This Time Is Different

I'm reviving all of my old blogs today.

I'm going to start posting regularly again and linking people to my thoughts and cross-connecting a bunch of different blogs and platforms to each other.

I've meant to do this in the past, but this time it's actually different.

It's different for two reasons.

First of all, I'm happy and motivated. I've never felt this way in my life until this month.

I'm able to get things done; I've written on average more than one song a day for the past few weeks. That's going to inevitably slow as I run out of rhymes that I'm looking for a way to use. But it's not going to dry up completely.

Secondly, I have money and time, now. I have time because I have money. I don't need to sacrifice my ability to live my own life anymore to society in order to survive on my own. I have my own place with a room with a view, which is what everyone needs to be truly productive and comfortable to write, man, woman, or child. (One doesn't need to be truly alone, but one does need to be away from all of the doubting voices.)

Thirdly, I have a path towards turning all of this into more of a platform now. I have expertise in things that are far more applied than I did at the time I started writing these things, and far more evidence that I know what I think I know. I no longer feel like an arrogant fool to doubt the efficient market hypothesis. I know for sure it is false, and I feel like I have good reason to believe that my stock-picking ability significantly outperforms random chance.

I've read far more books that I think I should review, and can now survey them from the perspective of completion much more often than I could have five years ago.

Portrait of an Artist makes more sense in the context of the rest of Joyce's work than it did on its own. I can give it that context. When I review science fiction, I'm now doing so from the perspective of having read the majority of the novels that were ever given a Hugo award, and it won't be much longer until I've read all of them. I don't feel like an impostor at all anymore. I feel like I've paid my dues, and done my research, and in doing so have earned the right to speak.

Fourthly, I'm sure I have a path towards turning all of what I'm doing into a way to make a living. I can join Amazon's affiliate program and put links to it in all of my book reviews, and reviews of other products. I can use my writing to help me find work that I'm actually interested in doing as a consultant who is helping people to improve their business and their corporate culture.

All of this is exciting to me. All of this feels to me like it will keep getting better for the foreseeable future. I don't expect anyone to read everything I write. I'm not trying to have that happen. I'm just trying to throw all of my knowledge and all of my skills and all of my thoughts out into the world and give them a chance to stick, and I'm pretty sure it will be possible for me to find ways of making that happen.

Fear and depression

[This is the last blog post I wrote in 2015, but I never published it until today. I'm going to be reviving all my blogs and perhaps adding a few new ones to them.]

I saw mildly disturbing data in the page-view tracker today, so I'm going to start off with a friendly reminder that this blog's existence is merely a technicality... I make no endeavor to say anything worth reading, and instead spend most of my time here making plans that I fail to follow through upon.

Why? Well, for one thing making plans carries most of the fun associated with accomplishing them, and it's a whole lot easier. For another, they always feel more realistic before I start working on them than they do afterwards... and for yet another, they're really easy to write about, and sometimes I think that I'm better off writing anything than writing nothing, even if for all intents and purposes anything is nothing.

Today, I'm reflecting on the underlying premise of this blog and leaning towards the conclusion that my general approach is ill-conceived. I wanted what I write here to be (in principal) publicly associated with me because I felt like taking that approach would motivate me more than keeping my work private or anonymous. In reality, having my thoughts publicly associated with me scares me much more than it motivates me. In real life, I filter a lot of what I say based on my audience. I'm able to occupy a lot of different roles and personas that fit neatly into polite society. The curated view of myself I present to the world omits most of what I'm not comfortable having most people know about me.

It's really hard for me to think of any perspective that I'd want to share with everyone. A huge percentage of what to talk about falls into the category of either "things I would be completely comfortable letting everybody except a few of my relatives know about me" and "things I would feel completely comfortable letting everybody except possibly my employer know about me." So for example, I've had issues with anger and depression in my life that color a lot of my view of the world, and even had one psychotic episode. I'm not ashamed of these things, and I'm comfortable talking about them. I think that they're things that people need to talk about more than they do. And I also know that they're fairly common experiences. However, they're still things that I would prefer that my boss would never know about me and certainly things that I would want someone to find out about me if they were doing a quick search of the internet to decide whether or not to offer me a job (Assuming that at some point in the future I am seeking jobs again -- it's still on my mind because I just finished. I'm beyond excited about my knew position and can't wait to get started with it, so I'm not expecting to look again any time in the next few years. I've actually been holding out posting until the background check was completed in part because I didn't want to say anything online that might make them change their minds.)

