Yes, it seems like there is a difference between "inwards stubbornness" and "outwards stubbornness", whether people refuse to change their minds for reasons private or social.

I know some people such that if you tell them they are wrong, they will double down and get angry at you... but if you meet them a few days later, they have updated their opinion. So it seems like they are willing to update, but not to admit that they did.

Similarly, you tell some people a good idea, and they will tell you that it is stupid. The next day, they will come and propose the same idea as their own. I think many books on manipulation social skills recommend that the best way to change someone's mind about something is to let them believe that it was their own idea.

Then again, maybe this is a smaller difference than it seems, and some people are just better at remembering what was their opinion yesterday, or better at convincing themselves that yesterday was different.

A well-designed simulation is inescapable. Suppose that you are inside Conway's game of life, and you know that fact for sure. How specifically are you going to use this knowledge to escape, if all you are is a set of squares on a simulated grid, and all that ever happens in your universe is that some squares are flipped from black to white and vice versa?

To answer your first question, some kinds of pseudo-randomness are virtually indistinguishable from actual randomness, if you do not have a perfect knowledge of the entire universe. For example, in cryptography, changing one bit in the input message can on average flip 50% of bits in the output message. Imagine that the next round of pseudo-random numbers is calculated the same way from the current state of the universe -- the slightest change in the position of one particle on the opposite side of the universe could change everything.

I am surprised to read such positive review of Roblox, because so far all information I got was negative. People basically describe it as a system optimized to extract money from children through various dark patterns.

There is the virtual currency "robux" that various games try to extract from you at almost every step; for example you have a sequence of trivial puzzles and there is always an option to pay 1 robux to skip a puzzle -- I think 1 robux is less than a cent, so it feels like nothing, but the point is that when there is an opportunity to pay 1 robux almost everywhere you look at, the numbers will quickly add up. (And generally, I think that in-app purchases aimed at children are an evil invention.)

Recently my daughter started playing under strong social pressure from her classmates. I should ask her about the details now that she has some experience, but from outside, my impression is that she spends a lot of time in the system but not at any particular game, not because any game is especially good, but because another game in the system is always only a click away. (Kinda like she used to spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos, again not because any video was particularly good, but because at every moment there were ten more potentially interesting videos advertised on the sidebar.)

Yes, it is very convenient that once you install the Roblox itself, you don't need to install anything more to get more games, and all the games have the same controls, the same chat to talk to your friends, etc.

I'd say that different people want/do different things (otherwise we probably wouldn't have this debate right now; no one makes LW posts with convincing evolutionary arguments for why people breathe), therefore you should be suspicious of theories that predict that everyone wants the same thing.

Maybe it's related to being on the autistic spectrum, or something like that? Normies have their complicated social games; aspies complain about people "playing mind games" and would prefer to communicate things explicitly. Then people form bubbles where they find their opinions "obvious".

There are bubbles where women upvote/retweet things like "if he stops when you say 'no', he clearly doesn't care about you". I was never in such bubble, but my wife was horrified to find similar things when she randomly checked some profiles of her former classmates.

Dropping a nuke right on Stalin's head would kill fewer Russians than not dropping it.

Well, yes. The question is, how much exactly. I mean, what are the points even supposed to reflect?

The thing I am trying to capture is "value for the reader". As a reader of ACX, I prefer longer articles to shorter articles, assuming constant frequency. But I prefer two articles a week to one twice-as-long article.

Mathematically speaking, this means that the function "how many words for N points" should be growing, faster than linearly. But that still leaves many options. Intuitively, I chose 250n²+250n, as a quadratic (faster than linear) expression with backwards compatibility (results in 500 for n=1). If we extrapolate that further, it would be 5 points for 7.5k words, 6 points for 10.5k words, 7 points for 14k words, 8 points for 18k words, 9 points for 22.5k words, and 10 points for 27.5k words.

According to this extended scale, Scott would get 6+4+1+3+10+2+2+3+1+2+1+2+3+3+2+3+1+2= 51 points.

But that assumes that the particular quadratic function is the right one. If we chose an exponential function instead: 1 point for 500 words, 2 points for 1k words, 3 points for 2k words, 4 points for 4k words, 5 points for 8k words, and 6 points for 16k words, that would give slightly more points to articles below 4k, but fewer points above 10k, together 5+4+2+3+6+2+3+3+2+3+1+3+3+4+2+4+2+3= 55 points.

Both functions seem to pass the smell test -- Scott should get more than 30 points, but not like an order of magnitude more (especially not after I have filtered out the links and contests and highlights). Getting about twice as much sounds about right. Still doesn't answer which function to choose; both seem okay precisely because they give similar results.

Another question is, how often will Halfhaven participants produce articles longer than 5k words. I know I probably won't, which makes the scoring of articles over 5k words seem irrelevant. I am open to changing my mind if someone actually starts writing the articles of such length, but at this moment it feels like if someone can write that kind of article repeatedly, they no longer need this project.

tl;dr -- the choice is arbitrary, and probably irrelevant for Halfhaven participants, so although I kinda agree with you, I am not going to change it now (but might change it in April, dunno)

Out of curiosity, let's see many points Scott Alexander would get for the last three months of 2025. Skipping the open threads and links and guest posts and highlights from comments and meetup announcements and contests and grant results...

• What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him? (10k) 🪙🪙🪙🪙
• Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (6k) 🪙🪙🪙🪙
• Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument (1.3k) 🪙
• Sources Say Bay Area House Party (3.3k) 🪙🪙🪙
• The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (28k) 🪙🪙🪙🪙
• Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target (1.7k) 🪙🪙
• Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds (2.5k) 🪙🪙
• Model City Monday 10/27/25 (3.1k) 🪙🪙🪙
• Writing For The AIs (1.2k) 🪙
• The Bloomer's Paradox (2.7k) 🪙🪙
• In What Sense Is Life Suffering? (800) 🪙
• What Happened To SF Homelessness? (2.3k) 🪙🪙
• The New AI Consciousness Paper (3.8k) 🪙🪙🪙
• Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China (4.4k) 🪙🪙🪙
• The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate (1.7k) 🪙🪙
• Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (4.2k) 🪙🪙🪙
• The Pledge (1.1k) 🪙
• Against Against Boomers (2.1k) 🪙🪙

Total: 43 points.

I didn't make a postmortem of the original Halfhaven, so maybe let's use this comment for a quick survey?

Please add a react (not vote) to this comment (by clicking the light-gray emoji in the bottom-right corner),

✔ - if you participated in the original Halfhaven and produced 30 posts during October and November 2025

✘ - if you participated in the original Halfhaven but failed to produce 30 posts

No specific suggestion, just a note that you should make sure that your very message does not become another public link to their identity. That would be ironic.