Author: Aaron

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Inkhaven: Advice for Aaron-Like People

This was Inkhaven month: I had to publish something every day.

It was a good month. I wrote 32,000 words, made four friends, and didn’t have to change my routines. (Aside from seeing my wife, which I’m glad I get to do now.)

It would have been a really good month if I’d changed my routines — to be more awkward, publish bad writing, and make premature plans.

A very brief review

Inkhaven is good. There’s plenty of food, a walkable neighborhood, and very strict deadlines. There are fun activities and writing mentors who take you seriously. The whole thing happens in Lighthaven, a big walled compound full of people who made the same weird choice you did — paying to write and be around writers. But there’s no pressure to socialize; if you need to focus on work for a day or a week, you can.

If you’re considering the program, and you can spare a month to go live in Berkeley, the answer is probably yes.

Advice for Aaron-like people

Henry Stanley, one of the most Inkhaven-y people here, wrote some advice that I endorse. It’s predictable; either of us could have written most of it in March. And yet, I didn’t actually follow the obvious advice, for reasons that were equally predictable.

Here’s the advice that very specifically would have helped March Aaron. If you are an Aaron-like person, maybe it will also help you.

Be more awkward

A few times a day at home, I walk to the fridge and get a soda. I did the same thing at Lighthaven.

At home, I don’t see anyone on my way to the fridge. We don’t have roommates or a cat; we don’t even have a mirror, at least in the kitchen. Soda time is a quiet transition between computer and more computer.

At Inkhaven, there are always people between you and soda. They are always having fun conversations. You’ll try to avoid eye contact, because you don’t want to interrupt and no one wants to talk to you. Why would they? They’ve never met you.

But Inkhaven selects for shy people, and even if most of the shy people are somehow friends from day one, that doesn’t mean you can’t befriend them on day three, or whatever day you get your bearings. Even if they think you’re awkward, they probably self-identify as awkward. You can be awkward together.

March Aaron: Force yourself to join conversations until you know everyone’s name. Talk to five people every day. When you like someone’s post, write them a compliment. Cancel your webfiction subs and block Mangadex until May; save your reading for the people around you. (They yearn to be read!) Random fiction is a fine hobby in most months, but not when you’re renting a room in the Wordcel Hotel.

The rats in this mural — short for “rationalists” — represent the friends I could have made along the way.

Publish bad writing

I write for a living — posts read by tens of thousands of people. I try to optimize every word. This is bad advice for bloggers.

On my first day, I published one minute before the deadline, then spent the next five hours editing. I didn’t know how to publish great posts, but I wanted to avoid writing any bad sentences, even if it meant I was wrecked the next day. I continued to edit every post after I published, which often doubled my time for a 10% quality boost.

Dumb. Better to have an okay post you can revisit later and a fun conversation in the game room than a “perfect” post that isn’t finished until everyone else is asleep.

I didn’t take many risks at Inkhaven. I had a lot of ambitious ideas I could never pull off in a single day. Instead, I mostly wrote about whatever felt easiest, or whatever I was thinking about at that moment.

Dumb. Better to write an interesting post badly than a boring post well. If you’re going to spend hours thinking about something anyway, think about something important.

This dark Lighthaven corridor represents my soul on the days I published at 11:59.

Make premature plans

The theme of this blog has always been “random stuff I think about”.

I came in with 600 ideas and no plans. I wanted to feel out the vibe before choosing topics or writing drafts.

Dumb! If you spend your first week sorting through ideas, you aren’t using that time to make friends. If you start each day with a blank page, you’ll never publish early enough to spend a carefree afternoon hanging out with the other early authors.

In the end, I got ~25 posts I was happy with (and a few I’d just as soon forget). But they don’t amount to anything: my theme is still the absence of a theme, like I’m a LiveJournal author in 2009.

If I’d forced myself to follow a structure — 10 short stories, 10 reviews, 10 articles on my weird philosophy of life — I’d have written more bad posts, but I’d have a serious body of work, the kind that might make someone follow my nonexistent Substack.

This mock trial represents… well, no, it was actually a trial.

Create a Substack

People like Substack. They know how to follow authors and leave comments. If you want them to read your work, put it somewhere they will see it. The end.

Is “Working” the Best Book About the 1970s?
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Is “Working” the Best Book About the 1970s?

You start off like “wow, everyone has a story” and then 400 pages later you’re like “Jesus, EVERYONE has a story.”

—lola, Goodreads review

 

My favorite movie is Life in a Day. It’s the movie I’d show an alien to explain humans: 90 minutes of people sharing their lives and sometimes talking about their feelings.

Studs Terkel’s Working is the book version. Subtitle: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

Terkel interviewed 100+ people around the United States, including a switchboard operator, two coal miners, a call girl, three paperboys, a fashion model, a migrant farm laborer, Pauline Kael, and Rip Torn, the coach from Dodgeball. He rarely appears in the book; his subjects mostly tell their own stories.

The result could be the best book about the 1970s. Most books about an era focus on what was unusual — culture, fashion, history. The problem is that most people, including me, have no idea what was usual. How did people spend their time? What made them scared or excited? What did kids want to be when they grew up?

It’s easy to think the answers are obvious or timeless, but human life changes with each generation. Here are some things that happen in the first ~100 pages of Working:

  • A stewardess gets a week of training on “make-up and poise”, including the most feminine way to let a passenger light her cigarette. On the plane.
  • A white, sophisticated feminist businesswoman drops the N-word with a hard “R”, multiple times, to describe her own working conditions.
  • A school district gives all the migrant farmworker children a week off to pick vegetables at harvest time, rewarding them with stickers for their hard work.
  • A telephone company only recently closed the “rest home” it was maintaining for switchboard operators who experienced nervous breakdowns.
  • A college professor complains that the Watergate affair has been “delicately brushed aside” by the American people. (This was before the impeachment.)
  • Several people have jobs that don’t really exist anymore: a switchboard operator who worked in a gymnasium-sized room (replaced by extensions and voicemail), an “installment dealer” who went door-to-door collecting checks for rent-to-own products (replaced by ACH and debit cards).