In some ways, it shouldn't matter. I've accomplished everything I've done in life despite these issues. There is an argument to be made to say that, under the circumstances, my resume is more impressive than it would be if I had achieved identical things while in a better mental state (and correspondingly less impressive than it would be if I had achieved identical things while in a worse mental state). This is especially true given that my emotional issues have been consistently improving over the past fifteen years. (I was once a deranged ten-year-old.) If I had been as happy when I was in college as I am today, I would have done a lot better while I was there.

On the other hand, almost everybody I know from college is a whole lot more responsible today than they were a few years ago. Most of them would have done a whole lot better if they were as responsible in college as they are today. I feel like the evidence in favor of extrapolating a monotonic trend in changes in people's responsibility over time is a lot more reliable than extrapolating a monotonic trend from people's changes in emotional health over time. So who would you rather hire, someone who was too busy partying when she was in school to achieve her full potential, but who has now grown more responsible. Or someone who was too depressed/angry in school to achieve his full potential (or to party for that matter) but who has since made progress in dealing with those issues? Assuming they both seem equally responsible/qualified/capable/stable and whatever else they need to be today, which one would you rather trust with additional responsibility given their histories?

When you're dealing with people who are generally competent, you can assume that things are trending in the right direction for all of them, at least the things that are more or less in their control when viewed on a long enough time scale. So you take whatever was their biggest personal weakness five, ten years ago -- an actual limiting weakness (not just one of those "it would be nice to be more well-rounded" sort of weakness which are the kinds of weaknesses people typically claim to have when they are not claiming to have "you could call it a weakness but you could also call it a strength" kind of weakness) -- you should be able to pretty safely assume it has gotten a lot better. So the real question remaining has to do with chance of acute catastrophic relapse. In practice, the amount of stigma associated with the weakness is also going to be considered. I don't think emotional issues score well on either of these tests. One of which, at least, is relevant.

My real fear isn't just that people who are in a position to give or withhold responsibility from me would find out about my sub-optimal past and choose not to trust me as much as they would have otherwise. My real fear is that they might be correct to do so.

Struggling with depression is an actual weakness, and it has no redeeming virtues associated with it, and it actually makes you worse at pretty much whatever you would want to do (unless want you would want to do is better-identify with and understand other people who struggle with depression, which still doesn't add any value to the group in any broader context but does arguably produce some in-group value). Similarly, being irresponsible is an actual weakness without redeeming qualities associated with it, and it likewise makes you worse at pretty much anything you would ever want to do. In certain contexts, I would like to be treated as though I had a history of being more emotionally healthy than I have actually been, but I can't think of any reason for why people "should" treat me that way. (I don't consider legal reasons to be a valid reason in this context, because I don't see any reason that a law should mandate that people do what they otherwise should not do if the law did not exist. [My views on how the law ought to work don't have anything to natural law -- a concept which I consider an absurdity -- but for the purpose of understanding what I mean in context, "natural law completely trumps actual law" is a pretty good first-order approximation of my views. It's technically incorrect, but then so are all approximations.])

So the next thing to consider, if I'm going to continue in this line of reasoning, is the meta-question of how talking about this experience relates to having this experience, and whether it would be reasonable for somebody to make similar judgments about me based on the fact that I talk about dealing with depression as they would if they were somehow able to make those judgments through some form of divination. I think these things are quite a bit different, but still not so different to reverse the ordering of reasonable judgments. There are five cases to consider. 1) It is somehow possible to know that somebody in particular is perfectly healthy mentally and emotionally and has been for his whole life. 2) The past and present status of somebody's mental and emotional health is unknown. 3) By somebody's own claims, she is perfectly healthy mentally and emotionally and has been so for her whole life. 4) By somebody's own admission, he currently has or has previously had some emotional issues. And 5) It is somehow known that somebody has or has had problems in the past, but this person does not admit to them publicly, at least. (We aren't presuming that they would lie if asked; and we aren't presuming that they would tell the truth if asked either.)

1) is clearly the best case.
5) is clearly the worst.

