Well, I think Steam deserves a 30% cut of game revenue for doing basically nothing.

EDIT: Why the downvotes? I love Steam! I am one of you! :( I failed the shibboleth.

Laws limiting the height of your fence are debated in the following way.

1. First, the benefits and harms to you and your neighbors are considered.
2. These considerations are weighed against the relative costs to the rest of the community.
3. Rules are agreed upon that take everyone’s interests into account.

This is a moral exercise, because to debate something is to engage in normative deliberation. Indeed, your only mechanism for social appeal is moral: “This is the right thing to do” for some reason, such as justice, fairness, harm reduction, or whatever.

If you pass a law protecting rare valuable books, then you also need to decide which books are protected.

You’re right. Laws are constrained by pragmatism. It turns out, figuring out which books are important is analogous to figuring out which natural habitats should be legally protected from construction, etc.

What?? Every law we have is a matter of moral debate. Why do you think murder is illegal, or rape? Because these are evil behaviors.

Did I make any policy suggestions? These are simply moral facts. Laws are a matter of convenience, and if it’s inconvenient for us to legally constrain some evil behaviors, oh well.

• Buying food in order to destroy it is bad.

• Buying art in order to destroy it, also bad.

Ownership itself is a pragmatic social construct: you “own” things insofar as that “makes sense.”

Does it make sense for Amazon to own rare books? Not really. I’m not sure why that would be allowed. It’s like a child owning a rocket. It simply makes no sense in most contexts.

I posted a small comment on Reddit for the first time in, oh, idk, years. It was in a thread about the book Dungeon Crawler Carl. My comment said, paraphrasing,

DCC is not a nihilistic book

Short and to the point. I received three replies, all of them antagonistic. The first one said,

You’re wrong, because DCC is not a nihilistic book.

Except weird and long-winded. The second one said,

your definition of nihilism is wrong. DCC is not a nihilistic book.

The third one was,

You’re being pedantic.

Aaaand last time I post a comment on reddit.

Yes. It only looks like magic until you see how the trick is done.

experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range.

This thesis comes from a study that correctly attributes Dunning-Kruger‘s metacognitive gap to “statistical noise,” which is why the author claims that the effect is an illusion.

He’s not even wrong, and far from invalidating the very intuitive, very obviously correct DK effect, the study just explains it.

Greater familiarity with your own abilities is part of skill acquisition, so when you guess your “score,” you do so with more precision. More importantly, however, because you’re in the upper bell curve, random guesses have much more room when you underestimate your performance than when you overestimate it, even if you’re doing so with equal frequency.

Someone who sucks, on the other hand, has way more room to overestimate their performance than to underestimate it.

For instance, if I claimed that my LSAT score would be perfect, I’d still be accurate to within 5 points, so my overconfidence hardly seems like hubris.

Compare that to a business major I knew who guessed he would score in the 75th percentile only to end up in the 5th percentile. The gap between his mediocre expectations and the brutal reality of being illiterate was substantial. And yet, it almost seems unreasonable to expect him to guess accurately! What is he supposed to say, “I’m gonna get a zero”?

The point is, the DK effect is a statistical artifact, and that changes absolutely nothing.

Why not?

People are such goddamned babies.

Looper (time travel)

• The Perfect Run --> Deadpool + Groundhog Day, almost literally. The MC is overpowered and hilarious, the world is a gritty cyberpunk-superhero amalgam crammed with action and fantastic character development. The whole series is good.
• Apocalypse: Regression --> World ends, MC goes back in time to save humanity from monsters. Unfortunately, his young self was a bit of an idiot, so nobody believes him. Really entertaining. Sadly, only the first two or three books are worthwhile, since the story loses momentum once he saves the day.
• Reborn: Apocalypse --> similar premise. Prose and character development are much worse, but the plot is better and more intricate. If these two authors had collaborated we’d have a real winner. Still entertaining, although the opening’s slow.

Avatar the Last Airbender is one of the greatest narrative achievements of all time. There is nothing else like it. That said, if we consider books whose young (magically empowered) protagonists are on a quest to save the world, with themes like found family and antiauthoritarianism, we find… Harry Potter! Just kidding, that’s the magical academy trope.

• Are You Even Human --> MC and friends acquire powers, which they need to save the world. Found family + adventure quest + antiauthoritarianism. All the published books are superb. The author is a master of characterization. Her prose is okay, the action scenes are excellent, and the plot is fantastic. The story only slows down in the later volumes, which get some slice-of-life elements.

Mass Effect is one of the coolest stories in sci-fi. It’s an unapologetically tropey masterpiece of action and adventure. I have read 300 sci-fi novels and I’ve never seen anything like it, except some ersatz derivatives, of course, which sucked and shall not be mentioned. That said, if we look for a team of heroes with variegated skillsets under a badass commander trying to save the galaxy from an unknown alien threat, we get…

• The Expanse --> an alien proto-molecule designed to hijack the machinery of life arrives in our solar system and causes a bunch of chaos. One commander and his team are forced to spearhead humanity’s subsequent battle for survival against the aliens.
• The Last Reaper --> the first book follows a formidable MC trying to infiltrate a prison planet. By the second and third books, the story evolves into building a team of misfits led by our overpowered hero to protect the entire galaxy from invading aliens.

Wow, good call. That paragraph was uniquely unpleasant.

The type and genre of other media you enjoy indicates the kind of books you should try (but expand your horizons later).

So, tell me some of your favorite movies and/or tv shows or genres, and I’ll recommend some books.

For example:

• Sci-fi —> Project Hail Mary
• Cyberpunk —> Thin Air
• Vikings —> The Last Kingdom
• FPS dystopia —> Battle Royale
• Romance (comedy) —> Yours Truly
• Romance (literary) —> Wedding People
• Thriller (espionage) —> Gray Man, John Rain
• Thriller (romance) —> The Chemist
• Literature (comedy, drama) —> My Friends
• Western (modern) —> No Country for Old Men
• Horror (sci fi) —> The Watchers, Relic
• Horror (romance, medieval) —> Paladin’s Grace
• LitRPG (vengeance) —> Path of the Berserker
• Philosophy (metaethics) —> On What Matters

I’ve read thousands of books, so tell me your mood.

Aren’t the only people who care basically children? What is the context in which you are spoiling the plot to a children’s movie?

The loophole is that SCOTUS decisions are arbitrary and institutions are meaningless if the rules aren’t enforced.