I recognize all the people in this book. People haven’t changed very much. But they live in a different country — an America with more sweat and smoke, where appearing in a commercial gets you mobbed in the subway, where five interview subjects talk about hamburgers but no one mentions sushi.

Putting the era aside, Working might be one of the best books about humans, period. It captures all the big feelings — boredom, envy, sorrow, anger, pride, contentment — but also peppers you with hundreds of facts about corners of the world you’ve never seen, both practical and personal. You don’t just learn the nuances of a receptionist’s job; you hear her fantasies set in the “land of no-phone”, where machines no longer tell her what to do. You get a primer on the installment business, and also a sense of how it feels to be a debt collector, working a job where no one is ever happy to see you.

If you had any one of these conversations at a party, you’d walk away feeling like you made a friend. Reading the whole book is like a long road trip with an interesting stranger at every rest stop. If you wanted to write the Great American Novel, you could scoop up ten of these people at random and use them as your central characters. Any ten. It would work.

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The Call of the Void

Content warning: Discussion of self-harm.

 

Julian locked his bedroom door and closed the blinds.

He sat down in front of his birthday gift — a 32-inch 4K monitor. He’d lied and told his parents he wanted it for gaming.

He opened IRC, logged into his alt account, and checked the Altiora server. There were thirteen new posts in #photos. His mouse hovered over the channel, but he didn’t let himself click.

Don’t indulge your instincts. Use the ritual, even where it’s safe.

Julian took three long breaths: in through the nose, out through the mouth. He thought about the beta blockers under his mattress — no. Not today. For his first run with the new equipment, he’d go all-out.

Headphones on. Volume up, but not so loud he couldn’t hear a knock. Play ambient mountain sounds. Open #photos.

Julian’s toes curled. His mouth was dry. His heart sped up. He leaned in close to the screen; on the new monitor, his peripheral vision vanished. He was on the mountain. He was sitting on that cliff. A few inches forward, and he would feel gravity take him.

He closed his eyes and imagined the valley floor rushing toward him, wind roaring, stomach flipping, no choices to make, no future, only the fall and one moment when the great crushing force of nature would swat him like a bug—

Julian released a quiet moan. No one else heard.

God made the world, and he made it full of mountains. These were the crucibles — where Satan tempted Jesus and walked away snarling, where Moses looked down from Sinai and felt the call of the void but shook it off to carry the Commandments. They were a constant reminder that God gave humans a choice — a few moments of ecstasy or eternal salvation. And they were a source of pride for all those who kept themselves close to the ground.

Heights were a test for every man, or at least 95% of them. Few had the twisted brain chemistry that allowed someone to look down from on high and walk away. A few bold science fiction writers imagined worlds where the call had been “cured”, and humans built vast cities of gleaming metal or floating platforms above the clouds, lethal drops as far as the eye could see.

Julian’s school district banned those books. He’d read through bootlegs, and they gave him a few small jolts, but without photos it just wasn’t the same. (Some people tried to generate images, but the better AIs would kick you off just for suggesting it.)

He wasn’t looking for death. If someone wanted to fall, they’d find a way. No buildings more than three stories tall, nets below every bridge — didn’t matter. There were heights everywhere for those with eyes to see; you could find a forest and climb a tree.

But that was a total waste, when God made the mountains. Why fall sixty feet onto the forest floor when you could enter the void? Enjoy eight, nine, ten seconds of ecstasy?

And why make a single jump, when you could imagine it a thousand times instead? He wasn’t an animal; he could satisfy his lizard brain and still have a great life. (On his alt account, Julian claimed not to believe in Hell — but that was one more reason to be safe.)

He knew his obsession wasn’t normal. Billions of people on Earth, and only a few million fell each year. Only a tiny fraction of those hung around in places like Altiora, feeling the thrill without following through. But even if it was a weird thing to do, it was healthier than the alternative.

Why look at a thousand photos when there were ways to get so much closer?

Julian snuck out at 3:00 am and got into the van. He’d started taking long morning runs before his lifeguard shifts; his parents were used to waking up and finding him gone. They didn’t know he’d swapped shifts today.

The van drove out of town and down I-24. Sean the driver and his two friends were callproof; at the checkpoint, they flashed the stickers on their licenses and the mountain guards waved them through. Julian hid under a blanket on the floor.

They reached the end of the road. There were no parking lots out here. Camping on Lookout Mountain required you to be in the lucky 5% or take a bunch of psych exams and wait a year for your license. Few bothered; there were plenty of nicer places to set up a tent, places without armed guards who would throw you in prison if they caught you taking drop photos.

On IRC, Sean had told Julian not to worry about prison; he knew this mountain well. No one was around this time of year. As heights went, it wasn’t high-risk enough to get attention from the rare callproof rangers who could patrol it without dying. Julian believed him; they were all in this together.

An hour into the hike, he was grateful for the morning runs. No one had ever carved a real trail here, and they weren’t even halfway up. They kept to the deep woods. Sean, Mary, and Omar led the way, headlamps shining, keeping him away from rhododendron thickets and accidental views of the valley. It wasn’t so different from his old Boy Scout walks, aside from the darkness — and the elevation, which felt like it was trying to drag him back down the mountain, making his calves and thighs and lungs burn with effort.

The others weren’t struggling; they had better shoes and more experience. They exchanged playful insults and gossiped about their classmates. They were all at UTC, part of a callproof club that hiked regularly and sometimes took money from people like Julian who wanted a glimpse of that life. He was breathing too hard to talk much, and he wouldn’t have known what to say; he didn’t want to sound like the earthbound high schooler he was.