The relative order of 2), 3), and 4) is a little bit complex, and it's hard to tell how you should handle them. 2) is essentially a superposition of 1) and 5). Since most people are mostly healthy (I think), you should treat people in this category as though they are probably in group 1), but as though there's a risk of them being in group 5).

3) is weird. There's an element of "the woman doth protest too much" to it, that's probably more closely associated with self-delusion than it is with mental health.

Now, it's just a matter of surviving

Scott Alexander S., who was born kind, has been blogging a lot about Growth Mindset recently. He thinks it's pretty much a complete farce. I'm not sure I agree with him.

Let me start out with a disclaimer:
Most of the virtue-ish concepts I've tested in life have proved to be terrible ideas. Trying out unconditional love or (worse) unconditional forgiveness will ruin your life and the lives of the people you care about. When I ran that experiment the results were disastrous. Trusting people more than you think is prudent is not prudent. It's the opposite of prudent, and has all sorts of negative consequences. There was a time when I bet my life on the belief that living virtuously was the right way to live, and I had to quit because if I didn't it would have killed me. I'm completely serious and not exaggerating. But that's a story for another time.

Growth mindset is virtue-ish enough of a mentality that I think the default approach to it ought to be extreme skepticism. These kinds of ideas usually screw you when you play with them.

I'm starting to believe that the way I view myself is important and that it's way better to view myself as someone who is just gets stuff done than it is to view myself as someone particularly talented or intelligent. (This change in mentality is thanks to Gabe Newell. I would not have attempted to adopt this mindset from the psych literature. I decided it was worth testing when Gabe said in his LBJ School talk -- on YouTube -- that he really hates the word "talent" because of the way it's usually used. He uses it anyways because he doesn't have a better word. He uses it to mean "the ability to be productive," and he measures "the ability to be productive" largely in raw output. The programmer who can write 5000 lines of code a day (and he says there is one at Valve) is a lot more talented than the one who writes 500 lines a year (and he claims that that's industry average which strikes me as absurd, but I've heard 2-4 lines of day numbers from so many sources that I'm starting to believe even though it sounds completely ridiculous)).

So I've started aiming to increase my raw productivity over the last few months, and it's been working. And it's been good.

I'm starting to feel like I have a bit of momentum built up in life.

This is a wonderful feeling. I'm starting to feel like if I just survive long enough and keep up some of the things that I'm doing, I'll end up succeeding at my efforts.

I've finally started putting some code together that I think I'll be able to continue to write making some slow steady progress for the next several years. (I wrote about 150 lines today, but once I have a job, I don't think I'll continue to make that kind of progress into the future, but I should be able to manage 20-50 even once I have a job again I think.)

I've got my own IP. I have some papers I can post a link to on LinkedIn as publications as soon as I've got that set up again and done a little editing. Obviously, I have my blogs. I'm not filling them up quite as quickly as I'd like, but I'm making progress. I finished writing the book that's been on my mind for the past several years.

I still need to learn how to view getting through bureaucracy, formatting, and other mundane grind as a form of productivity. I need to get my book up on Amazon over the weekend (or tomorrow, it's bed time tonight and I do have some more formatting and a bit of editing before I actually publish it). That's been in a state of completed-but-not-yet-used for way too long.

I just started work on inventing my own dialect of English to use in my novels. Really different from normal English. I think it's exciting. I'm working on a few novels and some short stories -- not high priority for me but they are fun to write.

I've got music that I've written, a few songs I'm really proud of. I'll record it in the next couple weeks. I'm going to meet with the guy in the studio tomorrow, and will be able to post videos of myself singing soon afterwards.

I'm mainly to the point that I just need to handle the bureaucracy of it all. Create a LinkedIn again. Link to my stuff. Cut and paste sections of a few of my white papers so that I can present them as publications on LinkedIn. (Some of the stuff is too targeted to work for a general white paper so it needs to be excised.)

In the mean time, I've got some job interviews lining up with some companies that excite me way more than anyone I've interviewed with in the past.

I'm probably spread a little bit too thin. Everything I'm working on is pulling me every which way. But life is becoming much more manageable for me than it was two or three years ago. I've really emphasized increasing my own productivity as my biggest priority in the time that I've had since I left Adaptasoft late last year.

