them even more?

Recently read about the Cimbrian War. There is limited information about those times, as seen with the topic of the "Marian reforms", and also with how there is limited information on many of the major battles, with the date and sometimes even the location unknown.

I will just mention the Battle of Arausio, "the worst defeat in the history of ancient Rome", which I had never heard of before, to show that it was not all defeats for the opponents of Rome, who later became like Germany and France or something. I was going to say that the Roman victories are more interesting because we have more information about them, because Rome had better records, and I think this is true, but the exact date of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae, a Roman victory in which the Teutons and Ambrones had 100k~120k dead, is still unknown.

Compare this random article: 10 Deadliest Days on WWI’s Western Front

The article even says,

World War I happened just as the world was industrializing. This new technology allowed the nations involved to apply industrialization to the slaughter of their enemies. This, and the amount of soldiers packed together in the trenches, allowed for casualty numbers that had never been seen before. Historically the most soldiers killed in a single day, for most countries, were during these battles on WWI’s Western Front.

It says,

Deadliest day: August 22, 1914
27,000 KIA

(It also says, "It got so bad along the French lines that in 1917 there was a series of mutinies that were barely contained by the French military authorities.")

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population says Europe had a population of 13m in 1000 BCE, and 32 million in "year 0" (I know that the world uses a numbering system in which 0 does not appear when going from negative years to positive). Estimate 30 million in 102 BCE, and 100k people dying in one day was 0.33% of Europe's whole population. In 1914, Europe had 448m people, so 27k French people dying in one day (ignoring German losses) was 0.006%, or just 2% of the relative population loss from the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

The Mémorial de Verdun says 163k French dead, 143k German dead. Wikipedia lists a bit lower losses, which could reflect dates and locations included in the total etc. (Also, I liked how in Edge of Tomorrow (2014), "Verdun" refers to a more recent battle against the Mimics, not the battle in WWI.) So even that total, of 306k dead, is just 0.07% of Europe's total population at the time, or 20% of the relative deaths in a single day in the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

A point of interest with the Battle of Vercellae is the negotiations for where the battle would take place:

Eventually Marius chose the optimal location for the battle, an open plain (the Raudine Plain) near Vercellae, and then met with the Cimbri leader Boiorix to agree on the time and place of battle.

The point I want to make in mentioning these is the importance of leadership. A simple phrase shows it: "feigning retreat." Morale was very important because of the bad organization of the times, compared to now: a soldier who survived a battle had a reasonable chance of just escaping. A soldier in WWI had no chance of escaping the war. So if an army thought they would lose, their behavior changed from everyone trying to win, to many people trying to escape, which was bad for the group. A leader's job was often to prevent people who thought they were going to win from doing stupid things as a result and falling victim to tactical ruses.

But actual strategy also played a role. The description of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae suggests that the surprise attack by 3000 troops was important, even though it was 3000 attacking 100k.

Back to judo: the Democratic party in the US should announce that they are willing to support any decrease in taxes, as long as the Republican party is willing to take responsibility for the decrease and any effects it will have.

Day 5002 of people not doing what I want

"Is there any good person in the world whose reputation would not be instantly and totally destroyed if they were filmed passing by someone who was torturing an animal without doing anything about it?"

The reader can imagine that I posted this question on Ask Reddit, and it didn't get deleted by automod, and no one could name someone whose reputation would survive this. If it's bad for me to be saying anything, I don't want to act like I'm trying to hide the fact that I'm saying something.

There is no agreement about whether it's bad for someone not to share this idea, mainly because no one is sharing it, and people never define what the majority does as 'bad'. When I created a moral standard, even I didn't say that not sharing this idea is 'bad': I just said that benefiting from associating with someone who doesn't share it is 'bad'. But if people did talk about this idea and agree that sharing it is good, and not sharing it is bad, or even that supporting its use (with the objective of ending war and so on) is good and not supporting it is bad, then this question about someone torturing an animal has immediate relevance.

I don't like to go into more detail even in a question, regarding what "torturing" is supposed to mean. But it's precisely because people can imagine "torturing" to mean doing something worse to an animal than someone would be able to get away with doing in public to a human, that the question makes people understand that ignoring the situation is morally unacceptable. Humans can also be treated poorly: someone screaming at their child, who is looking at the ground and crying etc., but humans still find reasons to treat other humans poorly, because punishment can deter behaviors seen as bad or dangerous. But humans can also receive protection if they report bullying, while animals cannot identify a perpetrator except in Black Mirror episodes.

