For today’s Inkhaven post, I built something I’ve wanted for a while: a database of “art with EA vibes”, for artistic content that relates to ideas or themes in effective altruism.
I’ve embedded the database below. You can read more about it here.
Author: Aaron
Protein Bars I’ve Known and Loved
My assistant cross-country coach used to bribe me. If I ran for 20 minutes in agony, she’d give me a Clif Bar on the bus ride home.
The bribery worked, because I was, and remain, a fiend for food in bar form. I even made my own to save money, mixing whey and eggs and oats — they were great, aside from the part where they grew mold at room temperature and I didn’t know until I’d eaten two. I think it’s the last time I ever vomited. So that was it for me and homemade bars.
Most of my disposable income in college went to feed my obsession. An excerpt:
I bought most bars from Amazon, but they didn’t stock one of my favorites: Detour Peanut Butter Cream, which I got from a little convenience store behind the dorm. It was run by an Israeli couple who got to know me and my standard order (the bar, plus a diet ginger ale). We had many brief, sincere conversations across four years. I knew them better than most of my professors.
Half a lifetime later, those bars are still among the best I’ve had. They aren’t manufactured anymore.1
Here’s to the five-star bars I had to mark “Discontinued” in my personal protein database:
- RXBar Layers Peanut Butter Chocolate
- Optimum Nutrition Cake Bites
- Optimum Nutrition Chocolate Sea Salt Bites
- The emperor of bars: Supreme Protein Peanut Butter Crunch. I still remember the feeling of that first bite, and the smell of a freshly opened wrapper. The nuts embedded in the chocolate shell. Fuck!
Did you say “personal protein database”?
I did. This is the official public launch:
I might fill in more stats someday. But I don’t feel the need to make it comprehensive — I see it as more museum than buyer’s guide. (Something tells me my tastes aren’t typical.)
That said, if you’re just getting into protein bars and want a spiritual guide — or a few recommendations — I’m available.
What country has the best protein bars outside America?
Australia. And I might drop “outside America”.
I visited five convenience stores — three in Sydney, one in Sydney Airport, and one in a small regional airport. They all had vastly better selection than comparable stores in the U.S. I didn’t have time to visit the Aussie equivalent of a GNC, but one day, I will return. Keep your shelves stocked.
That’s Harbor Bridge in the background. I took a tour later. Their gift shop was the one sad exception: no bars.
Why protein bars?
In college, I realized that no one would make me run for 20 minutes ever again. I celebrated by gaining 40 pounds of muscle. The dining hall couldn’t keep up; it was a year of bars and basement barbells.
I got in the habit of trying new bars whenever I found them. Some became staples. Some were the worst things I’ve ever chewed. But even a bad bar makes a good story.
Now that I’ve crossed 150 bars in the database, it’s fun to think about reaching 200, maybe 250, before the singularity hits and I can synthesize a new bar for breakfast every morning of my life.
Writing Advice I Actually Use
I’ve been a salaried writer and editor for the last eight years: newsletters, websites, blog posts, essays, and a bit of research.
People sometimes ask me for writing tips. This post collects my advice — all of which I still use myself.
Preparation
Read good writing.
The more good writing you see, the more you’ll notice when your own writing sounds off.
Read the sort of thing you want to write. If you spend the day on Twitter, your thoughts will take the shape of Twitter posts — which is great if you want to write for Twitter (no shame in that), but not so good for longer work.
I like this line from Scott Alexander:
Almost the only good advice in any discipline is “develop instincts, then use them”.
You develop instincts by writing and reading; writing is best, but reading is easier. And it’s hard to learn through writing alone if you don’t know what you’re trying to become.
Take notes.
Things happen around you all day. If you aren’t reading, you’re working, or walking around and noticing stuff. If something makes you stop and think, or makes you want to complain, or sends you on a brief flight of fancy, write that down.
I have a couple of Notion files for this — one for fiction, one for blog posts, and one “commonplace book” where I copy down interesting text (books, essays, anime). Make your own files on whatever service you’ll actually use.
In the last 24 hours, I’ve written the notes:
- “Buying art”, because I talked to someone about how much I love buying art and decided to promote the idea.
- “Anti-follows”, because I read something so bad I wanted to give the account negative one follow, but that’s impossible. So now I want to think of ways to punish them the equivalent amount.
- A fiction idea inspired by a story I read, with a cool premise and bad execution. “I could do that better!” is a great motivation — you either write something good or learn a valuable lesson about hubris.
Decide whether something is worth writing.
The fastest way to write something is not to write it.
When I reviewed ~600 saved-up ideas recently, I threw out around half of them. Some expired, some were stupid, some were too hard, and some had already been written (well enough that I wasn’t motivated to surpass them).
Before you spend hours writing something, spend five minutes checking whether it’s already out there. (Unless it’s something only you could write.) If you find something great, pick another topic — or write a commentary on the other piece, or find some way to mix it in with your work. For example, I quoted other reviews when I reviewed The Book of Disquiet.