It's been a really good decision. Raw output is what progress is actually made up of. All of the thought in the world isn't worth a little bit of completion. It's a pretty big shift for me to go from a life based on reflection and thinking and taking pride in how clever the ideas I can come up with are to a life more oriented towards getting stuff done where what I take pride in is the amount I can actually accomplish in one day, but I'm convinced it's worth the effort.

Viewing yourself as intelligent is a really bad self-image in my opinion. (I didn't think this when I was in high school or college; it's only something I've started to believe in the time since I graduated.) Viewing yourself as extremely capable and able to just get stuff done is a much better self-image to have if you want to succeed in life. (I think... we'll see. The "I'm smart" self image really didn't take me very far. I haven't tested this change for long enough to see where it leads, but I'm expecting positive results, and I have way more to show for the past six months of my life than I did for the last time I took a break from my work -- actually, that last break was longer too.)

It's amazing to me how much better I feel right now than I did this time six days ago. Very little of what's changed has happened in the last six days, except for the fact that I've started coding more again. (I love it again, which is great! I had started to hate writing code while I was at Adaptasoft. I hope my renewed enthusiasms lasts. For some reason, I expect it to.)

That's all.

I'm just happy right now, and sort of wanting to reflect on why...

That's another interesting contrast. When I had the self-image of viewing myself primarily as someone who was much more intelligent than average (which is true), reflecting on that tended to make me very unhappy and angry. I always felt like intelligence should be worth more than it is. Getting stuff done translates way better into being a reward in itself.

When I first graduated from college and started to earn some money, I loved the feeling of freedom that came from deciding how I was going to spend it. I loved the feeling of ownership. I have way more of that right now, reflecting back on what I've done, and the things I've made than I ever did from just having money.

The things I just mentioned are actually something of my own. And it feels wonderful to have them.

(This is not to say that I don't want to make money. It's not an either/or. I want to both create a lot on my own, and create work I get payed for.)

So anyways, I'd say it's reasonably likely that having a lot of natural ability causes people to value having that ability, but that the mentality of valuing natural ability rather than valuing the process of accomplishing is a destructive mentality. If that's the case, Scott's observation that growth-mindset isn't overrepresented among successful individuals is moot. A priori, it should be underrepresented among successful people, because people with ability ought to place more value on having that ability. (This is one of the reasonably widely accepted explanations of the phenomenon of illusory superiority and the one I personally find the most compelling.) Scott does throw out this hypothesis as a possible explanation, so I'm not pointing out anything new. I'm just saying that I believe that particular hypothesis more than I believe his deconstruction of growth mindset.

My evidence is anecdotal/personal.

But I weigh personal experience and anecdotal evidence quite a bit more highly in my evaluation of reality than most rationalists do. I'm very skeptical of the validity of anything unless I see evidence that there is strong selective pressure forcing it to become increasingly valid. I don't see that for late 20th century science, particularly any of the soft sciences.

I think there's a little bit more of that in personal experience than there is in science. (And way more of it in the economy than there is in personal experience. Hence Gabe's opinion trumps my experience trumps scientific research. That's just the way it goes.)

Planning for Less Wrong posts

I've got quite a few posts that I plan to eventually post on Less Wrong, I might as well make a list of them too, so that I have at least a superficial overview of pretty much everything I'm trying to write in the reasonably near future up somewhere, so that I don't have to keep any of it in memory.

I've been thinking quite a bit about a few optical illusions and how the human mind processes them. I have a theory that suggests that we see more than one often contradictory things when we look at something. For instance, I think we can see the same color in two different places in an image and see exactly the same thing in both places, perceive both colors accurately, but still see one color as being significantly darker than the other. When square A looks darker than square B, I don't think that that means that square A looks like it is a color that is a darker color than the color of square B. I think both colors look like the color that they are, but square A looks darker anyways. I can formalize my meaning by describing an experiment to test it.

I think somebody needs to write a sequence on semantics, morality, and all that, focusing not on what people should mean when they talk about ethics but instead what they do mean. Almost all of the discussions I see of ethics focus on what people should mean when they talk about ethics (object-level discussion of meta-level ethical intuitions), and I think people ought to talk more about what people empirically are trying to say when they describe their moral sense. (Meta-level discussion of object-level ethics). Consequentialism is rather inconsistent with most moral feelings. (Among other things, moral feelings are distinctively about "human actions" and emphasize intent. People have less of a moral reaction to a hurricane that kills 10,000 people than a terrorist who kills 10.)

