rsaarelm

I got the impression that it was more about mathematical sums being one of top items in von Neumann's mathematical toolkit, and he was really well-practiced in doing those. Then when he heard the puzzle he pattern-matched it to a problem he'd already solved enough times in his work to know it offhand, he didn't brute-force in his head 100x faster than other people who were rustier on sums and needed to brute-force things in their head.

There is a variant named NetHack 4, they might want to avoid confusion with it.

It's also funny how Finland has a concept of "thermic spring", which is defined by the temperature no longer dipping below 0° C, and the term doesn't exist in English because the definition wouldn't work in the climate of most of the English-speaking world.

It's helpful to tell people that they are in uncharted territory and can't rely on running on autopilot even if you don't have a new map to give them. Whether they can make their way or not is unclear, but the first step is just making sure they understand that they're now in a place where they need to make their own way and can't fully rely on existing maps. Otherwise they might not even realize they need to start asking "am I doing the right thing right now" by themselves.

Archive.today does not seem to have worked for people connecting from Finland since mid-January, it just gives an endless captcha loop. Is this related to whatever this drama is?

There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.

Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".

> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.

The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.

> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.

I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.

But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?

> Fake it till you make it.

What are you trying to make though? You're pretending to want the same things the people you think you need to fit in with want, but if you don't actually want those things, what point is there to be in a competition to get them?

Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.

Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.