Also keep the audience in mind. Will you be satisfied if your piece is read by ten people? Would it need to be a thousand? Or perhaps ten very specific people? Can you make sure they’ll see it?
Think about your readers.
You publish work because you want someone to read it. Who are they? What do they want?
And what do you want from them? Should they feel a certain way? Laugh, cry, get mad? Should they remember an important fact?
Should they leave the post with a next action — buy a new chair, practice juggling, donate to GiveWell, call their representative?
If you’re lucky, you get one or two things from each reader. Focus on the most important ask. You can even make it the title:
Writing
Skip whatever blocks you.
If something isn’t flowing, add a note like FIX LATER and move on.
Most of the time, you should separate research from writing. Don’t look up facts mid-essay unless they’ll determine your next move — type FILL IN LATER and keep going.
If something bores you, or you get stuck, skip it. You may reach the end and discover you didn’t need it. Aella says it well:
In marketing, your boredom itself is a virtue. If you are writing a blog post and discover your attention is wandering, STOP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE. If you are trying to explain a concept and the life drains out of you, STOP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE. It’s an important signal!! If your attention fades off of it, probably others’ will too.
If you’re really stuck, and you don’t even know where you’d skip to, try:
- Sleeping on it.
- Writing disconnected sentences about the topic until you hit a thread worth continuing.
- Asking AI for ideas — like a fancier version of lateral thinking cards.
- The best prompt likely isn’t “what should I say next?” — though you can try that, prompts are cheap — but something like “what does this make you think about?” or “imagine being TYPE OF READER, what are you curious about now?” Think of the AI as a reader, not a writer.
Only use extra words if you have a reason.
By default, nonfiction writing should be short. It helps the reader pay attention and remember things later. Most editing is finding shorter ways to say the same thing.
Excess words are fine as long as they do something. If you feel sad about cutting something, talk to yourself and explain why. Any reason is good enough — “it sounds better”, “it’s more specific”, “it makes me laugh”, “it adds clarity”. But you’ll find that most of the excess was just sitting around not doing much.
Write in sentences.
It’s easier to think in sentences, not paragraphs.
If I’m struggling with something, I give each sentence its own line. That makes them easier to examine — is this true? Does it need to be here? Does it overlap the next sentence?
Once the sentences are in shape, you can decide how to connect them into paragraphs. Most paragraphs should be two or three sentences.
Long, loopy, weird sentences can be fun. But you should surround them with short, clear sentences; the contrast makes them sing.
Keep your voice alive.
Writing isn’t just about efficiency. Inefficiency is human. Voice is human. It’s nice to read something and see the human on the other end.
Humor is awesome. I wish just about everything had more jokes. Don’t feel like you have to cut jokes — if something makes you laugh, that’s a fantastic reason to keep it, even if you think it might be stupid. But don’t force it; trying to add jokes later is a bad sign, with rare exceptions (stand-up comedy, speeches where the crowd is half-asleep and desperately wants to feel something).
If you think in footnotes, add footnotes.
Write the beginning next to last — or skip it.
The beginning is the second-most important part. It’s how we decide whether to read the rest. Write it next to last, when you have the advantage of maximum context.
If you write the beginning first, you might find by the end that it no longer makes sense and has to be rewritten, or removed entirely. But if you leave it for next to last, you might find that you want to write something different, or nothing at all — sweet!
On “nothing at all”: Plenty of pieces are fine starting where they start, without a real introduction. Ask yourself: Would the reader actually be confused without this? Would something important be lost?
Write the title last.
The title is the most important part.
If you know exactly what the reader wants, your title can be workmanlike and literal: Things I recommend you buy and use, Playing Magic: the Gathering for money.
If all you know is “they want something to read”, draw them in. You can win the reader’s attention by yelling at them, making them squint and say “what?”, talking about sticky topics like sex or death, or making them feel seen.
Good titles from other Inkhaven writers:
- Kill Yourself Cave (striking, weird, taboo)
- Persuading a million people to do something is easier than persuading one (makes you squint, has a big number)
- Rooms that hate you (striking, strong emotion, talks directly to you)
- You don’t have to say “I’m good, how are you?” (but… I do say that! How did he know? There’s a better way?)
If you have a good visible tagline, you can get away with a bland title: “Dr. Strangelove” vs. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”.
Editing
Change the form to wake up your brain.
When you stare at words on your computer for long enough, you stop seeing them. Your brain skims past them, picking up the meaning without actually reading sentences.
Fix this by taking the words off your computer:
- Read them out loud so you hear them instead of looking.
- Better yet, have a friend (or an AI) read them out loud, so you hear them in a different voice. Your friend might stumble over a sentence that worked for you because they don’t know what comes next.
- Print them out and edit on paper, with a pen. (I did this throughout college.)
Another technique is to give each sentence its own line (like I mentioned earlier). Read each one alone, so its neighbors can’t hide its flaws.
Don’t stress about making it perfect.
Every hour of editing helps less than the previous hour. Once you reach draft #3, further edits probably aren’t worth it. (There are exceptions — your thesis, an article you’re trying to sell — but casual blog posts aren’t among them.)