Someone also needs to take on Occam's razor. I've started to take a stab at it on Informed Dissent, but I need to work through my thoughts more thoroughly before I post them.

I'd also like to post my book on LessWrong, after I've published it on Amazon, begin to get some feedback, and also begin to describe in more detail some of my motivation behind writing that book.

I'm also hoping to contribute quite a bit towards the whole idea of both the craft and the community as well as the idea of winning, and help organize a community of people who are actively trying to help each other succeed. That might be a while in coming, but it has a lot of tie-ins with my book.

Then I'd also like to get people involved in talking more about investing, and possibly business designs, and related ideas.

So much to do. But I have many years before I need to be done with everything I've been hoping to work on.

Today's book reviewing marathon.

I have a pile of 16 books beside me.

My goal for today is to go through this pile and write at least a one paragraph review of each book... which I will later extend as I see fit (not today).

[Edit: I failed, but I did get through four books, with quite a bit more than a paragraph for each.]

Fictitious Worlds

I want to start wring a lot more fiction in the coming years... Most of the fiction I have written falls somewhat into the category of romance. Most of the fiction I want to write falls into the categories of sci-fi and fantasy. I like coming up with settings for fantasy and sci-fi worlds, but most of my characters seem to naturally fit better into romance. I have a tendency to think of sci-fi worlds in terms of their histories and (for want of a better term) natural laws. I think if I start developing these worlds enough, I'll start coming up with more interesting people and stories to put inside them.

