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Messages - Awaclus

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1
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 18, 2024, 12:51:22 pm »
Q as in genderqueer is not more of a container term than the B.

I don't buy that. Bisexual is pretty staight-forward, whereas queer I think most people just consider a container, even if there's some asterisks

Bisexual is a container for people who feel sexual attraction but aren't straight or gay. Genderqueer is a container for people who aren't men or women. I guess there is the difference that genderqueer includes genderless people while bisexual doesn't include aces, but I don't think that's a particularly useful point to draw the line between what counts as a container.

2
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 18, 2024, 09:01:37 am »
What makes the Q special though, other than being a more recent and less established addition? "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, genderqueer plus all the other people who are in this vague category" is not inherently less sensible than the same description without the genderqueer.

Because even if Q is not a perfect container term, it's still mostly a container term, and hence made redundant by the +, no? I mean, sure everything is technically made redundant by + as you point out, but there's more of a reason to explicitly name specific groups than approximate container terms.

Q as in genderqueer is not more of a container term than the B.

3
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 17, 2024, 05:56:56 pm »
Shelling ;) Although ordinarily I'd say the Shelling point is the first item of the list.

Kant would probably be the Schelling point for most people even if he wasn't the first item because he's the best known by far.

4
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 17, 2024, 05:05:04 pm »
https://twitter.com/aronvallinder/status/1779953971295031459
Robert Nozick’s The Nature of Rationality, p. 25

5
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 17, 2024, 11:36:05 am »
Speaking of things that bother me, it shouldn't be LGBTQ+. "Queer" is already a catch-all; either make it LGBTQ or LGBT+ >:(

The "Q" doesn't always stand for queer (it sometimes stands for questioning) and "queer" is not exactly a catch-all because
  • most of the prominent definitions of "queer" only include people who are not cis and/or not straight and therefore exclude e.g. cishet aros and cishet intersexual people
  • in practice, the reclaimed "queer" is often used as a shorthand for genderqueer
  • it is not entirely uncontroversial that the word has been successfully reclaimed, so the convention is that you shouldn't call other people queer unless they describe themselves as queer

It is redundant with the +, but so are all the other letters in the acronym.

mhh I suppose. I think then the obvious solution is to just say LGBT+ and leave the Q out of it. Definitely don't wanna exclude aroace people

What makes the Q special though, other than being a more recent and less established addition? "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, genderqueer plus all the other people who are in this vague category" is not inherently less sensible than the same description without the genderqueer.

6
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 17, 2024, 09:44:00 am »
FWIW I usually just type LGBT because the + is obviously implied even if people don't type it out, unless I'm responding to someone in which case I copy their spelling, or writing something potentially controversial where it's extra important to signal that I'm one of the Progressives™.

7
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 17, 2024, 09:33:19 am »
Speaking of things that bother me, it shouldn't be LGBTQ+. "Queer" is already a catch-all; either make it LGBTQ or LGBT+ >:(

The "Q" doesn't always stand for queer (it sometimes stands for questioning) and "queer" is not exactly a catch-all because
  • most of the prominent definitions of "queer" only include people who are not cis and/or not straight and therefore exclude e.g. cishet aros and cishet intersexual people
  • in practice, the reclaimed "queer" is often used as a shorthand for genderqueer
  • it is not entirely uncontroversial that the word has been successfully reclaimed, so the convention is that you shouldn't call other people queer unless they describe themselves as queer

It is redundant with the +, but so are all the other letters in the acronym.

8
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 16, 2024, 07:16:39 pm »
Paul Christiano named as US AI Safety Institute Head of AI Safety

That's... pretty great, actually. Paul Christiano is about the best person you could want in there. Eliezer, being his humble self, has previously described him as the only person in the world who disagrees with him despite a technical understanding of the problem.

Even more credit to Biden for his help in making this happen.

That is unexpectedly great news.

9
I’ve thought for a while that Potion would be a bit better if it came with +Buy. Makes the Potion more interesting if you wanted the Alchemy card but couldn’t trash the Potion, and also opens up the edge cases where even if you don’t care about the Alchemy card, you might be desperate enough for +Buy to purchase the Potion anyways.

Personally, I think the solution would be to make Potion a one-shot. That would strongly effect gameplay.

10
Rules Questions / Re: Sorcerer attack with empty deck
« on: April 07, 2024, 08:56:15 pm »
* Sorcerer: +1 Card. +1 Action. Each other player names a card, then reveals the top card of their deck. If wrong, they gain a Curse.

No Curse. With a more written-out-for-clarity "if wrong" it would just match Bounty Hunter.
Which suggests that my thought process would go astray here too.

* Sorceress: +1 Action. Name a card. Reveal the top card of your deck and put it into your hand. If it's the named card, each other player gains a Curse.

No Curse.
But as far as I can see this works just like Giant and Barbarian: there isn't a revealed card, so it can't be the named, so the unwritten otherwise, i.e. nothing, occurs.