Every hour of editing is an hour you aren’t writing. You’ll develop faster as a writer, and write more good stuff, if you focus on creating more and taking more risks, instead of polishing your early work.
I dropped this blog for a long time because I couldn’t publish without far too many edits, even though I had almost no readers. It stopped being fun. And now, when I go back and read those early “perfected” posts, they mostly seem… bad. I wasn’t a good enough writer to make anything perfect, so why was I trying so hard?2
Write too little, not too much.
Err on the side of making things too short.
It saves the reader’s time, and yours. Even if it’s easy to throw everything onto a page, it makes editing harder. Consider removing things instead of refining them.
If you leave some things unwritten, and leave the reader wanting more, you have a natural hook for a followup post — something that will bring them back, and get them in the habit of reading you. But if the reader gets tired, they’ll leave before the end: much worse.
Use AI.
It’s cheap, fast, and somewhat helpful. It tends to give good line edits, and correctly point out the most boring content.
I listen to maybe two-thirds of Claude’s suggestions, mostly around sharpening sentences to be less vague, obvious, or cluttered. I tend to ignore suggestions about removing jokes or things Claude finds “too cute”.
As of April 2026, it still isn’t a good writer, or a good rewriter.
I rarely use Claude’s suggested titles, but I often take a suggestion and find a better variation.
My standard editing prompt:
Here’s a blog post, written for audience X. I want them to (feel/think do) X.
- What’s the implied promise of this post, and do I deliver on it?
- Is any material not pulling its weight? If you had to cut 20%, what would it be?
- What’s the slowest part?
- Where am I going through the motions?
- What’s most memorable? What would someone share if they liked the post?
- Where does the voice feel flat or generic?
- What did you want to know more about?
- Where should I be more specific?
- My current title is X. Give me ten better suggestions.
I cut the “slowest part” (identified correctly), rewrote the “most cuttable” bullet list, and left the advice section untouched.
Other good advice
William Zinsser wrote my favorite book about writing. Very tactical and a pleasure to read.
These essays are worth your time:
- Scott Alexander (mostly nonfiction)
- George Saunders (mostly fiction)
- Joanna Wiebe, Stripe (mostly sales)
Good News I Rarely Think About
Media, social or otherwise, tends to surface bad news: things you don’t normally notice that make you sad or angry when you do.
These three stories are the opposite: good news I rarely notice. They also apply to most people reading this.
My friends aren’t dead
One night in Wisconsin, I dreamed my friend Xuan was dead.
The sky was dark gray and cloudless. A crowd of silhouettes whispered the news. I talked to them yesterday, I thought. Why are they dead? How are they dead?
I woke up in a panic and checked Facebook. As Xuan’s page loaded, I remembered that dreams weren’t real. Death was real, but not this particular death.
I felt amazing the next day. I kept thinking about whatever Xuan was doing at that moment: studying, rehearsing, eating lunch. We weren’t even all that close, but it was amazing to know they still drew breath.
If I dreamed about another friend dying tonight, I think I’d wake up feeling the same way: profound gratitude for their existence.
Therefore, I should feel that way now.
I just spent a few minutes meditating on the existence of random people I know. They are all out there, somewhere, being themselves. Andrew is repairing someone’s nose. Dan is playing with his baby. Britney is collecting adventures to blog about. What fantastic news!
I wish I could more easily tell my friends that I love the fact of their existence. This essay is one attempt; so is this one.
My neighbors would fight ICE
My wife and I wanted to get ice cream, but the line was too long. San Diego has a lot of long lines. The beaches are crowded. Rush hour starts at 3:30. People people people.
Despite my self-professed humanism, I still get antsy in crowds. But that night, as we gave up on ice cream, I thought about the crowds of Minneapolis. Masked gunmen invaded the city and shoved people into unmarked vans, but the crowds of Minneapolis slowed them down. They stood in the snow and blocked the streets. They whistled and filmed and followed vans full of people who might kill them.
San Diego, like almost every U.S. city, is a liberal place. If ICE came here tomorrow, it would look like a sunny Minneapolis. Instead of hogging the ice cream, the crowds would be making ICE scream. (I’m not sorry.)
Just like I know my friends are out there, I know my neighbors would step up if times became extreme. This isn’t true of all times and places, but it seems to be true more often than not, and I certainly think it’s true of my 21st-century American city.
You’d like most people if you got to know them
If you traveled to most places, and spent some time living with the locals, you’d probably come away liking those places and people. Some of this is the mere exposure effect; some of it is because most people are friendly and hospitable.3 (“We treat guests well” is one of those things every culture thinks about itself, but that just makes it a human universal, like storing sewing supplies in cookie tins.)
More than any generation in history, we live surrounded by strangers. It doesn’t help that the most visible strangers are often people living on the street, in situations that make it hard to be hospitable or pleasant.
But so often, a stranger is a friend you haven’t met.4 Or at least a person as real and important as the people you know. If circumstances brought you together — ICE invasion, AA meeting, playoff game in a bar — you’d probably get along fine.
