There is a great book that the main author of Chinook wrote about this. It's called One Jump Ahead[0] and it is a great combination of technical info about the development of Chinook as well as a kind of mini-history of competitive checkers. Strongly recommend!
Yes I read the book decades ago and it was indeed excellent. IIRC, the technical details are probably too light for the HN crowd, but it was the biographical stories that had interested me.
For an even shorter, and lighter, read on checkers engine, I recommend Blondie24[0].
Not interested in weighing in on less/fewer, but not sure architects of genocide is the comparison we want for grammar sticklers, even if it's become a common turn of phrase. Cheapens the real thing, doesn't it?
Is it? I'm a LP2 backer, and agree with you that I want a phone that does not have a browser, or an App Store, or anything like that; however, I do believe that the small set of tools LP2 is planning on coming with (simple directions, ride sharing, alarm, in particular) are pretty much no-downside.
What bothers you about features like these? Or is it the pricetag?
It's self sufficiency I want for our family, and those features discourage that. My kids' schools don't teach them many things anymore, including reading an analog clock. I'd rather my children know how to buy a map at a gas station and read it to get where they want to go, or do most simple math in their head instead of using a calculator. Alarms are built into most clocks made today, even (perfectly good) ones you can buy for $3 at a thrift store, and most microwaves have timer features. Using an app for ride sharing discourages phone (or text) conversations that are naturally able to lead to many unexpected places.
At the end of the day, I look at it this way: I'm able to live a full and happy life without a smart phone, the only thing I'm missing is the ability to call someone. That's where a phone comes in handy.
People will hate when you try to go against the flow, but it's a good path. We've recently cut pretty much all video games and television, and our family is better for it.
Protip: Some people will feel judged by you simply because you don't do certain things. If you want to avoid awkward conversations, you might not want to bring up that you don't have a TV. It's stupid but some people get seriously weird over it.
I think it is important not to boil fiction down into the 'idea or set of ideas the writing expresses' because if the author could so well articulate their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?
Instead, I think the fascination with difficulty is exactly this -- the idea that some ideas are amorphous and difficult to express directly, and that authors have tried (successfully and less so) drastic measures to try and, in their own way, do exactly what you said in your comment.
And there is something, for some, inherently interesting in the different contortions of text that experimental writers have come up with.
> wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?
There's an interesting quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is best known for writing the fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
"Nonfiction conveys knowledge and fiction conveys experience. If you want to understand a proof of Bayes’s Rule, I can use diagrams. If I want you to feel what it is to use Bayesian reasoning, I have to write a story in which some character is doing that."
It's interesting to note that he wrote HPMoR with a specific purpose in mind, namely to teach the specific skills of "rational" thinking he wrote about on the LessWrong site.
In his case it seems he saw fiction as something complementary to his essays, a means of conveying "experience", a simulation of living through situations in which the concepts could be used.
This is, of course, far from the only use of fiction, but I think it at least provides a specific example of a way in which fiction can be used to convey something in a way that cannot be (easily) done using dry prose (even if you are considering it purely from a practical standpoint without any reference to artistic merit).
> their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?
Not necessarily. It's a lot easier to empathize with characters and a novel can capture something more ephemeral. Camus would write a novel first then turn it into an essay.
> if the author could so well articulate their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?
I have pages and pages of what I think are well-articulated ideas that would be relatively easy to turn into essays. My challenge is finding a narrative that ties them all (or at least some of them) together.