Doesn't the actual ruling follow from that same thought process in both cases? There isn't a revealed card, so it can't be the named, and it also can't be wrong.

11
Rules Questions / Re: Sorcerer attack with empty deck
« on: April 04, 2024, 09:57:31 pm »
You're failing to consider that we're talking about human language. In English, if someone claims "You are short", the answers "Not true" and "I'm not" are equivalent. Meaning that "It's not true that I'm short" and "I'm not short" are equivalent.

That's because you actually exist. "I'm either average or tall" would also be equivalent with both of those. If someone claims "God plays dice with the universe", the answers "Not true" and "God does not do that" are not equivalent, because the latter statement agrees that there is a God (at least in a metaphorical sense) and only disagrees about said God's modus operandi, while the former is what you would say if you don't agree there is a God at all.

I'm saying that "not true" and "God doesn't do that" are equivalent in normal language. The proper answer if you don't agree there's a God is rejecting the premise of the claim: "There is no God" or "I don't believe in God".
"The king is bald." -- "Not true." -- means you disagree that the king is bald.
"The king is bald." -- "There is no king." -- means you disagree with the premise.

I don't think they are equivalent, and I gathered some data by polling people on the Bayesian Conspiracy discord (over there because it's normal to poll people about random questions there). Almost half of the respondents agreed with your position that "The king is bald." -- "Not true." is not a normal usage of human language if you believe there is no king, but a slim majority agreed with me that it is normal. There was unanimous agreement that "The king is bald." -- "The king is not bald." is not a normal usage of human language if you believe there is no king though, so the average person seems to think there is a difference. Finally, with the exception of one person who disagreed that the thought experiment made sense, there was unanimous agreement that in a made up board game context, they would expect the rules to work equivalently to Barbarian handing out a curse and Sorcerer not handing it out.


12
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 04, 2024, 05:05:44 pm »
When you define natural and supernatural that way you are missing the point. A lot of supernatural phenomenon are usually easily explained, although the explanations invoke a power that isn't easily observed. "How did the oracle know that?" - She was given revelation from a spirit with more knowledge than her. "How was the Red Sea split?" - YHWH did it. Here the supernatural distinction is important - the Red Sea doesn't spontaneously split, but a supernatural power did it. Claiming that that would be natural is missing the point of the distinction. What's natural is what's regular, what's possible to recreate and predict by simple observation. The methodology for intervention by supernatural beings is different. "Okay, the Red Sea split. How do we explain this?" Regular empiric science fails here, because you can't recreate it, but when you take into account the religiohistoric context, "YHWH did it" makes the best contender for an explanation. Why? The being that appeared to Mose in the burning bush used that name, claiming to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the forefathers of the Israelites, to whom he had revealed himself 400 years earlier. Then he said that he would deliver the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt, then the ten plagues came over Egypt in the way Moses had described by the command of God, and then the Israelites were released. When something happens that is impossible to explain using the naturalistic sciences, using the religious methodology to give an explanation is the most reasonable way, and in that case, calling the explanation "natural" doesn't make sense.

The superficial counterargument to this would be that I don't believe most of that stuff ever happened. But let's set that aside because that's not the point.

If YHWH is an agent who is capable of interfering with the natural universe, then there isn't really a categorical difference between the things he does and the things e.g. I do. You can't recreate the things I do by waiting for the thing to happen by itself, someone has to interfere. You can try to predict the things I am going to do with some greater than chance and lower than perfect success, and if we understood anything at all about YHWH (e.g. if everything the Bible said about him was true and we used that info to predict his future behavior), we could say the same about him. He might be able to do things that I don't understand, but I am also able to do things that e.g. people in medieval Europe wouldn't have understood, so that's at best a difference in degree, not in kind. I could go say hi to some people, and 40 years later, go see them again and explain that I'm the same guy I was 40 years ago and that I had a plan for smuggling them out of jail or something and then I could do the plan and have it work exactly as I described. Would that be supernatural, and would that make "Awaclus did it" a likely and sufficient explanation for something like a sea getting split later?

Back to the topic of religious vs. non-religious explanations: I could (if we are not restricted to what seems realistic) also invent a method for splitting seas, invent a time machine and go back in time to split the Red Sea for Moses. That's not a bigger contradiction with what we currently think are the laws of physics than some stuff YHWH allegedly did according to the Bible. The idea of a future me time traveling around and doing all the things attributed to YHWH in the Bible but with the power of future science instead of god magic is obviously ridiculous and super random, but it's an equally good explanation as the Bible and really the only reason why it sticks out as ridiculous and random is that people hold non-religious explanations to a much, much higher standard than religious ones.

Another application of the religious methodology: I could give you a lot of evidence that parts of the Bible are of supernatural origin, that they are historically reliable, that it is psychologically helpful and so on, but the only reason I can give for why I believe it is true in its entirity is this: God has gained my trust.

Sure, and the followers of other religions would say similar things about their holy texts that obviously can't be true if the Bible is true and vice versa. So, necessarily, the religious methodology leads to a huge number of people having strong convictions in explanations that are not true, which makes it a terrible methodology.

