NonZeroSumJames

The game that inspired nonzerosum.games is now finally out in the world, learn non-zero-sum thinking through play.

Most browsers have a reading mode button in the URL bar. Apparently these sorts of fonts are actually easier for people with dyslexia to read. But I'm more interested in creating a unified visual aesthetic that says—this is not a scientific paper, read at your own leisure / risk.

Yes, I don't advocate for this. I advocate for UBI, so we don't incentivise pointless jobs, and we give people the freedom to do meaningful work. I also advocate, once a UBI is established to do away with minimum wage, so that people can take on low-paid but meaningful work, putting their efforts toward something that generates actual social value rather than financial profit.

Each post can't describe my entire take on society absolutely, but taken with other posts on the site, I'd like to think it's fairly cohesive. I think subsidising industries for the sake of providing employment is pointless and unsustainable approach, it undermines both a genuine source of meaning for people and it undermines the market (making goods more expensive).

There's quite a lot of positive-sum energy the enters the environment from the giant nuclear reactor in the sky, which we have a few billion years lease on.

Money may be constant-sum but that doesn't mean what you can purchase with that money is constant, new markets emerge, others become more efficient. Many positive-sum systems are possible within a universe that is on-the-whole zero-sum.

Some of us would be advocating for this, but at present there are many who refer to taxes as theft because they take money from wealthy "deserving" people and give it to poor "undeserving" people.

If we took the moral value away from meritocracy-as-indicated-by-wealth as it is, not giving it the bait-and-switch moral weight of a "well-directed efforts" Effortocracy, it would be less of an uphill political battle to level the playing field for those with great potential to contribute to society but who are currently locked out by poverty or other accidents of birth.

OP here: I'm not sure I advocate for "rewarding pointless, Sisyphean tasks", I even identify as a Utilitarian within the post. Effortocracy points to effort as a good predictor of future capabilities (when selecting from candidates for college acceptances or jobs). If person A and B have both achieved the same results, but person B has done so in the face of a much more difficult situation than person A, this is a good predictor that person B is likely to outperform person A in future. You can imagine this as a two lines on a graph: A beginning at 10 and B beginning at 5, at some point of time in the future when different levels of linear development lands both at 15, this means person B has been consistently improving at twice the rate of person A, which is likely to continue.

The same is true of moral character, which as the post points out is a better predictor of future behaviour than an absolute measure of prior contribution.

But the main takeaway is not how we assess people in the world as it is, but how do we set up the world in a way where everyone's efforts lead to their optimal potential merit, which is incentivised by rewarding effort at each step. Part of effort is also thinking about the effectiveness of your efforts, but also many efforts might be seen as pointless and futile until they are not, scientists who contributed to the Covid vaccine had been doing seemingly pointless work for decades until it finally became relevant to MRNA vaccines.

And on the other hand, it is entirely possible to put fairly low effort into profitable ventures that are detrimental to society—porn, alcohol, sugary foods and get rewarded for it. An effortocracy would seek to tweak the incentives differently.

A long way of saying "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

I love this response.

Thanks unholiness—fair point on the footnotes, I'll put that on my to-do list. As you can see, it's all very hand-made, so some of those basics are missed sometimes.

Thanks max-amb, it's a bit clunky in places.. but with a little crowd-sourced bug-fixing it's getting there!

I think I've fixed it now... it's working in my reader, please let me know if it's still not working for you.

Thanks ultrasounder!

While travelling in Tanzania, I noticed a few unique game-theoretical scenarios, most notably the driving in Arusha, which is basically a game of perpetual chicken, a surprisingly functional one. This post explores why it works.

A Shapley Value calculator, that breaks down and simplifies the process, with cats.

Colorizes your text based on the length of sentences.

"Next level trolling"

XD I wish that had been intentional. Thanks. Here's Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics" partake if you dare.

https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/heid...

I think it's an established theory drawing on known variables (we know there are asymmetrical orbits) and the poster is simply demonstrating the inevitable effect.

This is an interesting take on 3D Tetris, using rings that enable seeing through to obscured layers. This has appeared on HN previously in the submission https://nonzerosum.games/thetetriseffect.html which explores the Tetris Effect and the obscuring issue.

That makes total sense, if Tetris is something your brain prioritises when consolidating memory during sleep then it will take up bandwidth from the traumatic event and block it from being consolidated.