Conclusion: You should like most people now.
I wrote more about this idea here, as it applies to charity.
Just as Best as You Are
In 2013, I pitched a story on middle school math to America’s finest magazines. I failed.
I wrote the story anyway, hoping to sell it somewhere. The most normal 1500 words wound up, unpaid, in a magazine for middle-school math teachers.
This is the rest. (With a few notes from 2026.)
When you reach the finals at MATHCOUNTS, you face your first level playing field.
You’ve been the best forever. Best student in your class, your school, your state. Now you’re on a stage with 11 other kids, just as best as you are.
But that’s not true. There is equality in math, but not MATHCOUNTS. It ends in a series of head-to-head competitions. 11 of you are about to be worse than someone.
The other kids don’t look as scared as you feel.
This image took me way, way back. Apparently they do an esports version these days.
I’m in the audience, trying to impress an eighth-grader.
The average age of three members of a quartet is 57 years. What is the age of the fourth member, in years, if the quartet’s overall average age is 62 years?
David Zhu, finalist, hits the buzzer.
I’m faster. I’ve already whispered the answer to my seatmate Arjun: “77.”
“77,” Daniel announces. It’s the winning point. His opponent, Nicholas Sun, has set. Daniel advances to the round of 8.
“Nice!” says Arjun. He’s from team Virginia. He saw me taking notes, got curious, and soon became the best friend I’ve made in this place.
I needed a friend. As a student journalist, I’m used to blending in — either with students or with journalists. At MATHCOUNTS, I’m too old to compete and too young to be a teacher. I don’t fit.
This isn’t the fault of the MATHCOUNTS Foundation: they’ve been excellent hosts. Any chance for public attention, even the faint hope I represent, is unusual. The competition’s a tough sell: rustier than the Intel Talent Search, sweatier than the Scripps National Spelling Bee. No one wants to watch algebra on TV.
But even if MATHCOUNTS isn’t relevant, the kids themselves are. This is the smartest room in Washington, and Raytheon is watching. (Seriously: They’re sitting behind me.)
“You’re good,” says Arjun.
“I remember some of my old tricks. These will get harder, though.” I write a small checkmark in my notebook. So far it’s Aaron 5, Mathletes 3. I won’t stay ahead for long.
Arjun says he wants to apply to MIT. I ask if he’s hacked anything lately. He’s plotting to get Pokémon Fire Red running on his graphing calculator.
“The emulator is Linux, and the calculator is Windows”, he says. “So I’ll probably have to pull an all-nighter to get the code right. But it’s definitely possible.”
It was, in fact, possible.
In middle school, I went to MATHCOUNTS twice. The second time, one of my Delaware teammates finished 205th out of 224 competitors. We all thought that was pretty embarrassing. But he still made it to the Ivy League, where he studies mechanical engineering and computer science. Someday he’ll help design a car that several million people drive or an electric toothbrush that ends cavities or maybe a new missile.
For a few hundred thou, Raytheon gets three days of marketing to 250 brilliant kids. An Under Secretary of Defense stops in to give a speech about majoring in STEM: “Your country needs you.” Mathletes are pure potential energy, and someday they’ll convert it into something stronger than algebra. Who gets to use those brains?
Maybe it will be the second sponsor: Texas Instruments. I can’t imagine they need the marketing, but they paid up anyway, and gave out 250 free calculators — next to Raytheon, they’re saints.
Between rounds, I ask Arjun for his feelings on the military-industrial complex. He hasn’t noticed the vast forces tugging at his future. I decide to think about this later.5
If m is removed at random from the set {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}, and then n is chosen at random from the remaining numbers, what is the probability that x2 + 2mx + n2 = 0 will have two real solutions?
In my day, I was fast. At my first Nationals, I was whispering answers to teammates at the speed of 2006 champion Daesun Yim, who is now building software at Palantir Technologies to help the government fight terrorists.6
Even today, I could beat 3 or 4 of the finalists. Back then, it would’ve been 8 or 9, had I studied hard enough to ace the written test and qualify for the “countdown round”.
It would’ve been 8 or 9, I tell myself. Respectable. But even so, I see Ashwin Sah, and I know that I was never the best. I was never even close. The U.S. military can’t have me, but if they take Ashwin, they’ll still win their wars.
On the high stage, seated behind one of the adult-size podiums, Ashwin looks to be about 4’8 and 80 pounds. He annihilates his first opponent, and though his semifinal match goes to 3-3, every point he doesn’t score feels like a stroke of misfortune in a Shakespeare comedy. The end is never in doubt.
Alec Sun, who made the finals last year and also in 2011 as a sixth-grader, is tearing up the other side of the bracket. I can’t match his pace; no more checkmarks for me.
As a “fun fact”, the moderator told the auditorium that Alec hadn’t scored a single finals point in his first two tries. But the rude anecdote doesn’t slow him down. It’s like he spent the last year meditating on a mountain instead of studying math. He had the math already, and now he has the nerves, while Hongyi Chen can barely breathe and another kid cries upon defeat.
