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How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

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Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#61
post #25

I'm not going to invest 40m watching the new video because I couldn't care less - but Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video. I can believe he's cheating but I don't consider it probable. Dream's success doesn't come from record settings, so I don't think he has any incentive to cheat. If anything, I believe more the allegations that his manhunt videos are staged, given that's the interes…

> but Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video. The video discusses this and tries to provide their own intuition besides the two papers, as both agree on the core odds of the likelyhood being around 2 x 10^22. They contrast this with the number of events if 10 billion (10^10) humans would do something for 1 century (10^2) every second (~3.15 x 10^7): ~3.15 * 10^19. So the odds of the event…

If the chance of it happening is that small, isn't it fair to also consider the probability that we live in a universe without objective reality and/or where a god or gods intentionally interfere with random occurrences such as RNG outputs?

I would put this at better than 1/10^22. If you claimed that your religion was real and showed me an incontrovertible 'miracle' which had a chance of less than 1/10^20 of occurring by chance, I think I would accept your claim.

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#62
post #6

I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...

For most of us there are only a handful of people we need to maintain our credibility with personally or professionally. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Yeah, it's a game of numbers. When you have 22 million subscribers and half of them don't trust you anymore, then you still have 11 million subscribers.

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#63
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pessimistic way to put it, but you have a point. This depends on the target audience though. Some people seem unable to be convinced by hard evidence and reason. If you’re able to pick your audience — which is the case for content creators and politicians — you will always be able to address those people. In most professional settings, you’re more dependent on the goodwill of someone specific, and I think th…

In this case it wasn't so much that Dream chose his audience, but that his audience is primarily impressionable young kids. I looked through the Reddit threads that got posted around the time this happened and there were clearly a lot of young people who either chose to believe Dream because they didn't understand the statistics well enough to know it was BS, or were trying to rationalize that Dream was innocent base…

That’s mostly my point though, if “doubling down” works best with impressionable, unreasonable (in this case, young) people, then the strategy limits you to that audience.

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#64
post #60
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I am not part of the community (for example: I wouldn't even have known about the Dream scandal if it weren't for the video by Matt Parker), so feel free to take my opinion with a bucket of salt. It might be an idea to decide as a community that the time of completely unassisted speedrun leaderboards has passed, and shift the competitive element of your community to technological advancements in TAS tools…

Sorry if I did not explain it well, TAS does not mean just small helpful enhancements. In a TAS, the game is being played by the computer using a series of pre-programmed inputs. The fun in TASing is creating the most optimized set of inputs that completes the game in the shortest amount of time. There are often precise one-frame tricks or inputs that would not be possible for a human to perform but can be done easil…

No, I meant more like... I don't know if it's possible to verify if a run submitted for non-TAS leaderboard isn't secretly a TAS run and if not, the era of any integrity of non-TAS leaderboards would be over. So all non-TAS speedrunning would be non-competitive in the future, if there's such a thing as non-competitive speedrunning.

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#65

I've had other people bring this up and they framed it in this wavering "Well maybe he cheated, maybe he didn't, but it was suspicious" kind of way. The idea that Dream was NOT playing on a rigged version of Minecraft is so astronomically unlikely as to be ludicrous. People go to prison based on far far less reasonable doubt, if be consider dream innocent we may as well let everybody out of jail, since they could be…

[deleted]

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#66

I'm not going to invest 40m watching the new video because I couldn't care less - but Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video. I can believe he's cheating but I don't consider it probable. Dream's success doesn't come from record settings, so I don't think he has any incentive to cheat. If anything, I believe more the allegations that his manhunt videos are staged, given that's the interes…

You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. The mathematical fact is that Dreams feat is so incredibly unlikely that (as illustrated in the video you refuse to watch):

*If every single human being on planet Earth each completed a Minecraft speedrun every single second for 100 years (no sleep), the chance anyone during those 100 years getting as lucky as Dream just once is less than 1:1000.*

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#67
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of the world would call "country", but American govspeak has decided to call "nation state" for some weird reason.

The English language is horribly ambiguous and confused around words like nation, state, nation state, country, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race etc.

Yes, but I've not seen an explanation of which useful cases are covered by "nation state" but not by "country" or even better "government". I don't think it even solves the problem of countries which cause other people to get mad if you acknowledge their existence (Taiwan, Palestine)

Meanwhile, does "nation state" apply to the Plurinational State of Bolivia?

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#69
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The English language is horribly ambiguous and confused around words like nation, state, nation state, country, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race etc.

Yes, but I've not seen an explanation of which useful cases are covered by "nation state" but not by "country" or even better "government". I don't think it even solves the problem of countries which cause other people to get mad if you acknowledge their existence (Taiwan, Palestine) Meanwhile, does "nation state" apply to the Plurinational State of Bolivia?

Government is also a murky concept. In the US it seems to cover all of the state apparatus, while in other cultures it only refers to the executive branch or even the "cabinet" specifically.

"Nation state" seems to be a thing because state alone could be confused with the 50 US states.

With nation state the focus is on the institutions and leadership, with country the focus is on land and ordinary people it seems.

Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?

#70
post #64
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if I did not explain it well, TAS does not mean just small helpful enhancements. In a TAS, the game is being played by the computer using a series of pre-programmed inputs. The fun in TASing is creating the most optimized set of inputs that completes the game in the shortest amount of time. There are often precise one-frame tricks or inputs that would not be possible for a human to perform but can be done easil…

No, I meant more like... I don't know if it's possible to verify if a run submitted for non-TAS leaderboard isn't secretly a TAS run and if not, the era of any integrity of non-TAS leaderboards would be over. So all non-TAS speedrunning would be non-competitive in the future, if there's such a thing as non-competitive speedrunning.

Frame perfect tricks are often fairly easy to spot, and heavy usage of then are pretty indicative of TAS runs.

Of course, there are folks who can do those frame perfect tricks, but if it ever does come to contention, then asking them to perform said trick live seems like a pretty easy way to confirm.

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