On 6/7/2020 8:25 AM, nch wrote: > On Sunday, June 7, 2020 9:03:32 AM CDT Rebecca wrote: >> On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 11:44 PM Kerim Aydin wrote: >>> On 6/7/2020 1:00 AM, Rebecca wrote: >>>> I personally greatly prefer Referendum (and voted for it) because it's >>>> intuitiuve. The rules need less incomprehensible, unintuitive terms of >>> >>> art >>> >>>> (like Switch!) and more like Referendum imho. >>> >>> Huh, interesting. The switch language always seemed really intuitive to >>> me (and was a great improvement on what was there before). Sometimes it's >>> odd that certain things implemented as switches (like when we implemented >>> "currencies" as switches) but the underlying metaphor of flipping switches >>> always seemed pretty clear to me? >>> >>> Officer interest, for example, is a switch, and that can be "flipped" to >> >> any list of the five ministries, including a list with multiple of the same >> ministry. That is not how I would expect it to work. Karma is an integer >> number that we've shoehorned into switch for some reason. >> >> The most unintuitive and pernicious type of terminology is not totally made >> up terminology (like Blornsbwerg or whatever). It is terminology that works >> similarly, but not quite the same as, its intuitive meaning, which means >> that the name actually undermines the full meaning in the rules. Switch >> would be intuitive if it were only applied to two or three possible values >> which could be flipped. >> >> -- >> From R. Lee > > I agree with this. We've shoehorned every variable into switches because > switches have well defined conditions and protections we know work. But that > doesn't mean it makes sense. Anything with more than one value at once like a > list definitely doesn't make any sense with the metaphor. Things with > infinitely > many values or values that aren't obviously opposed in some way are also > really stretching the metaphor.
Ok, just to take the karma example. The goal is to track an integer value assigned to a person, that has certain behaviors (e.g. default values, reports that are self ratifying.) We can: (1) use natural switches - current solution, bad metaphor; (2) use currencies - I think that's a bad fit, we don't really want to treat these quantities as tradable objects and we want to include negative karma, so with an even "worse" metaphor IMO; (3) invent something new in parallel to switches (A "dial" has more values than a switch. A dial can go to 11.) Is it worth the verbiage of a new name if it functions just like switches?; (4) just change the name of "switches" and the word "flip" (is there a term that's more intuitive?) Don't know the answer... -G.