Before long, Alec descends the mountain to face Ashwin. Now we’ll see who’s best.
It’s not a real mountain, but the kids did set the Guinness World Record for “fastest time to arrange the first 25 rows of Pascal’s Triangle (Human Formation)”. Look it up.
David Foster Wallace once described a tennis match as “carnage of a particularly high-level sort… like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator.”
Alec and Ashwin are predators of equal size — once cheetahs, now jaguars. They stalk each other warily, buzzing in slower. These are the competition’s hardest problems, and no mistake will go unpunished.
A rhombus has sides of length 10 inches, and the lengths of its diagonals differ by 3 inches. What is the area of the rhombus, in square inches?
((x-1)! * (x+1)! )/(x!)2 = 1.125. What is the value of x?
[I couldn’t transcribe this one, but it had a circle inside a square which was itself inside a circle inside a square. Someone answered before my brain could even process the problem.]
With the slower pace, I actually score a couple of points — though I need to be reckless, guessing wildly and getting some wrong. In spite of my errors, Arjun is impressed.
I’m feeling sorry for the parents, who have math genes but are thirty years removed from algebra; can they even track what’s happening?
But then, after a series of heavy blows, Alec and Ashwin are tied 3-3. Everyone understands that math: next answer wins. It’s Game 7, bottom of the ninth — and here’s the pitch!
What is the greatest integer that must be a factor of the sum of any four consecutive positive odd integers?
It’s an easy question for the finals. The boys read, think about sample digits, add those digits, and factor them in the span of four seconds. Ashwin’s hand is first to the buzzer. Fly ball, deep left field…
“Two.”
I drop my pen. Ashwin’s wrong. 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 is 16, 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 is 24, the pattern continues, and the ball falls into Alec’s glove. No mistake goes unpunished. He gets a leisurely ten seconds to check his work.
“Eight.”
When I watch the final question again on YouTube, the camera pans away from the boys’ handshake. That’s a shame: I found the handshake comforting. If the best of us couldn’t work together, we’d never have invented the electric toothbrush.
Speaking of reasons to brush one’s teeth: Raytheon sponsored our dessert.
Tautologies: If You Know, You Know
I
In high school, I convinced my cross-country team to wear shirts that said:
“To run faster, you must run faster.”
Some people didn’t get it. One day, we were stretching next to some cheerleaders, and they began to debate whether the quote had meaning.
“It’s not actually saying anything! It’s like, like…”
“No, it makes sense! You’ve gotta run faster if you want to run faster. There’s no trick.”
When I tell people that story, half agree with Cheerleader #1, the other half with #2. No obvious pattern; some people are just tautology people. If you know, you know.
II
I fucking love tautologies. A logically self-evident statement clears the air: there’s nothing to agree or disagree with. You just have to accept it and move on. It is what it is.
III
A tautology, like the eighteenth camel, can be helpful even if it adds nothing.
My favorite teacher survived a bout with cancer in our senior year and came back smiling. Then Race to the Top broke her spirit: Delaware’s new mandates forced her to teach special ed with no training, making her job feel almost impossible.
One day after school, we talked about it for two hours. She was in tears, not knowing how she’d make it through the next year. I didn’t know what to say: I had no life experience and no understanding of district policy. All I had was tautology:
“If it can’t continue, it won’t continue. Something will change. Maybe they’ll change the rules, or maybe you’ll find a new school. But it won’t be like this forever.”
Somehow, this worked. She was happier when I left. I couldn’t stop Arne Duncan’s reign of terror, but I could help Dr. Greenstone reframe: if it can’t go on like this, it won’t go on like this.
IV
Nature is tautological. An object in motion keeps moving. That which survives, survives.
That second one turned Douglas Adams into a tautology guy:
I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information has gone into it but that no consequence has come out of it.
So, we may have accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it’s the only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support from any other place, is self evident, hence tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects.
“Astonishingly powerful” undersells the point: a good tautology is undeniable. To run faster, you really must run faster. If you can’t run faster, then you won’t run faster — but the only solution is to run faster.
When I designed those cross-country shirts, maybe I was thinking of Adams. Or Ayn Rand, another high school influence. To her, reality itself was tautological: “A is A”.7
V
Back when I streamed Magic: the Gathering, I used to attract viewers with wild decks, then alienate them by playing with an insane degree of conservatism.
“You missed lethal, Aaron!”
“If they had exactly the right three cards, attacking was dangerous.”
“That’s incredibly unlikely!”
“We can kill them later when it’s 100% safe. As long as I don’t lose, I always win.”
In the world championship quarterfinal, I faced a Hall of Famer who was very skilled, but notorious for playing slowly. In the pre-match interview, I explained that I planned to stall until his time ran out. As long as I stopped him from winning, he was guaranteed to lose.
VI
I used to be a professional moderator. The forum I ran had many rules.
If I ever own my own forum, I may try what I call “the perfect moderation policy”:
“If no one becomes a jerk, we won’t have jerks.”