The elevation got a little better near the top. When they stopped in a clearing, Julian pulled out his beta blockers. He thought about it for a minute, as the others unpacked the equipment.

No. You spent your entire summer salary to be here. It may be the only chance.

“Go all-out,” he murmured, stuffing the pills back into his pocket.

“What?” called Omar.

“Nothing!”

“We’re ready,” said Sean. “Come over here.”

They put a harness on him and tied a rope around it. Julian recognized the harness — it was for rock climbing. (The sport was only legal in a few states, but he’d seen videos on Altiora.) Then they gave him a stiff helmet to wear. And finally, handcuffs, which would keep his arms locked in front so he couldn’t untie the rope.

“Tell me what’s going to happen next,” said Sean.

“Right before we crest the ridge, you’ll tell me to stop.”

“Good. And then?”

“You guys will hold me while Mary sets the anchor and loops me in.”

“Right. And you will do what?”

“Nothing. I’ll stay still. You can trust me.”

“If you do anything surprising, what will we do?”

“Drag me down the mountain until I calm down.”

“Right. Greg vouched for you, so I don’t expect any of this to happen, but we are deadly serious.”

“Yes sir.”

Sean’s brow furrowed. Omar chuckled. Why did I say “sir”?

“I mean, yes. I’m also serious.”

“Good.”

They walked another hundred yards or so. Sean and Omar helped Julian keep his footing, since he couldn’t use his arms to balance. Mary was already at the top with the anchor.

The trees were sparser up here, and the sky had been lightening over the last hour. Just as Sean and Omar pulled him to a stop, Julian saw clouds glowing orange on the horizon. He felt his heart racing, and it was more than just the hike. He took deep breaths, nose in, mouth out.

Mary returned, took the rope, and carried it up to one of the last big trees. Julian saw metal glinting as she tied the rope to the anchor. It took her a long time to finish the knot.

“Ready!” she shouted, finally. 

“Okay!” Sean shouted back. 

He turned to Julian. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

Omar and Sean let go. Julian took his last few steps up the hill, and then.

His feet found bare rock. He could see the valley and the city. They were below him. Everything was below him. He had never seen so much below. And ahead. Ahead the rock ran out and there was air. Void.

He tried to stop, take in the view, but his feet were moving beneath him. He took one more breath and then he was screaming, screaming, sprinting with his hands behind his back, somehow keeping upright and taking a shallow breath and screaming, the rope was running out and he should slow down but instead he kept running until YANK the rope ran out and he jerked to a stop. The harness dug into his skin. His feet slipped out from under him and he fell hard. Pain shot through his left shoulder.

“Ow!” Julian’s scream cut off. He lost the view for a moment — he could only see rock. He got his feet under him and rose, unsteadily.

Sean and Omar and Mary jogged over, saying something or other that he no longer heard because he was at the edge now, he could see the forest and every house in the city and he was two thousand feet off the ground, ten seconds of ecstasy away from God’s green earth.

Someone clapped hands around his eyes. “No!” he shouted. “No!”

“Julian!” Mary shouted, directly into his ear. He flinched. The howling of the void was quieter now, but he couldn’t unhear it. 

Omar grabbed his arm. “You good, buddy?”

“Untie me, please, untie me—”

“Nope.”

“We’re all here, Julian,” said Sean. “We’re not going to let you jump. We’ll let you look, but you have to stop talking. Okay?”

Julian took a few seconds to breathe. He felt… he didn’t know how to describe it, nothing else compared. Like a grizzly bear was chasing him, and he had to run over that cliff to escape. Like Samantha Williams from his biology class was disrobing in midair a few feet out past the ledge, calling him over to kiss her thighs. Like God himself was waiting on the ground to bring him home.

But it was dark, and quiet now, and the void was almost like a dream. His heart began to slow.

“You sure he’s ready?”

“They say the first pull is the hardest. If you get past that, people calm down.”

“I guess he’s secure. I just don’t want him to fight us all the way back.”

“Julian?” Mary again. “Are you ready to see again? Are you going to fight us?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’m okay now. That was… really intense. But I— I think I can take it. If I go crazy again, just cover my eyes and pull me away. Once I can’t see it, I know I’ll be fine.”

“We will definitely pull you away,” said Sean. “Last warning. Okay, let him see.”

Sunlight returned. Julian stood three feet from the edge and saw infinity. He fought back another scream — and it worked. He hugged his hands to his chest, while Sean and Omar held onto his biceps. His shoulder ached, but like everything connected to his body, it didn’t really matter.

There were birds below him. The clouds were still above, but so much closer now. Dawn was breaking. Row after row of houses lit up gold. The forest and the city were like a model train set; he could reach out and pick them up.

This is how God feels. 

He’d heard it many times in church, but now he understood. This was the lesson of the void — humans weren’t built to look through God’s eyes. (And good callproofs kept it to themselves.)

Julian could still feel the call, almost gentle now. It wanted him, body and soul. Two steps forward, one flex of the knee, and he would feel the mercy of the universe.

“Like what you see?” said Omar.

“Ssssh!” said Mary.

“We should bring shoulder pads next time,” said Sean.

“Ssssh!” said Mary.

Julian couldn’t speak. But in a few minutes, he’d let himself be led away, back to the ground where he didn’t belong.

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Lost Days

I used to journal every day. But I was depressed for a while and fell out of the habit: I didn’t like the way I was living, so living each day twice had no appeal.

I feel much better these days, but the journal habit is still shaky. In the last year, I’ve stranded a bunch of half-written drafts in my inbox (each entry is an email to myself).

Today, I’m stealing my daily motivation from Inkhaven and using it to finish those journal entries. I’ll publish the safe bits here — the rest is secret, unless you’re on the Gmail team or a good hacker.