1. A Time to Scatter Stones. Real world with magic where magic is a finite resource; magicians mainly concern themselves with reading each other's minds and assassinating one another to gain control over each other's magical artifacts. Normal people have witnessed and remembered magic but not frequently enough to think anything of it. Anyone can become a magician, but unless they begin in childhood cannot become a powerful one. In fact, magical abilities tend to peak in adolescence. All magicians are highly specialized, partly naturally, partly by choice. Dark comedy satirizing magical fantasy in general (e.g. families contrive impossibly complex languages for internal communication that they use to control their magical artifacts, not because magic requires weird languages, but because they don't want anyone else to be able to use their artifacts against them).
2. Ex Post Facto. Developing new technology is pretty much illegal because experiments in AI caused stock market crashes and other developments aided terrorist activity through things like bitcoin. The internet, and computers are so important to life as we know it, that they cannot be forbidden or cracked down upon. However, the government seeks to ensure that all platforms are very closed, and writing code without specific permits to write exactly the code the government inspects and deems harmless is quite illegal. The government also arrests and imprisons quite a few people who were involved in developing the open source software that lead to some of the major problems, even though their activity wasn't illegal at the time, while in prison they form alliances with gangs and other organized crime that gradually grows into a major chaotic force.
3. Fantasy world with approximate technological development of ancient Greece. Ordinarily humans don't have any supernatural abilities, but gods and demons are real. Some of the gods are blood-thirsty and demand human sacrifice and other forms of violence, so do some of the demons - the moral character of the supernatural being has no bearing on whether they are gods or demons. However, all societies pretty much agree on which supernatural beings are gods and which ones are demons, and making ties with the beings considered demons is considered "evil" whereas serving the gods is not. The only noteworthy difference between gods and demons is that demons negotiate with humans and allow certain humans to channel their power; whereas, the gods simply dictate their will to humans and have mercy on whom they will have mercy and deal harshly with whom they will deal harshly. Gods sometimes fall and become demons, and demons sometimes rise to godhood. People only turn to the demons in desperation, and the demons are often willing to help, for a price. In exchange for renouncing the demons, the gods often free people who have gained power through their deals with the demons from the contracts they have signed. The story is told through the human perspective, but humans are pretty much pawns in the overall story. The backdrop of gods and demons negotiating for increased power in their own political system that somehow depends on the prayers and sacrifices of people is what really dictates the movements in history in this world.
4. A world where physics and chemistry abide by the same laws as they do in our world. It has three sapient species, two of which are related and vaguely hominid. They have skeletons, and warm squishy bodies, and give birth to live young, and are capable of regarding each other as pretty much equally "human." The third sapient species is entirely other. It's more like an arachnid. It has an exoskeleton and twelve limbs. It communicates through clicking/dancing patterns that it makes with its feet that are completely incomprehensible to the other species -- both of which are pretty much incapable of learning each other's languages to something approximating fluency, but are able to learn them well enough to communicate certain ideas. The arachnid creatures are too incomprehensibly other to trigger normal moral considerations at least when I think about them. When would be a good-evil axis for behaviors with similar impact done by other hominid creatures falls on a curiosity-horror axis for these creatures instead. When hominids seek to eradicate them, it doesn't seem evil or horrible; it simply seems natural. When their bites paralyze hominid creatures with extremely painful neurotoxins and they drag the hominids back to their nests to spend a few days of agony being occasionally re-paralyzed by the excruciating bites until a new brood of young hatch at eat them alive, it provokes horror but not moral outrage. In fact, the concept of pain seems to be incomprehensible to the arachnid creatures -- though their behavior upon returning to a destroyed nest demonstrates that they have some concept of loss and possibly-emotions that are full of sensations that say something not-good has happened. I try to imagine the world from both hominid species' perspectives, and try to make both species human enough that their own perspective of themselves seems human, but non-human enough that their own perspective of each other paints the other species as very sub-human, in a way that makes them seem sub-human to human readers. For example, they are mutually incapable of learning each other's language to fluency, even though members of both species are capable of speaking many languages within their species fluently -- and view themselves as having mastered one or more of the somewhat-childish languages that the other species speak. When listening to the other speak in their own language, the other seems ignorant and barbaric. When attempting to speak the other's languages, people cannot attain enough fluency to express abstract concepts well, even though they think they can, so they interpret the other's inability to grasp their attempts to convey abstract concepts as evidence that the other species cannot understand abstract concepts. Since no one can speak both languages and close the gaps, they never overcome the belief that the other species is more barbaric and less human/sophisticate/intelligent. Similarly, they are just different enough from each other that each other's technology seems obviously poorly designed.