Divisive content is designed to spread. So is divisive behavior. If acting a certain way provokes others to act the same way, the behavior spreads like fire: that’s why they call it a “flame war”.8 You’ll always have would-be provocateurs — but to successfully provoke, they must provoke someone. Ergo, the perfect policy bans becoming provoked.
VII
When I got to Yale, I was delighted to find these banners in our rowing tank:
You can’t avoid the past: it happened. But it only happened in the past. The present is what’s happening now.
Some mantras fail. You won’t always be the best. You won’t always outwork the other team. But last year will always be last year. And if this year doesn’t work out, there’s always next year.
Is it stupid? Maybe. But if it works, it works.
The Genie of Medium Wishes: Wiki Updates
I’ve added thousands of words of new material to the Genie of Medium Wishes wiki.
New sections include:
If you’ve wondered about using your wish to negate someone else’s, changing the speed limit in Virginia, or cashmaxxing by wishing for a golden statue, this is the update for you.
And with that, it’s time to take a break from genieposting! I may return to this later in the month, but will write something realer tomorrow.
The Genie of Medium Wishes: WishDB (Part 2)
This is part 2. Start with part 1.
Living room, India. Ganesh statue on a corner shrine. The genie hovers like another statue.
The mother makes her wish.
“Aisa hi hoga.”
Her husband sweeps her into a dance. The phone dips to a small boy rubbing his eyes, then returns to the parents.
James checks the translation: “I wish for Aarav and Arjun to be the best students in all their classes, and enough money to pay all their school fees through university.”
You really shared this where other parents will see? Now they know their kids will always be second-best, and it’s your fault. Good for the classmates, though — they’ll always have an excuse for why they missed that one question. And good for WishDB — one more file for the file gods.
Box of money. Long lives for the Chen family. Make me feel young again. Box of money.
A hundred years of bountiful harvests.
“Nahin.”
Ugh. Can’t wish that far ahead — infinite ways to go wrong.
“I wish for 100 million yuan in my bank account, and a sexy dream with Lu Yuxiao.”
“Ru ni suo yuan.”
And the bar goes wild. Is that a celebrity? Oh, she’s a babe. She’ll be trending in the morning. Sucks to be her. Sucks to be him?
Nope. He’s a guy, Weibo’s going to meme the shit out of him, but he’ll be a folk hero. Could’ve gone much worse. Pretty clear wish for someone in that state.
If the genie gives you a dream but you’re blackout drunk, do you remember it?
Box of — no, money in the bank. Smart. Keep our family safe from harm. Heal my son’s mind. Heal my daughter’s marriage. Make me a famous actress. Box of money. A whispered wish he can’t hear. That’ll be a pain to track down.
Busy street. Night market. Who’s the wisher? Oh, god. The guy is getting mobbed. It’s less common than you’d think — people tend to keep their distance and respect the genie, or something. But sometimes it just takes one desperate person, someone who needs the money or the miracle cure, and then everyone else jumps in.
“Sepuluh detik tersisa. Apa keinginanmu?”
Somehow, the genie always drowns out other noise. Most in the crowd step back, but a beggar dressed in rags is still holding the guy’s collar. He only has six, five—
He cries out to the genie. A box of money appears in the street. The beggar vanishes.
“Oh, shit.”
The crowd surges forward. One man tackles the wisher to the ground. Others tear open the box and grab fistfuls of bills, stuffing them into pockets before someone pulls them away.
The video continues. Whoever holds the phone decided not to join the melee, or realized they’d be better off selling interviews than trying for a pocketful of rupiah.
The wisher is surrounded. He curls up against the kicks and stomps. James watches, teeth clenched.
Shots ring out. People start running the other way. The phone’s owner huddles against a wall, but keeps recording as pedestrians stream past. Two police officers approach the crumpled form. The wisher struggles to his hands and knees.
The box is still there. Might have money. But the money belongs to a murderer, so the cops are probably going to keep it.
Wait. Is that… that’s the same beggar!
James turns to his other monitor. The translation is ready.
“Make me rich, and get this man away from me.”
Not “kill him”, not “get rid of him”. Just “get him away”. The genie must have teleported the beggar one street over. What a joke.
It isn’t James’s first mob; he’s thought about self-defense. You can’t solve everyone’s problems; the genie will vanish before you finish your sentence. If you help one person, that can be enough to soothe the crowd, but it depends on what you take for yourself, the way you’re dressed, the way your neighbors feel about the genie…
The best answer is to whisper. People almost never whisper; the genie is so loud and present that they feel the urge to shout. But he always hears you. And when he leaves, you just have to tell the crowd you wished for their health, or gave them all another year of life — whatever gets you safely home to the box of money in your bedroom.
From an intellectual perspective, this was an incredible wish. If they could figure out how much money the box held, they’d have a ballpark figure for the value of a minor teleport spell. If only the cash weren’t scattered across — he checks the location tag — Jakarta.