 

Warning: Personal, of limited interest. Have you considered reading Alicorn instead?

July 19, 2025

Karaoke night! It’s basically a Bay Area house party, but much louder. There’s a live band, with a prominent AI researcher on bass and probably ten more in the audience. For the first time in years, someone recognized me from Twitch.

I meet a GiveWell recruiter with cat ears; unlike actual cats, he’s a fantastic singer. Someone attempts the Mariner’s Revenge Song; unlike actual sea shanties, it’s hard to remember when you’re drunk. I used to sing, and while I’ve lost my touch, I’m still good at being loud: “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” goes well. Several hours on, I’m very hoarse and make the mistake of trying to lead “Mr. Brightside”. Ow, ow, ow. Good night overall; I still can’t hear in crowded spaces, but I can smile and sing along.

For most of the night, a succession of Open Philanthropy staff run the karaoke laptop, scrolling through lyrics to keep the party alive. It’s a funny metaphor, but also a testament to Open Phil’s ability to screen for helpfulness.

Earlier, I met (politician) at a fundraiser. He is two standard deviations taller than I expected, and two standard deviations less charismatic. That’s a really good sign about his other talents.

September 9, 2025

Small conference this weekend. I met Andy Masley today! He’s exactly what I imagined.

I ride the bus with B, who is about to sign the Giving What We Can pledge and plans to throw a party. We brainstorm ideas:

  • Ten percent. Guests must give 10% of something (one fingernail, thirty eyelashes, 1.2 donuts). Everything goes into a big pile that gets burned to symbolize all the money B will be burning.
  • Good and evil. Guests spend the day cleaning up a park or doing other good deeds; at night, they party (sinfully).
  • Fancy things. Now that B has given up fanciness for life, this day will mark their final exposure to the finer things. Guests dress formally until the Pledge is signed, then change into jeans and tees for dancing.

I learn to play Hearts, win my first two rounds, and retire undefeated. Stephen King wrote a whole novella about someone getting addicted to this game; skill issue.

At night, I try to help the AI in Context team come up with titles for their forthcoming MechaHitler video. I get stuck on “Can Elon Musk do ANYTHING wrong?” which makes me giggle uncontrollably and renders me useless for any more ideation.

September 11, 2025

There are few better places to be human than a beach at night, with just enough chill breeze to make people gather by the fire. It’s all friends and future friends. Three hours of conversation, and I’m never bored, I never miss my computer.

I wish I’d written this seven months ago, so I could remember any of it. I talked to M for an hour, made a friend, and now I’m not sure I could write five true sentences about him. Ten people were swapping scandalous stories from college and nothing stuck. This is why I started the journal, so I wouldn’t lose things, and I lost almost everything.

But honestly, I feel okay. I didn’t lose the feeling, and I still feel warm remembering that night, even if the soundtrack is all murmuring and laughter.

The one detail that stays: British people learning about s’mores, making them with vegan marshmallows, and wondering what the fuss was about. So much wasted potential.

September 14, 2025

T and I recovered a pair of lost surgical loupes, but misplaced a box of bathing suits. The net profit was probably $400, but we were mostly bummed about the swimwear — two cognitive science majors defeated by loss aversion.

Blood and Fur ended. The usual LitRPG disappointment: I love a good rise to power, but power itself is boring.

January 7, 2026

Goodbye, Open PhilanthropyCoefficient Giving. On the day, I wondered how long it would take me to start using the new name in my own mind, like a second language; it turned out to be fourteen weeks.

Most of my farewell notes are about Above the Bar, the silly internal digest I wrote for ~six months of my tenure. There’s an Inkhaven author who wrote about the importance of visibility — people like who they notice. Lucky I stumbled into that. Being very good at writing lightly satirical corporate newsletters is not a marketable skill in most places, but it’s evidence of something. What if I could write a version of ATB, but… for life? (Stick it in the idea box.)

I wish I had lived up to the job’s potential. But maybe the fact that I never did means it wasn’t the right job.

January 17, 2026

This was the first free month I had in four years, and I wasted almost all of it on Teamfight Tactics. Today I finally uninstalled, after an unhealthy number of hours, because a thought occurred to me: Wildbow has written more than five million words.

I want to be an author. I’ll be happy if I’m half as good as Wildbow. If I get to 1,000 words per day, it will take me more than seven years to write five million words. I’d better start today. (Looking back: I did not start that day. But I did finally apply for Inkhaven.)

It’s really stupid that it worked. I knew about Wildbow already. I knew about all the things I was giving up in an attempt to… do what? Be in the top 100 North American competitors for a game most people haven’t even heard of? Win $500? I could have read fifty books.

Is TFT the last game I’ll ever be that addicted to? The last one that will Tetris-effect me, drive me to madness as I claw my way into a tournament only to fall apart because I tilt off, play tired, refuse to apply even rudimentary logic to something I spent hundreds of hours on? The last one to make me hit the button when I know I shouldn’t?

If it happens again, the game may have been designed by an AI. I can’t decide whether that addiction would be more dignified, or less.

January 18, 2026

Starting to recover. I missed out on a lot of good stuff while TFT was happening — it requires total focus, and I can’t even listen to music while I play. Went through a hundred new songs today; music is great! Between TFT and music, it’s got to be music. If it starts to happen again, I should remember music.

Also cleaned up Workflowy. Mostly it’s a graveyard of old ideas and lives I didn’t live. But there’s also the Compliments file — always a burst of sunshine. I had completely forgotten about writing a short play for AF’s farewell party at the end of sophomore year. She laughed so hard. I have enough talent to make a few people happy. I’m glad I’m starting to use it again.

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Punched in the Mouth

When I was 12, I got into an argument at summer camp with the kid whose bunk bed was below mine. I leaned down from my bed to make a point, and he punched me in the face.

