Yeah, I was just poking at what I assumed was a day off the cuff response. Didn’t occur to me they might have tried formatting it, and failed.

Thanks for breaking them out!

…what kind of game is that?!

Think they want the whole gorilla

I absolutely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and completely disagree with the second! That said, stories evolve at least as quickly as the language they’re built from, and I’m sure every family that hangs up stockings has their own unique spin for Santa. But intentionally gaslighting your kids in order to teach an object lesson about how people will manipulate you seems like an awfully convoluted way to go about it, especially when the kid comes out ahead for it!

I think it started as a story to get kids excited, because that’s fun. In my family, the kids were brought into the act as they got old enough to understand that the point; and I assume this was very common back when kids had to help with everything as soon as they were old enough. The kids then get to practice giving without any intention of getting recognition for it, which helps make more charitable adults.

That’s not to say that the story doesn’t get used to enforce behavior - the existence of Krampus shows a long history of that! But I don’t think it’s used primarily for that anymore.

I was incautious with my phrasing, I should have said something like “humans have a singular capacity” etc. There may well be other storytelling species (in fact, I hope there are!) Whalesong seems like it could have the necessary complexity, for instance. I don’t think crows warning each other about particular faces quite constitutes a story, though - that seems more like spreading “we hate that guy!” without any of the context a story would provide. Would be easy to check for storytelling with the species that can imitate speech, though.

I suspect this is a big part of what we’re looking for when we’re exploring personhood in nonhumans, too - whenever talking to animals, aliens, etc comes up in fiction, people inevitably end up swapping stories with them. Suggests to me that storytelling ability is what people are actually looking for.

I heard a fascinating notion on the radio the other day - the thing that makes us unique as a species is that we’re storytellers. Other animals can teach each other things, like whales and dolphins teaching their young how to hunt fish, or crows warning each other that one particular person is shady; but no other species invents Santa Claus to demonstrate that one should give for the joy of giving.

Humans have a unique capacity to not only understand complex, abstract ideas about how we should interact with each other; but also to reinvent and transmit these ideas in an evolutionary eyeblink. This memetic transmission and interpretation of societal ideas is having an impact on the earth as profound as when genetic transmission came along. And it’s done through our capacity to tell each other stories, about how things might be and how we think they should be.

I wonder how much of our sense of self, as an ongoing narrative, stems from that ability to invent a story.

What I’m saying is that it suggests uncomfortable things about the ethical framework in which whoever is making the valuations is operating. Not because of any specific valuation schemas, but because reducing people to numbers (values) is inherently dehumanizing.

I’m not saying that there aren’t terrible people who do terrible things. But any ethical framework or decision that dehumanizes people I would consider inherently unethical.

So it lets us work out certain laws inherent in our universe? Wow, I did miss that implication…

Do they do different dialogue styles well? I could see using it for NPC chatter

Right now, it’s just a fun toy, prone to hallucinations.

That’s the thing though - with an LLM, it’s all “hallucinations”. They’re just usually close to reality, and are presented with an authoritative, friendly voice.

(Or, in your case, they’re usually close to the established game reality!)

Hadn’t heard of her before! The theorem sounds interesting, but the Wikipedia article is a bit dense - I got that “any system with symmetry will have conserved values”, but I got lost on the implications. Would you mind expanding on her theorem?

Declaring people to have a certain value relative to each other strikes me as uncomfortably close to treating people as things.

Yep, this is how I understood the story. For whatever reason, God considered himself bound by the rules he laid down, and so worked the system to break everyone out of it.

It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.

The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.

I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.

Perhaps. I’m not sure I agree, honestly.

But I’m certain there’s never a time to hit a person you’re responsible for, who depends on you.

Man, my kids love windows.

They keep opening their bedroom windows in the middle of winter and making igloos from their pillows and blankets!

The d in “dick” doesn’t quite have the top of the round part connected to the vertical part, so it looks like “click” - a homophone of “clique”

Yeah, from the article, it sounds like only a few organizations were in the lawsuit. They’re the only ones the judge ordered restored.

The administration is characterizing her as an activist and an agitator, in order to try to retroactively justify her killing.

This story is putting the lie to that statement.

Doesn’t say it wasn’t an apple!