Don't just not do bad things. Do good things.
I played a lot of MTG from age 9 to 14 or so. I picked up the game again recently and I was immediately better at the game than my 14-year old self. I don’t have any direct way to prove this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.
Continue readingNearly all gaming keyboards use the conventional typewriter-inspired keyboard shape. That is not a good shape for typing or gaming or frankly anything else.
A few years ago, there was some publicity around a Navy fighter pilot who claimed to have seen an unidentified object that couldn’t possibly be explained except as an alien phenomenon. Many people considered this to be indisputable proof of aliens. “The pilot is an expert, there’s no way he could have been wrong.”
I am much more willing to believe that someone can make a mistake, regardless of how good they are at the thing in question.
Sure, fighter pilots have excellent vision, and sure, they’re better than I am at identifying objects in the sky. But they’re still fallible. There is no level of fighter-pilot skill that would make me believe aliens visited earth based solely on one person’s testimony.
For any scientific theory, no matter how well-established, you can always find at least one expert with a PhD who studies the topic for a living and disagrees with the consensus. So either almost all experts are wrong, or that one expert is wrong. Either way, experts can make mistakes.
This post contains spoilers for the first episode of Pluribus.
Continue readingA reborrowed word is a loan word that goes from language A to language B and then back to language A. I think they’re neat.
A classic example is pidgin. A pidgin is a grammatically simple proto-language that emerges when two groups from different places have to learn to communicate. The word pidgin originally described a simplified form of English spoken by Chinese business people, with pidgin being approximately the Chinese pronunciation of the English word “business”. So “business” was borrowed by Chinese, and then borrowed back by English as pidgin.
Continue readingThe ethical principles that most people hold—and hold most strongly—go completely out the window when it comes to war.
Continue readingAI companies want to bootstrap weakly-superhuman AI to align superintelligent AI. I don’t expect them to succeed. I could give various arguments for why alignment bootstrapping is hard and why AI companies are ignoring the hard parts of the problem; but you don’t need to understand any details to know that it’s a bad plan.
When AI companies say they will bootstrap alignment, they are admitting defeat on solving the alignment problem, and saying that instead they will rely on AI to solve it for them. So they’re facing a problem of unknown difficulty, but where the difficulty is high enough that they don’t think they can solve it. And to remediate this, they will use a novel technique never before used in history—i.e., counting on slightly-superhuman AI to do the bulk of the work.
If they mess up and this plan doesn’t work, then superintelligent AI kills everyone.
And they think this is an acceptable plan, and it is acceptable for them to build up to human-level AI or beyond on the basis of this plan.
What?
Continue readingI’ve been playing a lot of MTG Arena lately, but I refuse to spend any money on it, which means I can’t craft many rare cards. When I look up meta decklists, they always include a lot of rares and mythic rares. I don’t want to spend all my rare wildcards on one deck!
That’s sort of what the Pauper format is for. Pauper decks are only allowed to use common cards, which makes them cheap. But that format isn’t quite what I’m looking for, for four reasons:
There’s the Artisan format which is Arena-specific (so it fixes problem 4), but it still has the other three problems.
What I really want is to build a Standard deck using only 4–8 wildcards to craft the most important rares, and then if I decide I like the deck enough, I can craft some more. Which means I want to know which rares I really need, and which ones I can replace with common or uncommon substitutes.
Continue readingInspired by this post by Tomás Bjartur, which is an allegory; but I’m not writing an allegory, I’m writing about the rules of Quidditch.
The rules of Quidditch have a big problem. The game ends when a seeker catches the snitch, and the snitch is worth 150 points. So most of the players on the field don’t matter; in almost all games, the only thing that matters is who catches the snitch.
This also makes it a bad spectator sport because you can’t see the snitch, so nobody knows what the hell is going on.
I propose some rule changes:
Continue readingSometimes I’m talking about lifting weights and someone asks me, “What’s your goal weight?” I don’t understand why I would have a goal weight.
Say I want to bench press 300 pounds. What happens when I reach 300? I just give up on the bench press now? That would be silly. If I can keep getting stronger, I should.
What happens if I fall short of my goal? Say I haven’t been able to bench more than 285.1 Should I start eating 5000 calories a day to put on as much muscle as possible? No, I’m not going to do that, I don’t want to get fat. Realistically, if I fall short of my goal, the answer to the question of what I should change is “nothing”.
The point of a goal is to make tradeoffs between objectives. But when you set goals, you have less information about your costs than when you’re trying to implement them. At implementation time, you have new information that might change how you prioritize things, which may result in failing to achieve a goal; and that’s perfectly fine.
Sometimes a goal turns out to be easier than you thought; that doesn’t mean you should give up after you achieve it.
Sometimes a goal turns out to be harder than you thought; that doesn’t mean you should sacrifice everything else for it.
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