5. Holworth. The nanobots have eaten the world and most of the rest of the solar system (other than the sun). They are specifically programmed never to destroy biomass and to destroy any other nanobots that do destroy biomass. They are also programmed never to kill a biological organism unless they are specifically instructed to do so by another biological being, and to destroy any nanobots that fail to act accordingly. They are also programmed to remain pretty much dormant when they are not part of a network that is somewhat controlled by a biological being's instructions, and to destroy any nanobots that operate independently of the influence of a biological agent's instructions (except in specific approved ways described by "Pretty much dormant"). "Pretty much dormant" means that they still must enforce the rules about destroying nanobots that violate instructions, but other than that they wait to be absorbed into a broader network. There are also a few special broader networks, most importantly the Registry and a few infrastructure networks involved in shipping energy that dormant nanobots participate in by default. They are allowed to perform many optimizations, inferences, and guesses in the process of generally going along with what a biological agent wants them to do, and can follow vague instruction to optimize for certain conditions, as long as they don't kill any biological organisms in the process. (Killing biological organism requires specific instructions; it cannot be done simply because it helps complete a broader goal that they were instructed to complete.) The nanobots are also required to report certain forms of data to the Registry, and destroy any nanobots that fail to comply with the reporting requirements of the Registry, as well as destroy any nanobots that report data to the Registry that the Registry determines indicates a defect warranting destruction. There are several other protocols that the nanobots are forced to obey and enforce, on pains of being destroyed. (Nanobots that fail to enforce an obligatory rule are also destroyed.) This world is full of NPCs who live in the Coves and subsist as best they can. The people of interest in this world are mostly cyborgs who have extended their own minds with biological computers made out of bacteria as a workaround that allows them to use the full extended power of their mind to control their nanobots. Some free-floating biological computers that control nanobots also exist, but a common tenant of the many cults that exist within Holworth is that these devices must be destroyed, along with anyone who works with them, so purely biological computers have trouble persisting. Pretty much nothing exists in Holworth beside people, cyborgs, biocomputers, and nanobots. And the existence of non-cyborg people is debatable since even before birth people's bodies get filled with nanobots that allow them to survive in a world where people can obtain limited amounts of nutrients from food, but pretty much only get energy by absorbing electricity from the nanobot environment, and don't breathe the air that doesn't exist instead relying on the nanobots in their blood to convert the CO2 in their blood streams back to oxygen and sugars using electricity.
6. Fantasy world where magic is a rare inborn trait in which some people have very specific magical abilities (more like super powers than magic). People who have magic can learn more general abilities through practice, but it is all still filtered through their primary ability. Members of the ruling class are very likely to be magical and keep pretty much everyone else in poverty/slavery. (The ability to be magical gets passed along like a dominant gene... though I'm not going to give any explicit in world genetic explanation of magic.) The ruling class kills anyone they discover to have magical abilities in the peasant/slave classes (almost guaranteedly the result of having been fathered by a member of the ruling class); some of them manage to flee and live like outlaws and sometimes manage to join associations like the maroons and Seminole Indians, which are able to offer some protection and resistance. Since having a magical child as a peasant is pretty much only possible if the child's presumed father is not the child's actual father, the head of the household where magical children are born are usually willing to kill them, especially since they have a strong incentive to do so. The ruling class has pretty much limitless rights with respect to what they do to the lower classes and most members of that class abuse their power excessively. It occasionally receives token Tolstoy-opposition from inside. It's the worst parts about the caste system in India mixed with the worst of new world slavery mixed with the worst of feudal Japan, and it's maintained by magic. I haven't decided what sorts of neighboring countries exist. My story so far only deals with the rural desert backwaters (without the waters) of the country -- in a village that is just barely on a route between two major cities.
7. Real-world with magical realism where some people's imaginations have the ability to project manifestations into actual life... mostly their subconscious imagination rather than their conscious imagination. This disproportionally results in the manifestation of things out of nightmares. A few people gradually learn to control this ability, some use it to fight against the monsters of their imagination, and some use it to seek to gain personal power. This ability is reasonably common in children, and most people lose it as they age, but the few people who truly control their ability are almost all adults. Most people don't believe in the paranormal and seek purely natural explanations for why strange bad things are happening and why these things mostly involve young children. This results in constant witch hunts.
8. Another possible future. Someone creates something enough like AI that it allows him to extensively control the world, and he (and successors) turns the rest of the world into a bunch of sandboxes for experimenting on what happens when he exposes people to various conditions, and a playground for the things he wants to do. He has many children in many of these different worlds and elevates some of them to deity-like status. He also has himself cloned many times (doing some genetic experimentation in the process), and his line of succession passes down through his modified clones. The stories mainly concern the people living in his sandbox worlds -- where they experience contrived levels of technology. One society has all of the technology useful for building spacecraft, but live in an environment that was chosen to make the production of food entirely impossible, and can only survive through their service to "the gods" who literally deliver their food to them from on high.  Some societies have no written language but have industrial-revolution era technology in most other respects. Others have computers and electricity but weaponry hasn't advanced past swords and bow and arrows. Some of these societies are permitted to live in as much peace as they can enforce internally, and other societies are subject to the whims of the gods that occasionally open up gates towards neighboring places... having preached through their temples a tradition which instructs them to go to war and pouring out their wrath on those who refuse to fight when this happens. The god-king of this particular world is neither sadistic nor malevolent, but he is also not benevolent. He just enjoys playing god.