Things quiet down a bit. The genie never sleeps, but China does. Milo tends to pick up South American wishes; he’s half-Peruvian, and he likes to watch people celebrate in Spanish. James decides to catch up on the slush pile. He opens the team’s shared inbox—
A soft ping. Never mind. He opens Discord to read Benji’s message.
got a bad one for you
WWYD?
James hasn’t seen this one, but it’s not his first Indian wedding wish. The families aren’t rich: bare stone floor, bamboo canopy, plain lightbulbs on wires.
No one is watching the bride and groom. They’re watching the genie, and the man in the off-white kurta. It’s quiet for a crowd scene: two layers of reverence.
The man looks distressed. But he speaks clearly, before the ten-second warning. The video has an AI caption:
“A year of health and happiness for all of us here, and seven years for Rajesh and Sunita.”
“So it shall be.”
The guests stand and the shouting begins. The newlyweds and their parents will be the envy of the country this week. The wisher has to be pulled to his feet; he takes a moment to find his footing. James closes the video.
You first. WWYD?
definitely not boosting every single guest
just get a BOM and share it around. you don’t have to share the wish to share the proceeds. it’s tacky at a wedding but you can give everyone more money than they’ve ever seen and still keep most of it
You’re probably right. But easier said than done. Remember your first alarm?
Members of the Optimal Wish Project set genie alarms to ring at random times. You’d be at a party, or in the shower, or hooking up with someone, and your phone would go off and you’d have one minute to record a wish.
Once you have your wish locked in, the exercise isn’t too hard. But in its early days, some Owpers felt their “great ideas” evaporate as soon as they had to articulate them.
i had a hard problem, i’m trying to change the world
if you don’t want to optimize, just get the BOM
Any WOC updates?
no. still want luck, luck is the answer
we’re up all night to get lucky
Hope it works out better for you than Jesse.
jesse walked so i could get lucky
and he helped me write the new version
if it works i’ll make him a BOM with a very nice box
respect the brave wishers who failed for the cause
Well, good luck.
haha
Benji’s lifetime odds were half of one percent. James, the same. It was strange to have a hobby you would never really take part in. Like following football in a world where every team was a group of strangers who didn’t know the rules, while good players were trapped in the bleachers, leaning forward to yell instructions no one could hear.
James didn’t let himself think about his own wish. Too unlikely, and it would make every video that little bit more painful. He refused to become Benji, using every mistake under pressure as an excuse to armchair quarterback. The genie made wishes a human story, the same way NASA made the moon a human place. He wouldn’t go to space, but he could root for the astronauts.
The Genie of Medium Wishes: WishDB
Woburn, Massachusetts
The video shows a busy street. East Africa? Bright colors. Cool mural in the background.
In the foreground, the genie hovers.
Looks real, and the reactions remove all doubt. Cars have stopped in the middle of the street. People are pointing and shouting. A crowd is gathering, but they keep a few meters’ distance from the bearded giant floating over the sidewalk.
Wisher is young — eighteen? Says something to the genie, no response. Says something else. Still nothing. Hurry up, kid!
The crowd is chiming in, which doesn’t help. He starts again, but the genie cuts in:
“Sekunde kumi zimebaki. Unataka nini?”
Ten-second warning. He freezes up — no! — then spits something out. Long sentence.
“Itafanyika.”
The kid staggers, weak-kneed. Two men step in to hold him up.
“Nice.”
James gives a double thumbs-up to no one and turns to his second monitor.
GPT-6 has processed the video and prefilled the form. He scrolls to the “Wish” section:
“I want Samuel to get better, and not get sick again, and I want a big house in Muthaiga for my family, with no rent.”
Good compound wish. Kept his shit together.
The rest looks clean. Wish granted. Time to wish: 58 seconds. Male wisher, estimated age 20. Public appearance — city street. Swahili — nailed it. James knows the same twelve words in every common language.
He skims the comments. Nothing useful: “Very nice.” “God is great!” “I’d wish for…”
He sends the usual DM to request more info.
From the first day of the genie era, James was digging through every video he could find and throwing details into a crappy Airtable with two of his fellow Wikipedia mods. (The Airtable retroactively acquired the undeservedly dignified name of “WishDB v1”.)
He didn’t help with the nonprofit setup — he was an underemployed infovore, not a founder. But they hired him right away, employee #4.
WishDB got big: over a hundred staff, grants from several governments. They tried to promote him. But he wasn’t a manager either. He just liked collecting data.
It’s been a good morning; nothing sticky so far. Karen and Milo are keeping the queue clear with him, filing videos as soon as they arrive.
Once people got used to the genie, and stopped thinking it would curse them for filming, around 30% of all encounters were recorded as they happened.
Another 30% popped up later. People recorded themselves crying because the genie said no, or because he said yes. They showed off their boxes of money, or their cancer-free grandmothers with shiny white teeth and perfect squat form. In one famous case, the parents of Xander Meier (age 7) showed off the twenty-foot chocolate castle crammed precariously into their backyard.
That’s 1200 wishes a day. When you add government data, bounty submissions, and whatever the rest of the team hunts down, WishDB approaches 90% coverage.