13
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 04, 2024, 12:07:43 pm »
(I do not very highly value behaving morally.)

14
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 04, 2024, 12:06:33 pm »
Non-metaphysical objective laws of morality don't make sense to me, at least sans a creator or guided evolution. If morality is unchanging (which we suppose it to be when judging the sins of history), it must have existed before humans evolved. What made humanity evolve to give us the qualia of pre-existing moral laws, which are common to all men? And if moral laws evolved alongside us, in what way can it be objective, other than in the way that we have it in common?

Morality is not unchanging or objective, it depends on the mores of any given society at any given time. For example, in societies where most people think it is moral to own slaves, it is in fact moral to own slaves. When you are behaving immorally, your "sin" is that you are acting against what your society considers to be good and proper behavior, and that is not what slave owners in the past were guilty of.

15
Rules Questions / Re: Sorcerer attack with empty deck
« on: April 04, 2024, 04:43:10 am »
You're failing to consider that we're talking about human language. In English, if someone claims "You are short", the answers "Not true" and "I'm not" are equivalent. Meaning that "It's not true that I'm short" and "I'm not short" are equivalent.

That's because you actually exist. "I'm either average or tall" would also be equivalent with both of those. If someone claims "God plays dice with the universe", the answers "Not true" and "God does not do that" are not equivalent, because the latter statement agrees that there is a God (at least in a metaphorical sense) and only disagrees about said God's modus operandi, while the former is what you would say if you don't agree there is a God at all.

16
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 04, 2024, 04:20:02 am »
If I understand you correctly, you mean that if the only reasonable explanation for a phenomenon is supernatural, you should automatically dismiss it and search for a natural explanation. I would argue that this is fallacious, "naturalism of the gaps". This methodology doesn't help you at all in finding and knowing about supernatural phenomenon, in case they exist. If you have sufficient evidence that they don't, that's one thing, but otherwise, it seems wrong to rule them out because of your faith in naturalism.

What I mean is that the difference between natural and supernatural in how most people use these terms is that the things we understand are natural and the things we don't understand are supernatural. Supernatural explanations are hence impossible, because if we don't understand our explanation, we don't have an explanation. More literally, anything that affects the natural universe is a natural phenomenon by definition and anything that doesn't doesn't matter. In principle, it would be possible for there to be an agentic being similar to what people might call a god, or the spirits of dead people could sometimes stick around and haunt places, or humans could have a mysterious energy flowing through them that keeps them healthy when it flows the right way, but if we had actual evidence of any of these being true, they would just be natural phenomena.

17
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: April 03, 2024, 09:18:20 pm »
If you couldn't explain consciousness without invoking religion, that would be one thing, but I think you can.

If you can't explain something without invoking religion, you can't explain the thing at all. "We haven't yet discovered the god that is doing this magic" is not a better explanation than "we haven't yet discovered the law of physics that explains this phenomenon", but it is a better explanation than what religions are actually doing, which is to confidently claim that this particular god is doing the magic in this particular way while there are no actual reasons to believe in that hypothesis over any of the other countless imaginable gods and ways for magic to work.

18
Rules Questions / Re: Sorcerer attack with empty deck
« on: April 03, 2024, 05:44:26 pm »
"It's not true that the king of France is bald" does not mean the same as "the king of France is not bald".
Uhm... That's a very strange claim. So "it's false that the king of France is bald" does not mean "the king of France is not bald"? Or are "false" and "not true" different? What about "untrue"?

"The king of France is bald" and "the king of France is not bald" are both false because France is a republic.

19
Dominion General Discussion / Re: How often do you buy new Base Cards
« on: April 01, 2024, 01:19:37 pm »
I've been playing Dominion physically roughly

You would have to replace broken sleeves less frequently if you played it gently instead.


20
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: March 30, 2024, 07:16:05 pm »
Even numbers are more kiki than odd numbers and odd numbers are more bouba than even numbers. 6, 9, 3 and 8 basically cancel out, and out of the remaining numbers, 1, 2 and 4 are all very kiki, 5 is somewhat bouba, and 7 is not particularly kiki or bouba.

21
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: March 28, 2024, 08:26:23 pm »
It's probably the least bad thing related to Meta that isn't FLOSS. Meta claims the messages are E2E encrypted and that's probably true, so they don't know the contents of the messages (they just know everything else, like who you're messaging with and when).

22
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: March 28, 2024, 06:34:00 pm »
Have made relatively few stupid decisions lately I think

Was posting the Lab with the OP alternative win con one of them?

23
I admit I'm a bit stunned that I can make a card that literally gives you +1$ for every 1$ you overpay (plus every other part of the card) and no one realizes that it's a joke. I guess the joke really didn't land ???

Well, it's not really uncommon in VFC for people to submit much more ridiculous designs and be completely serious about them.

24
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars
« on: March 27, 2024, 04:59:08 pm »

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