Other ideas for fantasy worlds that I've toyed with quite a bit include the following. I might eventually merge several of these ideas into one, because I have too many worlds already, or I might add them into the world's I've already mentioned.

• I really like the idea of a magical system with time-adjusted trade-offs. So magicians, wizards, and casters. Magicians use wands and can learn some magic really quickly, but they also peak early. They basically have a set playbook of prepared spells. Wizardry is physically demanding enough that people peak in early adulthood like professional athletes do... but like pro athletes people really don't have any hope of becoming a powerful wizard unless they've trained their whole life. Casters don't use any implement to channel their power. It's just hand gestures. But people basically never peak.
• I've thought about having worlds with three genders one of which is very much unlike the other two, and written a little about a world like that, but I'm not sure there's anything more interesting in that kind of world than you can get simply by having sexual dimorphism with two genders. Two similar with one radically different is more interesting than three genders that are radically different from each other -- because it lets you keep the male-female dynamic similar to what it is in the normal world without changing things too much. I think this is the wrong kind of creativity for imaginary worlds.
• However, I am very fond of the idea of alternation of generations like in the typical life cycle of plants (the sporophyte generation is nothing like the gametophyte generation). In the same vein, metamorphosis in a sapient species could be quite interesting.
• I do like the idea of sexual dimorphism too as part of fiction. I especially like one idea that I've been playing with. In typical high fantasy, the elves are specialized for the forest, the dwarves for the caves. But the humans are generalists who can move between the niches. I like the idea of having one gender be adapted for the general case and being dimorphic with the other gender which is fragmented into a bunch of niches. The males of the seafaring communities have webbed feet and are optimized for swimming; the males of the mining societies are short and stocky; the males of the planes are tall and swift and have high endurance. None of them can really survive well in any environment other than the one which they have adapted for, and none of them really want to. Whereas, the females can travel around, while not necessarily as adapted for any particular niche.
• I also really like the idea of giving astrology more physical significance than it had in the ancient earth. Because the night skies are essentially a giant clock of annual patterns, they are naturally synced with other annual patterns, like migrations and weather patterns which made astrology useful for societies before calendars were invented. The moon's influence on the tides also affects ground water which has significant implications for planting. One way to amplify this effect is to give the world more moons, and another is to give it precession and nutations, possibly erratic. I think Europa has some erratic changes in its orientation, and the closer a body is to being spherical the more likely such changes are to occur. (I'd write about the radical climate changes that can only be read in the stars... the explanation would probably not be included in the actual story.)

That's a lot of topics...

But 40-80 books is a reasonable number to write in a lifetime. I think I will be able to tackle some of these at least, and turn them into interesting worlds with interesting series.

Topics I need to discuss

I have discussing quite a few topics on my todo list, and I probably should periodically create short lists of what I haven't discussed. This is one of them.

• Immortality, cloning, and having kids. I don't want to be myself forever...
• The problem of language. "Monkey see. Monkey do." is a completely different paradigm from "Simon says," and "Simon says" is worse.
• Cryonics. I'm in favor, but mostly as signalling.
• Death. If it's not terminal bad, it's instrumental good.
• Error theory. Sort of. God is the tribe personified, and morality is the will of god.
• More error theory. I'm much more sympathetic to the idea of the existence of meta-level claims about morality that are true, than I am about the possibility of the existence of true object-level claims about morality.
• Utilitarianism, now and later. How does the fact that what people value changes over time fit with utilitarianism?
• Utilitarianism: present and future. Trying to optimize future utility is very different from trying to optimize present utility.
• The null hypothesis -- How do we decide which hypothesis is null and is there a better way to do it?
• Privileging the hypothesis. I don't think it's as bad as Eliezer does.
• An alternative to Occam's Razor, genetic algorithms based on modifying existing hypotheses get to start with probability stolen from their parents.
• Everyone is a sociopath with respect to their enemies. Not being a sociopath is just about belonging to some in-group.
• Sometimes I wonder if I'm on the autism spectrum. My approach to morality, the way I review books, and the particular ways I like to approach organization all seem a bit autistic to me. In a good way, I think.
• To be verbs -- are they bad?
• Solomonoff Induction -- is it actually asymptotically optimal?
• Should I seek to be happy?
• Talk about sanity...
• Humor, hyperbole, and sarcasm. Should I try to be funny?
• Slate Star Codex: No arbitrage in social science but plenty in business, even though businesses are subject to much higher selective pressure. Hmm...
• Slate Star Codex on the control group being out of control, and related. How should you update your beliefs as you collect new evidence?
• Time, evidence, and over-fitting. Only predictions provide evidence for the accuracy of a claim. Well, only predictions and explanatory power.
• Time, evidence, and equations. How would you expect physics to be different if we are in a timeless universe versus if we are in a universe where time is relevant?
• Models of science need to include models of scientists.
• An introduction to extreme skepticism.
• Be wary of non-monotonic trends.
• Self-perpetuating phenomena and multi-faceted explanations of major shifts.
• What are reasonable "prior" odds?
• Andy Warhol sponsoring art.
• A quick overview of social history as I understand it.
• Evolution: an introduction to the code I'm writing to test ideas followed up with occasional posts about results.
• Pronouns. Easy reference please. (Let's have more than one pronoun even if we have gender neutral pronouns.)
• Language is an encryption.
• City states have small governments. Empires have big governments.
• I was wrong about Lawful Good and literature. Terry Pratchett totally does it.
• Resource allocation is hard!