I’d wrestled on the playground, but I had no framework for a punch. I didn’t know what to do: I couldn’t hit back at that angle, and I certainly wasn’t going to keep talking. Confused, I rolled over and went to sleep. I don’t remember the argument, but I guess I lost.

The Motto

I have two mottos. One is for self-improvement, adapted from Judith Shapiro:

Learning should make the inside of your head an interesting place to live.

I wrote about it yesterday.

The other is for acting in the world. It supposedly comes from Mike Tyson:

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

I wasn’t thinking of the summer camp kid when I chose it, but he’s still my only punch. Without him, maybe the quote wouldn’t have been salient. James — if you’re reading this, I owe you one.

Everyone had a plan

I mostly use the motto to help me appreciate other people.

Most of the “bad people” in our lives didn’t plan to be that way. Almost everyone wants security, love, and respect. And they want to get it the right way — working a useful job, attracting a partner, earning status through worthy deeds.

If a person’s life looks very different from that, it’s usually because something punched them in the face (drugs, abuse, a catchy wrong idea from an academic scribbler). And while I may never know the full story, I can at least remind myself that they didn’t want to be a liar, thief, or murderer at 12.

I don’t know many liars or thieves (much less murderers), but I do know people who are annoying or difficult in ways that make my life worse. That’s when I actually have to practice compassion — and the quote helps. Everyone had a plan: what looks like a bad trait might be a bad circumstance.1

But what if someone never had a plan? Some people don’t really think about the future.

“Never” is a long time. Are you sure? 

And if you’re right, that means something punched them when they were too young to plan: another reason to feel compassion.

Which plans deserve punching?

If you can punch away someone’s plans, that implies two things:

  1. If someone has a plan you can’t abide, punch them.
  2. If you want to make plans with someone, no punching!

I know a lot of nice people. One thing that trips them up is poorly applied politeness. If someone mistreats them, they’ll complain in private, but they’ll go to crazy lengths to avoid confrontation. I’ve seen a close friend be pressured into working for ten hours to avoid a ten-minute showdown with the selfish person responsible. If someone clearly doesn’t care about your wellbeing, approach them with stern words and an iron will.2

But some people need the opposite advice. Communities I love (effective altruism, rationality) struggle with the narcissism of small differences. People who share nearly every important value, and could easily work toward common goals, too often become enemies. Sometimes, this happens after one bad interaction.

The irony is that EAs and rationalists are good at small jabs — public debates that bruise without breaking. But an accusation of bad faith or rumor of criminal deeds is a punch to the mouth. It disorients the other party and makes it hard to keep talking, much less make plans. Sometimes, that’s for the best (we’ve seen plenty of bad faith and the occasional crime). But it’s tempting to go too far, because the Internet loves a good punch.

Very convenient — sometimes punching is right, sometimes wrong. How do you actually distinguish the two?

If someone’s plans are fundamentally opposed to yours, stop them. Don’t let people steal from you, or be cruel to you. If you want to change their behavior, your justice should be fair — but also swift and certain.

But if there’s any chance your plans can coexist, explore that. Set up a private conversation. Be wary of actions you can’t reverse; it’s hard to un-punch someone.

Don’t be too punchable

Memento percuti — remember that you can be punched.

In one sense, this is the lesson I learned at summer camp: don’t assume that rules will protect you. To paraphrase a fellow Tyson acolyte:

“The pain isn’t usually what overwhelms the individual: it’s their new understanding of what the world looks like and how unprepared they are to deal with it. The laws, social conventions, and agencies that keep us safe aren’t present in this moment. That frightening realization catches most people when the first punch lands; people shouldn’t be allowed to do that, but they are, and nobody is going to stop them.”

It’s also a punchy way of saying “be flexible”: keep your options open, make lots of small bets, and insure what you can’t afford to lose.3

The world will change a lot over the next few years. Punches will come from new directions. Guard your jaw.

 

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The Mind Is A House

The mind is a house you can’t escape. You live in your own head, and you’ll be trapped there for the rest of your life.

We all react to this in different ways. You can:

Leave the house for a while.

Drinking lets you open the door and wander around in your front yard.

Meditation lets you make the walls transparent, so you can pretend the house isn’t there.

LSD lets you climb up on the roof for a helicopter tour. But if things go wrong, you punch a hole in the roof and it leaks until you patch it up.

I’ve known people whose happiest moment was the first time they left — it helped them understand that the house was, in fact, a house.

Get roommates.

You can fill your house with replicas of other people.

Some people live with their friends. Some live with their parents. Some live with Jesus.

Some people have really accurate replicas. Others have weird broken versions that love them less and judge them more. I once spent several days being yelled at by a replica of my favorite professor, until I met her in person and realized I’d drawn her eyebrows way too angry.

Some people have houses so crowded that they have to squeeze around people to go anywhere; they might not even have their own rooms.

Roommates can be fun. And sometimes, someone really needs the space — like your kids, or your spouse. But you own the house. Your roommates don’t pay rent. If they trash the place, or insult the host, you can kick them out.

Open the windows.

You can’t escape the house, but you can look outside. Travel opens windows. So does meeting new people. As you create more views, you may feel less cramped inside your house, or learn to appreciate how cozy it is.

Perspective-taking is looking through your window into someone else’s house. If you concentrate, you might be able to walk around inside.

Decorate.

The most compelling reason to get a good education is that it makes the inside of your head an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.

—Judith Shapiro

If you look at art for a while, it might show up on your walls. If you read, you’ll get a mental library. By exploring new fields or philosophies, you can build entire rooms.

Decorating can be addictive. If you spend all your time shelving books and buying art (my weakness), you may find your house a bit stuffy and quiet. I wish I had more roommates.

