TRPG General Chat

12:01 AM

Yeah, the word choice was maybe bad there. I was trying to sum up, like, "arguing against something you accept but don't prefer".

nitsua60

Yeah, that's a tough one. "Pissing into the wind" comes to mind, but I'm not sure that really helps the discourse =)

Thomas Markov

I don’t know. I’ve already got in the back of my mind a concern that someone might think the result is unfair since no one made an attempt to defend the policy, and I worry that a disingenuous response in the eve of the resolution of the whole thing would look even worse. I’m not sure that concern has any real merit, but it concerns me nonetheless.

BESW

“Minority report”

The term y’all’re looking for is minority report. It’s like a dissenting opinion in a legal case, but applies to situations outside the law.

Thomas Markov

Oh, so you weren’t referencing the movie where someone suspects a future crime?

BESW

12:17 AM

The title of the film is quite literal: of the three precogs, sometimes one of them delivers a "minority report," a dissenting view of the future that disagrees with the others.

At any rate, the idea of a dissenting opinion or minority report has a dignified history and on Stack meta we often find such posts invaluable when revisiting a decision years later.

2

I've seen cases where my own analysis of the situation is initially rejected, but much later is found to be more applicable to whatever the situation has evolved to become.

As has been pointed out, minority reports need to be sincere in order to be useful and avoid needless division, but I think in this particular case, given the individuals involved, that concern isn't particularly pressing.

Thomas Markov

2:10 AM

@BESW my recall of the film’s details was fuzzy. I remembered crimes from the future.

Medix2

3:30 AM

Darn, the new Mod and OP borders are really hard to see in my browser. But SE doesn't care about phone or browser specific dark modes so it'll stay that way XD

Oh, apparently the official dark mode fails to meet contrast accessibility requirements and that got reported, so maybe it will get fixed on my end indirectly

Glazius

4:09 AM

@ThomasMarkov On second look, it seems like your answer to the DGtS system says most of what I want to say?

My primary attraction to the current policy is that it's objective and future-proof, but as I started writing it down I realized that ultimately a community can't rely on objective rules to deal with problematic members.

People who answer non-D&D5E questions as though they were D&D5E are inexpertly sure that the question must be 5E, and they could inexpertly tag it as such.

2

But...

They're also inexpertly using the site and not aware that every open question has a defined system, so the existing policy doesn't really work to stop them.

BESW

4:46 AM

Mmm. It may be a symptom of the same cause which manifests people unfamiliar with a system demanding the asker explain the system in ways that aren't ever expected for games like D&D, and then trying to answer the question based solely on the asker's explanation without any further research.

(See: my Sun's Ransom question where people would answer without even looking at the picture I was asking about, much less considering --even after it was explicitly said-- that a question about a narrative game might not be reducible to a simple maths problem)

(Or people assuming that "Lovecraftesque" was a genre, not a game system. Or answering Lady Blackbird questions by assuming it has spell damage.)

It seems reasonable to think that maybe "Don't Guess the System" should be a more expansive, inclusive attitude than a simple tagging policy.

6

Bardic Wizard

5:44 AM

Off the top of people’s heads, does anyone have a reasonable figure for how often real world computer programs designed to detect something (assuming they aren’t trying to minimize either false negatives or false positives) trigger on a false positive? A false negative? Overall rate of wrong answers?

I’m working on an idea for a d&d thing that involves being able to make more specific detections than existing detect spells but at the risk of coming up with false positives or negatives

And as google currently absolutely hates me, I’m not finding a useful answer

BESW

6:02 AM

Hmm that seems like it'd be very VERY dependent on specific parameters.

Glazius

@BardicWizard For research purposes many people look for an error rate of 5%, as demonstrated here: xkcd.com/1132

BESW

6:46 AM

But see also:

Misuse of p-values

Misuse of p-values is common in scientific research and scientific education. p-values are often used or interpreted incorrectly; the American Statistical Association states that p-values can indicate how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model. From a Neyman–Pearson hypothesis testing approach to statistical inferences, the data obtained by comparing the p-value to a significance level will yield one of two results: either the null hypothesis is rejected (which however does not prove that the null hypothesis is false), or the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at that ...

And of course the basic principle that if you're relying on two systems that each have a 1% failure rate, combining them cannot give you less than a 2% failure rate on the total system, even if their connection is perfect.

Thomas Markov

8:16 AM

@BESW we need more Bayesian statistics.

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