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[silverspawn]

And that's all assuming that the goal is to be understood, whereas in practice, even that is often untrue.

[silverspawn]

the complexity of human communication probably exceeds even the inscrutability of theorems in modern number theory

[silverspawn]

by the way I think I won a bet about the price of ETH

[silverspawn]

This all is also the reason why twitter is so awful. because at least on other social media platforms, you have discourse that's sort of specific to one community, and then people can fit people who communicate similarly, to an extent. On twitter, if a tweet goes viral, everyone may see it; there's no restriction.

[Awaclus]

by the way I think I won a bet about the price of ETH

True. Points granted.

[silverspawn]

The basics of goddamn rationalist discourse in one fucking minute or less

ok I changed the title but I think mine's better

[silverspawn]

my chess rating is currently below of what I think it should be, so let's try sth. I'll try my best for the next 10 games and must write a short summary of each game no matter how well or poorly I do. I'm interested in how much you can actually do by "trying hard"; I suspect it's a lot.

Game 1 (white/W). Grabbed a pawn in the opening, then struggled not to lose a piece for it. Barely managed, kept an extra pawn in the endgame. Then opponent blundered a knight fork and resigned. I do not feel contempt for my opponent!

[silverspawn]

Game 2 (white/W). My opponent played the popular "I'm not gonna think about strategy, I'll play quick moves, get ahead on time, and hope you make a tactical blunder" strategy. Imo this is one of the most effective ways you can play though I suspect it's terrible for improving yourself and for attaining happiness. And it worked, but the only time I blundered, my opponent didn't notice. That's the thing if you're to make your opponent lose on time; you have to play fast yourself. I won with 2:11 vs 7:30 minutes left.

[silverspawn]

Game 3 (black/W). My opponent played bad after the opening, got behind, then hung their queen and resigned. Analysis says I blundered the game twice but neither of us noticed. The first was way too hard to see (this happens a bunch with this opening and no one ever sees it), the second wasn't though, and I had enough time to be more careful so shame on me.

[silverspawn]

Game 4 (black/W). I won the exchange with a very nice tactical manouver but my opponent defended valiantly and it was too hard to convert, pawns were very close to promotion when we stalled and I was ready for a draw. Then my opponent tried to make more out of it, which was a mistake because their position also very fragile, so I won. Analysis says more early blunders on my side that neither of us noticed. Also many opportunities to win the endgame for me which does not surprise me, and I'm pretty sure trying to calculate one of them would have been a terrible idea.

[silverspawn]

And four in a row is most certainly enough.

Chess is a mirror that reflects human failure in real life. By far the most popular event format is the Arena, where a bunch of people (often many hundreds) sign up and play for two hours. The format is, you smash the play button and get matched immediately with someone around your rating. Then when the game is over, you smash the play button again and repeat. Winner is the one with the best net record afterward. (The only time I stayed until the end, the winners were all super low rated players because I guess their games go faster, which is amusing but not the point.) The point is that it encourages very fast, mindless play since the # of games is not fixed and playing more games is beneficial.

Conversely, other daily events are swiss format where there is a fixed # of rounds and you wait until everyone else has finished their game, also you play people with the same record in the tournament as you. These are far less popular.

I strongly feel like the first one is bad for mental health and will make people unhappy. It's very unenlightened, dopamine-driven, chasing the next distraction kind of thing. I feel similarly for small time formats, which as it happens are also very popular. I find anything below 10 minutes to be miserable, and I even wanted to stop 10 minutes and replace it with 15|10 (that's 10 seconds increment), but I'm doing 10 until I'm happy with my rating again.

And ditto for playing styles even within one time format. Playing midlessly for time is Moloch.

Or maybe it's just me and all other people go through life with zero concerns of this kind, fully content with their actions from moment to moment.

[silverspawn]

If you took my history and just computed an integral over the little graphs I posted where it shows which played is ahead, I bet that they'd net a big positive area even among games with total 50% winrate. Because I usually play better strategic moves and get ahead, then either I make a tactical blunder and lose or don't and win. And if I do make a tactical blunder, I usually resign. But there have also been times, just not recently, where I was sucked into the dark hole of Moloch and played each game until the end.

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

the problem is when you are down the ladder, you have absolutely no motivation to get back up; you have motivation to smash the play button and beat some %#*)(& players

[silverspawn]

Hey, speaking of waitbutwhy (that was the origin of the last image), I just got an email saying that his book is finally done! context: ... actually I'll just quote the email

Hey readers,

Remember the time I kind of disappeared for two years? And then I triumphantly returned in 2019 with a giant post series called The Story of Us? And then I was part of the way through publishing the series when I disappeared again for three more years?

That sucked.

And now it's done! I do think very highly of his series and his writing, so this is quite nice.

Reminds me of myself, too; you want to do this project, you think it's super important and then it just swallows several years outright.

[silverspawn]

(that is, he disappeared for three years to make the series into a book.)

I'm not sure that the book thing itself was actually a good idea since his blog is already super popular, but either way it's good that he's done.

[silverspawn]

https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1622211939345514501

[silverspawn]

Game 5 (black, L). Opponent played the "I'm gonna make very complicated moves without calculating anything ever, which will give me an advantage if you run low on time" strategy. Which is similar to the "I'm gonna play whatever really fast" strategy but with a bit more explicit optimization toward complexity -- for example, this opponent chose to do something maximally confusing on move 2 to make sure I didn't know the position, which the previous one didn't. This effectively makes the game more luck based and this time, I got unlucky. Not that I'm complaining, there were lots of things that could have gone wrong in games 1-4 that didn't.

[silverspawn]

Game 6 (white, L). Opponent made an opening mistake and got worse, but defended well until time got low and things got complicated, and pulled off a win. Analysis shows yet another blunder in the opening that was so complicated that I don't get it even after seeing the move.

[silverspawn]

Game 7 (white, L). Opponent won exchange with a tactic I missed and didn't blunder after that.

[silverspawn]

Game 8 (black, W). Opponent made many quesitonable strategic moves that compounded and lost them the game, but not before they tried every last trick to backrank mate me and eventually forced me to put checkmate on the board when they had 8 seconds on the clock. Also they walked into an opening trap that would have blundered a piece if they hadn't played a strange move order first. I mean maybe they saw it and did it intentionally.

[silverspawn]

Game 9 (black, W). Opponent sacrificed a piece on move 4 for an attack, which is not a thing in this position. I defended.

[silverspawn]

Game 10 (white, L). My opponent employed the rarely used "try to think about the position and make smart moves" strategy. There was hard to see tactic that would win a piece that I missed. My opponent found it and I resigned.

[silverspawn]

So that was 6-4. That's definitely a little disappointing, but at least not terrible. But I feel like it should go better on average. May try again sometime.

[silverspawn]

if I were higher up the enlightenment ladder I'd have taken a break after game 7, which was very frustrating. But the last opponent felt like someone I could lose to even if I play well