Learn to keep your house in order.

Window stuck? Roommates won’t leave? Try becoming a better housekeeper.

When I get more sleep, I have an easier time decorating, and I stop tripping over that one broken step.

When I stick to my gratitude journal, the lights seem brighter.

Therapy offers tools: A rag and oil to get the window moving, a lock to keep the roommates out of your space.

But housekeeping alone doesn’t make a home. I’ve known people whose houses were incredibly tidy, but barely decorated; they were dusting empty shelves and wiping white walls.

 

Every single person has a house

I try to remember that everyone has a house.

If someone is an asshole, something might be wrong with their house: mean relatives who won’t leave, a backed-up disposal filling the place with foul odors.

This doesn’t mean you have to help them clean — though you can if you want to. It doesn’t mean you can’t shun them, or put them in actual prison if they hurt someone. But you can feel whatever sympathy seems right, and enjoy knowing that your own house doesn’t smell like garbage.

If someone has a mental illness, something is definitely wrong with their house. Maybe the lights are dim, and there aren’t any windows to let the sun inside. Maybe there’s a radio they can’t turn off, even to sleep. Maybe they have a violent roommate who routinely trashes the place. Whatever’s happening, they can’t escape. 

Some people are trapped in burning houses; we should put the fires out, even if they don’t want help.

by

Second Place Academy

On his first day at Divine Eagle Academy, Tetsu felt at home. This was a school for winners. The weight rooms stank with effort at the end of each day. Olympic hopefuls circled the tracks. Professional scouts bought parking passes in the principal’s office.

Tetsu liked to watch the afternoon buses roll in, full of doomed athletes from other schools. Some looked at the gleaming entrance and visibly swallowed. Others kept their eyes to the ground. Hours later, they’d limp away, tears making tiny marks on the sidewalk.

As a first-year shortstop, Tetsu had no hope of starting, but he was happy enough watching his seniors mercy-rule their opponents. He knew he’d get his chance. His training was scientific — broad jumps, power cleans, reaction drills, ice baths. He wasn’t first to arrive or last to leave, but that’s only because every one of his teammates was equally dedicated. They’d won the Koshien five years running, and #6 was guaranteed.

47,000 fans screamed as Matsuda hit the grand slam that would seal the final game.

Then the center fielder from Muddy River High ran up the wall and caught it. Four meters off the ground. Three outs.

But he didn’t stick the landing. He left the field on a stretcher, surrounded by his teammates. There were only ten. 

Tetsu counted them again. That’s… three pitchers and no backup fielders? How did they get to the finals?

No matter. It was still 4-1 in the bottom of the ninth. Their ace reliever, Suzuki, was fresh. The Divine Eagle Band played his fight song as he took the mound. Tetsu imagined sprinting out of the dugout, joining his comrades to wave the navy pennant.

Suzuki struck out the first batter with a splitter, the second with a sinker.

The third, a beanpole whose glasses glinted in the stadium lights, fouled off eight pitches before walking.

The fourth, one of the scrawniest high-schoolers Tetsu had ever seen, laid down a desperate bunt and beat the throw.

The fifth batter, Tetsu recognized. It was Izaya, who was expelled from Divine Eagle last year after a brawl with Suzuki over some girl. The pitcher stared him down, then brushed him back with an inside fastball. Izaya yelled something, Suzuki yelled back. Tetsu couldn’t make it out over the fight songs and cheer squads.

Izaya hammered Suzuki’s next pitch right back at him. It hit him in the nuts — ow! — but Suzuki somehow controlled it, stopping anyone from reaching home. Then he hobbled off the field with his arm around Coach Takashi’s shoulders.

Takashi handed Suzuki off to his assistants. He looked to the dugout. Ushida, who’d pitched a shutout the night before, rose to his feet.

“He’s mine.”

“Are you sure, Ushida? How’s the arm?”

“He already struck out twice tonight. He can’t touch me in his condition.”

After a long look, Takashi nodded. Ushida trotted out to the mound. Tetsu felt the impact as 94,000 hands began to applaud.

But they weren’t applauding Ushida. That center fielder was back — hobbling to the plate. The scoreboard announced him as Mizuno Ryota.

What is happening? He can’t even walk!

As he took his stance, both schools’ bands inexplicably fell silent. The cheer squad captains lowered their megaphones. Tetsu could hear the players clearly.

“You already failed twice!” Ushida cried out. “And now you’ll be the final out! Why so stubborn?”

Do they know each other?

“Baseball is like life!” replied Mizuno. “Everyone gets out sometimes! But even if you fail twice, one for three still makes a great player! I’m not done yet!”

“You’re pathetic!”

“No!” Mizuno lifted his bat, swaying slightly with the pain. He pointed to the left-field wall — a called shot. The crowd gasped. “I’m going to be a great ballplayer! I am… the Boy with the Golden Bat!”

Tetsu’s teammates were cackling, but he didn’t join in. He was getting a funny feeling about this whole situation.

Mizuno settled into a stiff crouch. Ushida hurled a fastball straight past him, then another. The bat never left his shoulder.

“This is the last one, Ryota Mizuno! I’m ending your career today!”

“Bring it on!”

Ushida released the pitch. Mizuno whipped around with a cry of pain, practically flinging his bat in front of it. Tetsu’s mouth fell open at the sound — the purest crack! he’d ever heard. The ball flew over the left field fence.

Ushida punched the ground. Tetsu’s tears made tiny marks in the dirt.

“I still can’t believe what happened,” said Tetsu. It was the first lunch period after summer break. He sat with three friends, desks pushed together into a square.

“One of the craziest games I’ve ever seen,” said Kenji.

“One?”

“I still think our final was worse. We were up by 20 with six minutes to go, and this punk with bleached hair hit seven threes in a row. I wanted to give up on basketball forever.”

