Bay 12 Games Forum

Affirmative action is essentially just means-testing, using demographic as a rough estimate of need. Whatever your thoughts on means-testing, it’s hardly beyond the pale.

the latter soudns liek cheating - the first involves building constructions, which we want to not do.

This thread isn't about how building constructions is lengthy and clunky (which is true), it's about how you can't build constructions on floors. That problem is thoroughly solved by obsidian casting. (And I think building a cast and digging it out takes less time than building normally, while giving you valuable stone and smoothable/carvable floors and walls at the same time.)

Dwarf Fortress players: even in their dreams, they fight the UI.

What's the difference between a mutant and a vampire?

...good point, scientific methodology is largely irrelevant to whether we should include oppression (which is at least moderately related to the OP). I’ll drop it.

Seeing is indeed the ability to see things that exists, and only those things that exist. Not only do we not know which methodology is the correct one to detect the phenomenon if it exists, we don’t know which is the correct one to fail to detect it if it doesn’t exist.

In other words, in one possible world there’s one seeing man and ninety-nine blind men. In another possible world, there’s one hallucinating man and ninety-nine sane men. You are assuming that the first world is the one we’re in. This Proves Too Much in that it can be used to argue for the existence of anything regardless of its existence. A better method is to say “a negative result establishes that EITHER the phenomenon isn’t real and this methodology is sound OR the phenomenon is real and this methodology is unsound.”

For “fake replication by not adding noise”, that can still be represented. If two observations are not independent, they do not add as much information together. In the simplified version where somebody just physically reconstructs the original study down to the atom, this gives no additional information than the original study (barring quantum randomness playing a role).

You are correct that “cryptid-seers are hallucinating because cryptids aren’t real” relies on the assumption that cryptids aren’t real, and so can’t be used as an argument against cryptids being real. But I haven’t seen anyone make that argument.

The precautionary principle is a rough approximation to optimal decision-making. Effort/cost should be expended to prevent a negative outcome to a degree proportional to both the weight of the outcome and the probability of the outcome.

As for Antarctica, that’s Maximally Realistic. Part of oppression in fictional games includes the ability to meaningfully combat it. Is that unrealistic? Yes, because single people rarely have a disproportionate impact on history compared to the Vast Formless Things. But this is just the same unrealism underlying role-playing games in general. (My argument, in general, is that the “problems” you’re pointing out are not specific to oppression.)

the wiki collaborates it though.

To collaborate is to work with somebody. You want "corroborate".

How possible would it be to just create zones within which items and entities would be read, transmitted, despawned, and then spawned in your friend's receiving zone? Not exactly multiplayer, but both people could use the same world if they wanted, to make it somewhat parallel, and trade things and needed workers. Separate means could be used for viewing one another's screens if desired.

What do you mean by "same world"? If it's asynchronized, then it's more like "parallel playthroughs". If it's synchronized, then that's a very hard problem and might take as long as DF itself.

Assuming both players are using vanilla raws and the same version, this sounds possible but will probably have negative side effects. Any links to history (tracked kills, being a histfig, being an artifact, etc.) will be severed, and it will probably be difficult to restore them if they return. If it's asynchronized-parallel, it might seem possible, but histfigs and artifacts are created over time so you will still need to sever links to histfigs that don't exist in the other world. And what if somebody made an artifact in Aleph but not in Bet? Should it still be linked to them? This shouldn't be an issue if it's synchronized, but at that point you might as well just implement sending trade caravans. That's minimally difficult compared to implementing synchronized multiplayer.