Box of money. Box of money. Heal thy parents. Heal thyself.
Obvious fake. He’s a bad actor; his genie casts no shadow. Add his account to the fraud list.
On Weibo, an old man wishes for his family to live in eternal harmony. The genie says no. James winces. Chinese wishes hit harder, since he understands them without the buffer of AI translation. And the man reminds him of his mother’s father.
12-year-old girl. A kitchen somewhere in Asia.
Her parents are trying to coach her, but they end up talking over each other, and the phone swoops away as her mom gesticulates. When it comes back, the girl’s in tears.
“Sampung segundo na lang. Ano ang iyong hiling?”
She yells something at the genie, voice catching halfway through.
“Mangyayari ito.”
A wooden box appears. Cubic, less than a meter wide. James has seen enough Filipino wishes to know she didn’t maximize her money. The video suddenly shuts off.
James checks the translation:
“I want lots of money, and I want Mom and Dad to stop fighting!”
Could be good, could be very bad.
He reports the video to Madison, his Instagram contact, kicking off a chain of messages he hopes will reach the Philippines equivalent of family services.
One of WishDB’s specialties is noticing when a wish is inherently dangerous. Money is safe, if no one kills you for it. Health is safe, if you don’t party too hard and overdose the next day.
Relationships are dangerous. If you wish someone out of your life, the genie might edit their brain to make them fall for someone else — or edit their heart to make it stop beating.
James, and most of his colleagues, think the genie summons whatever fitting outcome was most likely to happen anyway. The girl’s wish could make her parents blissfully happy, make them divorce the next day, or lead one of them to an untimely death.
He watches the video again. There’s a cross on the wall. He remembers that the country is very Catholic. He checks something with GPT-6:
“Divorce is illegal for non-Muslim Filipinos.”
Shit! That cuts out one of the nonlethal outcomes. James sends Madison a follow-up.
Continue to part 2.
The Genie of Medium Wishes: Day One
Introducing a new setting.
April 12, 2026, 9:06 pm CST, Dongguan
The genie manifests in Zhao Lin’s dormitory as she puts on her pajamas.
He has horns, a long beard, and no shirt. His head nearly scrapes the ceiling; his shoulders span the bunk beds on either side of the room. His torso terminates in a wispy tail of smoke that hovers over the floor.
In perfect Mandarin, he speaks:
“I am Jinnī al-Amānī al-Muqayyad. What is your wish?”
Lin screams and falls over. Her roommate Sun Meili screams. Her roommate Liu Yan throws a chair at the genie. It passes straight through and clangs off Zhao Lin’s bed. The genie hovers in perfect stillness, arms crossed. It looks only at Zhao Lin.
Meili sprints out of the room. Lin forces her other leg into her pajama pants and hustles after her. The genie follows in silence, passing through the doorway like it doesn’t exist.
“What do you want?” shouts Yan. The genie ignores her as it leaves. She pulls out her phone and starts recording.
The genie phases through the floor and hovers between Zhao Lin and the building’s front door. Her screams have drawn a crowd, and she can’t easily retreat. She stands frozen as the genie speaks again:
“Ten seconds remain. What is your wish?”
The crowd startles at his booming voice.
Yan calls out: “Say something, Zhao Lin!”
Lin is speechless. The genie disappears, gone as abruptly as it came.
Yan posts the video on Douyin at 9:12 pm.
By morning, there are thirteen other genie videos on the platform, and over a hundred scattered across Instagram, TikTok, Bilibili, and YouTube.
Tiruppur
Kavita Selvam, interrupted at her sewing machine, stares the genie down, even as younger garment workers scream and back away. Her supervisor, Ramesh, films with a shaky hand.
“Very well, sir. If you can grant wishes, take away all these aches and pains.”
“It shall be done.”
The genie disappears. Kavita blinks. She twists her torso. She stands, eyes wide.
“What is this?” She bends her knees. “What is this?”
She flings herself into a girlish cartwheel. Ramesh drops his phone.
Lahore
Muhammad Qureshi lies prostrate, praying at a frantic tempo. The other old men prostrate themselves and pray.
Hamza, a younger man with modern instincts, continues to record. His legs have given out, so he leans back against the wall of the mosque. He hadn’t believed in jinn, but his prayers are the loudest of all.
The men pray. The genie hovers.
“Ten seconds remain. What is your wish?”
The men pray. No one answers. The genie disappears.
Bakersfield
“What the fuck!? It’s that genie! It’s here!”
Yvonne Duarte sits frozen on a wooden bench in the courtyard of Liberty High School.
The genie watches her. Nine phones record the encounter.
Her pizza slice is face-down in the grass. When the genie appeared, three of her classmates were already watching Reels of it. This tempers the shock enough that no one flees.
“Wish for a million dollars!” someone says.
“Are you stupid? Wish for a trillion!”
“Hurry up! It only sticks around for a minute!”
“I wish,” says Yvonne, “for… one trillion dollars.”
“No.”
The genie disappears.
The Genie of Medium Wishes Wiki has its first entry. More content coming soon.