“You should’ve seen the volleyball final,” said Naoki. “They had this kid — must’ve been 160 centimeters tops, but he could jump as high as Kuroba!”

“Soccer wasn’t even fair,” grumbled Daiki.

“You lost to a foreigner, right?”

“He’s half-Japanese, half-Brazilian. I looked him up. His grandfather was, er, Pelé.”

“What?”

“His Brazilian dad showed up at the match. They were hugging each other and crying. Apparently he spent the guy’s whole childhood in prison on false charges.”

“I mean, good for them, but it does suck for you.”

“Have you seen Twitter?” asked Kenji. “People are calling us Second Place Academy.”

“Because we went one season without a championship? That’s stupid.”

“Yeah. Next year will be different. No more freak accidents.”

Next year was not different.

Nishikawa, the school’s tennis ace, made the national finals but lost to some nobody who started two years ago — and was dating Nishikawa’s ex-girlfriend.

Mihara, Tetsu’s girlfriend, lost her most important kendo match to a full-blown gyaru who tripped over nothing and struck the winning blow by chance.

In the national meet, their relay team lost to a team of… horse girls? They all wore headbands with animal ears and impractical shoes and won by forty meters.

Second place, second place, second place.

Tetsu ran three miles every morning and lifted weights three times a week. He made the baseball starting nine, and they swept the regular season. But in the Koshien, they were shocked in the semifinals by some industrial school with no baseball pedigree. They were enormous — Tetsu knew about steroids, but could steroids also make you taller? They smashed five home runs and played ironclad defense; Divine Eagle never stood a chance. 

As he endured a series of crushing handshakes from men shaped like refrigerators, Tetsu spotted Muddy River High’s team in the stands. Their glasses kid was scribbling notes. Mizuno — sorry, “Golden Bat” Mizuno — looked worried.

Tetsu skipped the finals, but couldn’t stop himself from watching the last innings on TV. Mizuno, who had acquired a black eye somewhere, came up with two outs in the ninth. His shallow fly caught a freak gust of wind and bounced off the left fielder’s swollen head for a home run.

After summer break, the atmosphere was terrible. It didn’t improve.

The Divine Eagle sumo captain got tossed out of the ring by an ex-judoka who, according to his own Twitter, took up the sport after becoming “addicted to pizza”. (Tetsu now spent his evenings on Twitter, defending his school’s honor in #SecondPlaceAcademy threads.)

The new American football team, a group of bitter refugees from second-place teams across the school, cruised through its matches with sheer athleticism — until a team of juvenile delinquents left them bleeding in the dust.

Tetsu’s new girlfriend — Mihara had left school to train her swordsmanship in the mountains — set a national record on the balance beam. This was immediately broken by a girl with violet hair who got the highest possible score, looking bored the whole time. Then some guy in a gi jumped out of the stands and proposed to her. She broke his nose with a kick and fled the gym as he stood there with his bouquet, blood gushing down, still smiling.

In his third year, Tetsu tore his ACL. No more baseball.

At first, he staggered out to practice on crutches. But he couldn’t stand the mournful glances from his teammates, or the thought of watching another second place.

He took to spending his time in the library, scrolling Twitter and watching scrappy outsiders beat objectively better teams. The contagion was spreading; no champion was safe.

One day in June, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see three students — a short boy with a binder, a tall boy with thick glasses, and a shockingly beautiful girl — crowded around his computer.

“You’re Hayashi Tetsu, right?” said the girl.

“Yeah. What’s it to you?”

“Looks like you’re a real sports fanatic,” said Binder. 

“You could say that.”

“We’re starting a team,” said Glasses. “A fantasy sports team.”

“What are fantasy sports?”

“It’s a big-time thing in America,” he replied. “You pick teams of players from different schools, and score points if they do well.”

“This is its first year as an official sport in Japan,” said the girl. She had pink hair, and her uniform broke at least three rules. “All the best academic schools are favored; they have huge teams. Everyone here plays a sport, so we can’t even find a fourth member.”

“But then we saw you!” said Binder. “It looks like you have time — no offense — and we could use someone with real experience to give us a leg up. Someone with an eye for raw talent, who can see past the numbers and pick the right underdogs.”

“With your help,” said Glasses, “we could make this year a real… Allsports Fantasy!”

“A what? Why is your voice like that? Why are you putting emphasis at the beginning of those words?”

“All great questions, which we will gladly answer in the clubroom. Fair warning: It used to be a broom closet.”

“Are you in?” asked the girl.

Tetsu thought for a moment, then sighed.

“Guess I’ll give it a shot. I know a winner when I see one.”

by

A Reader’s Guide to Alicorn

Every few months, my RSS feed tells me there’s a new Alicorn story, and it feels like seeing a stray Christmas present under the tree.

I first discovered Alicorn when she wrote about disliking surprise gifts. But her stories are surprise gifts — the small, heavy kind that don’t rattle when you shake them.

Alicorn is among the greatest living authors of speculative fiction.4 She invented a popular microgenre and wrote least five collections’ worth of short fiction. But she’s criminally underrated; I’ve met fans of HPMOR or Worth the Candle who aren’t even aware of her.

Hence, this guide for new readers.

What makes Alicorn great

Alicorn writes without affectation. Her work is clear and easy to follow, even when a twist reframes the rest of a story. The people act like people — they have hobbies, emotions, motives, and flaws. I’ve never lost immersion because a character was acting ridiculous or a setting fell apart under examination.

Those characters and settings are deceptively deep. Reading Alicorn, I see one tiny corner of a larger world; I sense that she could start following a random side character without losing me. Her short stories feel like long stories; novellas feel like novels.

