Bob laid out the sincere case for J. R.:
Well, having actually encountered Larry Hagman in a quasi-seminar context (he led some acting workshops in my dorm at Caltech back in the day), I’ll have to say he’d probably give a pretty good talk – plus be able to direct the attendees in various improvisation and related exercises. Could be a lot of fun!
From the other direction, Dan advances an intriguing argument from physics:
A quantum superposition of the captain and the rocker could make for an entertaining seminar.
Ultimately, though, the decision was made for me by Raghu, who wrote:
John Paul Jones I’s Wikipedia page notes that he’s the “Father of the American Navy” (a nickname he shares with John Barry and John Adams[3]).” Therefore John Paul Jones, John Paul Jones, John Adams, and John Adams all share the same name, which should count for something.
John Barry . . . where have I heard that name before? Yeah, that’s right—he’s the musician who is famous for falsely claiming to have written the James Bond theme. It’s already been established that we have too many British secret agents in this competition, so that rules out John Paul Jones.
Also, all those Johns! I’m reminded of that statistic comparing the number off female CEO’s to the number who are named John. Or Bob Carpenter’s remark that when he was in grad school, it was considered a good party when there were more girls than Daves. If John Paul Jones brings along John Barry and any John Adams (or, perhaps, all four of them!), we’ll be overwhelmed with Johns.
Say what you want about Larry Hagman, there’s little risk that he’d show up with overrated economist Larry Summers, legendary fullback Larry Csonka (with the change in offenses in the NFL, there may never again be a star fullback), or crypto shill Larry David, nor do we expect that during the Q-and-A period he’ll be distracting himself by playing the classic video game Leisure Suit Larry.
So Hagman it is.
Today’s matchup
Guy Fawkes is so famous, but he’s not even seeded, which just shows you how strong the Traitors category is. Just wait till we get to Judas and Brutus, neither one of whom was a British secret agent. He’s competing against Vladimir Chvátil, the third seed in the “Creators of laws or rules” category. Code Names unfortunately has a “spy” theme, but that spy thing is really irrelevant to the game play so I don’t think we have to hold this against him.
Ok let’s look at this from the other side. Guy Fawkes is legendary yet not even seeded while Vladimir is literally seeded higher than THE Sir Isaac Newton. If I asked a bunch of people who created code names, half of them would say: “Is it on Netflix?” and the other half would say no. There would be one guy who would say “Vladimir something” and a tiny percentage of people who would no. All in all, Guy Fawkes would be interesting while Vladimir is so overrated.
A few years ago, my younger son made a diorama of the houses of parliament with space below for Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder for an elementary school assignment in which they had to say something about a holiday. I took a photo of this. This is of interest, of course, to no one but me. However: I thought about this today and wanted to find the photo; I couldn’t remember when it was taken. I typed the word “cardboard” into Google Photos and, like magic, it came up (along with about 10 other photos I’ve taken of cardboard in its many manifestations). Squabbling about AI comes up a lot on this blog, hence this comment. I was stunned, even though I know how this works. The cleverness of machine learning algorithms and the sheer volume of training data is really amazing.
Anyway, this says nothing about the contest, except that no one is making dioramas of Vladimir Chvátil, as deserving as he may be.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Chvátil makes the rules, Fawkes breaks the rules. Making is harder, but breaking is the rock to it’s scissors.
(Paper covers rock, though, so any good game analyst [von Neumann’s not in this one] will have the advantage.)
Rules are made to be broken and rulers to be blown up. One suggestion would be to go with ‘da bomb’. While that might be a blast, it would probably end too quickly. Also, if you want to be a guy outstanding in your field and invited to give important seminars, you shouldn’t be tunneling under London. Chvatil may be able to discuss how to get a good balance between rigidity and flexibility in rules to get good outcomes.
Galaxy Trucker was a really fun game, but Wikipedia says Vladmir is 51 years old!
The choice is between someone we would have to resurrect or someone we would need to call — this favors Guy.
It’s possible too that Vladmir just gives a seminar unprompted, so the expected number of seminars is maximized with Guy.
This applies to the other dead/alive pairings, and so maybe it is not a special-enough argument here. In that case, we’re minmaxing, which seems more like a board game thing than an assassination thing, so Vladmir.
There’s also the issue that Guy’s version of a seminar might just be blowing everyone up. That’s no fun!
Guy Fawkes tried to light a fire under a bunch of shiftless politicians, and while his ideas failed to explode at the time, his flame still burns down to this day.