I wonder if there's something in that, where people try to distract themselves in their every day life with these games, perhaps it's an instinctive way of reducing trauma.

My intention was to have the simplest implementation with the most information, so having 2 cameras is a solution of sorts but it sort of fails on both my objectives adding the complication of a second camera and then perhaps having to implement controls for that as well as the 3D controls of the pieces... and even so there will still be some aspects obscured.

This was also much easier to code, an unspoken 3rd objective :)

Thanks for playing - if you'd like to try the mobile version it's at https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html

As the developer I also haven't even developed the intuition required to grok the visualisation, so - it probably takes a considerable amount of time, but surely after some weeks of play...

That definitely sounds like some approaches that have been taken. Blockout and Welltris are workable. I was just trying to do something that gave access to all information in a consistent way, so that someone might develop an intuition for a space outside of their usual 3D vision.

Thanks for your feedback

Thanks! I take your point that colours would help distinguish the different z-layers - it's pretty easy to confuse the two larger rings I found. I was also thinking that making it stereoscopic might help. I've done this before where you have two running side by side, responding to the same controls, but you offset the z-axis a little. Then you basically match up the two by going cross-eyed! And voilà, more 3D information in the brain.

Concerning the controls I had to factor in simplifying them to create the mobile version - https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html because it was just not possible to distinguish between so many different gesture controls on a touch screen. So, in the mobile version, on a couple of axes you can only rotate in one direction, given this limitation I could definitely limit the keyboard controls for people with only 2 hands.

Thanks again, finding comments like these has been really enjoyable.

Thanks! I was actually going to make an algorithm to find all the possible variations, but I realised that the additional options were limited and immediately obvious, and hard coding them would give me more control of game balance.

The blog is really about sharing ideas, so yes "forcing" the read is part of it XD - hopefully some ventured into the rest of the blog, which is more "saving the world" sort of material. I really appreciate your comments here, I wish I'd found them straight away :)

Thanks - discovering these comments has been a real treat. It was fun working it all out. Turns out rotating these babies in code is easier than in your head, just swapping out relative x,y,z positions.

Hey everyone, I'm James, the writer of the linked blog post with the 3D Tetris experiment and I just today discovered this thread! Which explains the bump in traffic I had for a couple of days back in August.

One of the moderators has kindly let me jump back in to say thanks to everyone that read the blog and had a play, it was most exciting to see people talking about it and I was especially amused by everyone bagging on the unreadable font - you'll be relieved that it has been changed, as of a few weeks ago.

So, a huge thanks, you've all made my day. And if you were looking for a mobile version, here it is... https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html

I'm looking forward to being part of this community too.

Thanks Kiro, I really appreciate it. What's your twitter handle? (If you care to share).

BTW - There's a mobile version of the game too now https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html

It was really cool seeing all those comments about the terrible font, and the game of course.

Thanks for that, I appreciate your help :)

Hi Dang, sorry to contact you via a random thread. I am new to HN and have jumped on because I've discovered that a couple of months ago a project (a blog / game) that I created was posted here and got a lot of interest and feedback that I wasn't aware of at the time. The post is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37060305

I would love to be able to reply and thank all the people who showed an interest in my work, but the post is more than two weeks old. I have read a comment by you where you said you could reopen commenting for a thread given a good reason. Hopefully you think that the creator of a project that was the subject of a popular post here, wanting to address the 75 comments about his project is a good reason to open up comments?

I would really appreciate it if this is possible. I'm excited to chat with the people and assure them that I have indeed changed the terrible font I had been using - which got roasted mercilessly.

I'm also excited to join the community, turns out this might be where I fit :)

Hi Kiro, sorry for the random contact on a thread, but you posted a game of mine a couple of months ago (a 3D Minimalist Tetris game) and I only just now discovered your post - which explains the massive amount of traffic I got for a couple of days. I wanted to say thank you for posting.

I'm new to HN, but can see that the thread is no longer active (as in I can't reply). There was lots of great (and entertaining) feedback on the thread (especially about the terrible font). I would love to reply to those who fed back on the game and the page, now that I have ironed out some bugs with the game, and importantly changed the font to something that is much more readable (and with much better CSS). I've also released a mobile-friendly version of the game. Do you know of any way I can engage with those that commented?

Again, thanks for your interest and the two days of excitement I had looking at those analytics.