She’s gotten better over time. I reread 20 of her stories today; a few felt thin upon revisiting, but they were from 2009 and 2012. This decade, it’s been heater after heater. The concepts are denser and the twists are twistier. The surrounding worlds unwrap themselves in your mind without even needing to be written. Nearly every new story deserves a sequel — if only this wouldn’t take away time from new stories, which might deserve sequels even more.

Selected stories

I can’t say much about the plots, because discovering them is half the fun.

These are all selected from her short fiction. I’m still exploring her books, and I’ll get to the glowfic if we ever solve aging.

Under 5,000 words

Succulent: No humans in this one, but otherwise it’s the perfect starter story — premise, personality, twist, close the tab, stare at the wall.

Story Of: A remix of Arrival, with a better ending.

Dogs: “Nothing good was preserved, and nothing bad had context.” Future generations will think we were hopelessly morally confused. (If you like this, there’s a small chance you’ll like this essay I wrote, also about dogs.)

Princess Innocence: I wish I could be an eight-year-old girl reading this, or a parent sending it to my eight-year-old girl.

Threshold: Cleanest twist I ever saw. This is trans-everything fiction — it’s about changing religions and genders and genetics and substrates of reality. And it’s ten pages long!

Strax: Sympathetic non-magical parents? In my fantasy genre?

Tower: Under 1000 words, and perfect.

Over 5,000 words

Khan: A horror story about good luck.

Hollow Grove: Like Succulent, a story about things being grown by other things. There are many places you might catch the twist; all satisfy.

Specter Sanctuary: One of Alicorn’s specialties is writing futures that are better than the present, but still logistically imperfect. This one takes a top-three Black Mirror episode (“San Junipero”) and adds enough weight to anchor a multi-season series.

Ibyabek: Dystopia, but the realistic kind: stale bread and broken tech and people who steal to supplement their flimsy state salaries and crutches that must be returned to the hospital when you’re done with them. I genuinely think this deserved to be a Hugo finalist — it reminds me of many recent Hugo nominees in its themes and structure, but with better prose and fewer words.

 

by

The War on Terrible Decisions

Want to hear a horrifying story?

A middle-class woman and her husband struggle with home and car payments. The woman wants children but feels she can’t afford them.

In a stroke of luck, she inherits $80,000 from her grandmother — enough to pay down debts and even start a family.

She uses it to build a driveway for her father-in-law’s fancy fishing cabin. The reason: “My husband and his father REALLY like fishing…”

I don’t know this woman. Maybe the decision made sense.

But if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be surprised. People make terrible decisions all the time — giving away years of their lives, or tens of thousands of dollars, for very little benefit.

Life would still be hard without this. We’d still have cancer and hurricanes and armed robbery. But much of our misery is self-inflicted.

Terrible decisions

By “terrible decision”, I don’t mean:

  • Impulsive acts, like a bar fight that ends in murder.
  • Premeditated crime, where criminals improve their lives by hurting others.
  • Bad policy, where corrupt politicians and interest groups take our money.

I’m talking about decisions where nearly everyone ends up worse off, including the decision-maker. It’s a fuzzy boundary, but I think the $80,000 driveway counts.

So do these:

There are reasons people do these things. But if they made other decisions, their lives would predictably go better.

How can we reduce terrible decisions?

For the rest of this post, I’m picturing the U.S., but the ideas could apply anywhere.

We have social infrastructure for some of this: drug rehab, small business counseling, legal efforts to stop conversion therapy.

And there are bloggers and podcasters who share good advice widely: the driveway story came from the forum of Mr. Money Mustache, who I’d guess has prevented hundreds of equally terrible decisions.

Nonetheless, people keep making them.5 How can we stop this from happening?

On its face, this is a ridiculous question. There are a thousand kinds of terrible decision, and you can’t monitor 300 million people. But there are also a thousand ways to commit crimes, and we still try to stop those — at least the most damaging ones.

What would it look like to build social infrastructure for reducing terrible decisions in general, the way we try to reduce crime with police and courts?

“Decision police” aren’t the right approach; people have a right to make (most) terrible decisions.

But what about decision counselors? Here’s a half-baked sketch:

  • Once a year, the government offers you $150 to visit a decision counselor, with a small payment to your employer so you can take a half-day. It isn’t mandatory like the DMV or jury duty, but it’s still a normal thing to do.
  • It’s the same counselor you saw last year! You talk about whatever’s new — family, health, money, school, career. (You answered a few questions ahead of time.)
  • She isn’t an expert on any one topic, but she knows enough, and has enough AI support, to notice issues, ask follow-up questions, and refer you to public resources.
    • “Have you thought about ways to save money on that Disney trip?”
    • “I know a pastor who’s helped families in your situation — want his number?”
    • “You’re thinking about X College? Here’s some data on its job placement rate.”
    • “Starting a family is more affordable than you might think; there are federal tax breaks and our state has a baby bonus program. Want to learn more?”
  • If you pay attention and engage in conversation, you get the money. The counselor gets evaluated… somehow.6

Decision counselors are reasonably well-paid state employees. The jobs are taken by the kinds of pleasant, competent people who might otherwise become actuaries, librarians, or social workers. As government jobs go, it’s appealing — at least compared to running a post office or teaching algebra.

Meanwhile, the people who take the $150 will often be those without much access to good advice from peers or paid professionals. They could ignore the advice, but they’ll also know the stories about counselors helping people find apartments or saving them from scammers. If you’re paid to be there anyway, why not ask a few questions?

The service isn’t cheap. But the government already buys you 30 minutes a year with a doctor making $250,000; it can swing 60 minutes with a counselor making $80,000.7

This literal idea probably can’t work. Even with AI help, you’d need to train a few hundred thousand counselors to cover the U.S., and the government would find plenty of ways to corrupt the idea.8 But I think we should look for other ways to get tough on terrible decisions, and to raise society’s bar until more of the ideas that ruin lives are safely underwater.