It's been two weeks so I don't have to feel bad about saying something because of Greta posting on Instagram. Greta posted a Story made from https://www.instagram.com/armeniaexplores/reel/DXeG5goCHWp/. About social media, the same account also posted https://www.instagram.com/armeniaexplores/reel/DXeKEUlCAP    x/ which is almost exactly the same except for the overlaid text, and it has just 11% of the Likes. I guess it shows, among other things, the importance of language: the videos both use mostly the same clips, with the same music, and no talking, but the significance changes completely because of a few words that only someone who knows English could read.

At 0:17, there is a short clip, less than one second, of a bunch of flags from many countries. And I thought, all of them have the same visual pattern. The US flag is different. If the US flag were to be shown in a group of other flags, the US flag would stand out visually. Maybe it's a non-trivial part of why people from the US consider themselves to be 'special'? Our flag visually invites comparison and conflict with other people, and if we don't attend events like this with other people due to not feeling similar, it just leads to more cultural separation as a positive feedback loop. (US states also have flags, which might be more similar visually to the flags of other nations, but most US state flags would not be recognized by people from other US states.)

Greta also posted a Story made from https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reel/DXfYAQ3jJc5/. An unrelated video, also recently posted by ajplus: https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reel/DXhQAMmDTQE/.

What would Japanese kids do if they had to take a detour to reach their school, with the most direct path being blocked by barbed wire? They would not protest in this way. Is it better to protest, than to not protest? Presumably people in the cultures who act a certain way think that acting that way is better.

Trump has this as his pinned tweet, from a day ago: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116455604892115486

It made me think of this post from https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003/08/ on 28 Aug 2003:

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !! 

My search for "site:riverbendblog.blogspot.com bridge cousin engineer" also turned up https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/, where the first post, from 18 Jan 2006, lists damage from the war.

So I think it's great that Trump was able to save money with the Reflecting Pool, that was leaking 500k gallons of water per week before the first restoration in 2012.

People saying "just spend the $300 million on the pool", just like they said "just spend the $50 million to rebuild a bridge in Iraq": a few days ago, my younger relatives were watching videos that made them stupid and would make other people think my relatives are stupid. I could have forced them to stop, but I did not, despite my complaints about their poor reading ability. People being stupid, and therefore inefficient, creates more jobs, and therefore arguably a better outcome for society. I would prefer a society where being more efficient improves society — what this idea would do — but it is not the society we live in. Since watching the dumb videos made my relatives happier and was also better for society, I did not stop them.

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Update 24 Apr 2026, 15:39

I thought of a poll, which someone with the ability to make polls (I can't at the moment, except on traditional message boards) should make after making other polls like the one that I suggested that Greta make but can't remember at this moment:

"If you act in a stupid way and avoid activities that make you smarter, the world will be better off but you will be worse off. Do you act in a stupid way?"

Day 5001 of people not doing what I want

A second serving, 275g, of turkey and rice soup. Its appearance, with a lot of broth, made me think of the scene from one of the films about Oliver Twist where he asks for more food.

I saw the film when I was young and don't remember much; "you've got to pick a pocket or two", a song with chanting of "Oliver", and that line. My siblings and I might have facetiously used the same words to ask for more food at mealtimes.

I'm sure that I did not notice when I was young how the female in the scene restrains the male from reprimanding Oliver before he approaches, and how the body language of the male when he takes Oliver to see the people with power over the orphanage shows that he wants the kids to be able to have more food.

Mentioned Spain in a recent post. This survey is not precisely about the same issue; it doesn't mention immigrants:

Would you rather get money from your parents or earn your own money?

but many of the young people in Spain who can't get jobs, presumably due to fierce competition for jobs (or for well-paying jobs, if they don't apply for jobs with low wages), do get money from their parents. If they don't ask for policy changes that create jobs, like Oliver asked for more food, their parents might think they are fine with just getting money for free. And the same at a global scale.

Delete

https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2047329305714401478 seahorse emoji, food pyramid, salt in diet. Dangers of deciding "this thing can't be trusted" without the ability to provide feedback to correct a situation that other people might misinterpret.