I love the concept of this book but was pretty disappointed by the actual recipes tbh.

So they were proven right, got a lunch, and paid nothing... The conclusion is that there is a free lunch.

As a background, I loved the Ezio games and also enjoyed AC3 somewhat. I also love open world RPGs in general. But I hate grinding and mandatory generic side quests.

I tried it years ago, but did not like it and stopped playing after some hours. Assassinations via sneaking up and one-shotting were not possible AFAIR, which ruined the fun on assassinations for me. RPG mechanics like leveling and skills were present, but were designed in a way that added nothing of value to the experience while requiring a boring grind. There were many side quests, but they felt boring and generic and. I could have overlooked these things and concentrated on the main story, but engaging in the level grind and the generic side quests was to a large degree mandatory to be able to continue the story. That made me feel like I'm wasting my time and made me stop playing.

Overall I felt that the game tried to find some compromise between story-based action adventure and open-world RPG, but just ended up combining the worst of both worlds. It felt like the RPG features were pushed in top-down ("everyone is doing open world, levels and skill trees now, we should put that in the game") without any regard to WHY these features work well in some games and how they have to be integrated in order to make the experience more fun.

Do you know what the B in Benoît B. Mandelbrot stands for?

It's for Benoît B. Mandelbrot.

This article of a dentist testing other dentists gives some more anecdotal evidence: https://www.rd.com/article/how-honest-are-dentists/

Europa nicht den Laien überlassen ;)

NOW I CAN SEE THE WALES LOOMING OUT OF THE DARK

Who's the guy on the left?

This blog post summarizes the science nicely: https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2023/10/30/a-conversation-about-the-science-of-willpower/ TL;DR: You can train your willpower. It does act like a limited resource [Edit: Science is inconclusive on this claim]. But most importantly, it is strongly affected by your sleep, nutrition and stress level.

I found that mindfulness meditation was helpful for me. Practically, you can achieve an effect that is similar to having strengthened willpower by organizing your life in such a way that you don't encounter many temptations in the first place.

Yeah, but if you wanna act out the contents of the book and sell it as a movie, you need to buy the rights.

Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor's desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.

Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!