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The XKCD Canon

If you were born before 2010, give this post to a child instead.

Just kidding, you can read it! But know that I wrote it for Generation Alpha. It was meant to be a bit cringe but funny; I’m not sure it wound up being funny.

 

Hey, kids!

Have your parents or teachers ever shared a stick figure comic like this one?

Cat Proximity

This is XKCD, a webcomic that helped define online culture from 2005-2015.

The author, Randall Munroe, is one of his generation’s great communicators. He wrote the best memes about multiple social phenomena. He invented nerd sniping and ten hundred words. And some of his work reveals important truths about human existence.

The other day, I met a teenager who hadn’t heard of XKCD and had one of these moments:

I wanted to say “go read it!” But then I remembered that most of the comics riff on culture and technology from the late Aughts, and might not appeal to modern teens.

So I used this post to create a canon: the comics people reference most often, and the ones I’d consider “essential” for someone willing to spend 15 minutes on XKCD.1

 

Someone is wrong on the internet

When the Internet first emerged, people rarely argued with strangers who lived thousands of miles away.2 If they won an argument, they got to rub it in someone’s face right up close, and that would’ve been their only argument that week.

The Internet exposed us to an infinite supply of arguments, and made it harder to end them. When they don’t have to show their face, or hear the crowd’s laughter, one person can argue forever. And even if you forced them into retreat, you’d get bogged down debating other people with the same dumb idea. (Meanwhile, they’d be losing sleep over your dumb ideas.)

To cite an even older nerd meme, the trick to winning that game is not to play. So you might hear us use “someone is wrong on the Internet!” to make a friend abandon a hopeless conversation, or as a reminder to ourselves not to crash out because our opps were giving delulu.

See also: Real winners quit

 

Standards

Standards

Many smart people see chaos and assume that no one has tried to organize it. They yearn to create a single, perfect system that everyone will use.

This usually doesn’t work. It’s not impossible — one of Munroe’s examples, charging ports, is close to solved already — but it’s harder than it looks. This goes for standards, databases, rulesets, and any other attempt to systematize how things are done.

Signs someone is about to encounter this:

  • “Let’s put everything into a Wiki!”
  • “We’ll use this tagging system to organize all of our content.”
  • “These five categories will cover all possible examples.”

If a new standard involves our social lives, see “Drama”:

Drama

See also: Everyone will not just, “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names“

 

Password Strength

Most Gen X-to-Z-ers who use multi-word passwords are probably thinking about this comic. The advice is good.

Just don’t use it the way my wife and I did — setting our wifi password to “HorseBattery” because we’d already memorized it.

 

Dependencies

Dependency

This comes out whenever a single company’s service outage collapses the Internet for a day. Now that AI systems are becoming elite hackers, you might see it a lot more often.

 

Extrapolating

Useful whenever you see someone use current growth rates to reach absurd conclusions.

After all, if past growth really predicted future growth:

  • A single Bitcoin would sell for $73,000.
  • COVID would have been a pandemic.
  • We’d be marching toward an AI singularity.

(Just playing with you, Randall — it’s a great comic, no cap.)

 

Ten Thousand

Ten Thousand

Everything you know came from somewhere. There was a day you went from ignorance to knowledge. Those days should be celebrated, not mocked.3

When you go the opposite way and give people too much credit for knowing things, you get “Average Familiarity”:

Average Familiarity

 

Sheeple

Sheeple

When you care a lot about issues that most people ignore, those people may seem broadly ill-informed. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t thoughtful or complex. Everyone has their own collection of cares and worries; we’re all conscious of something.4

If you find yourself thinking of average people as “sheeple” or “NPCs” or whatever label your generation uses, you’re probably underestimating them. Reading Working or watching Life in a Day makes it harder to fall into this mindset.

 

Free speech

Free Speech

This is correct, but the devil is in the details. Sometimes:

  • Most people agree with you, but enough people think you’re an asshole to make your life miserable.
  • Someone you like disappears through that door.
  • The door you show the assholes opens into an equally crowded room, where they discover a gigantic audience you weren’t aware of.
  • The other room’s audience is big enough to let the assholes take over the government, claim that their opponents are the real assholes, and start arresting them for what they say.
    • But the comic says they can’t do that!
    • The comic is right. But if people get used to showing other people the door, it’s easy to lose the distinction between “the government tacitly supports it” and “the government actively participates”.

But this isn’t Munroe’s fault. At the time, this was a good contribution to an exhausting debate; you can only do so much with a six-panel webcomic.

 

The rest of the canon

These aren’t quite as influential, but everyone in certain parts of Twitter has seen them at least once:

Meanwhile, Time and Money are brilliant comics that are too big to share.

 

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Too Good for the Greater Good

In college, I temped for a headhunting firm. They taught me to spam engineers with LinkedIn messages, to recruit for an app called Spoon. I sucked at this, because I hate bothering people. (I didn’t know what headhunting was when I took the job.)

I customized every message for a human touch, ignored anyone who looked busy in their profile picture, and reached a third as many people as the other temp. Together, we convinced about six engineers to let us call them.

Spoon’s CEO was not happy. To make a point, he spent an hour sending his own messages, which were brief and clearly written by an engineer. He got more bites than we did in a week. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t have much time to recruit; he was too busy being a CEO. Someone good enough to impress an engineer through LinkedIn can use their time for better things.

This is what Patrick McKenzie calls “The Sort”:

The Sort is the world’s way of moving people to wherever their talents will produce the most money. It sends mathematicians to Jane Street, Dominicans to the MLB, and Justin Bieber to Universal Music Group.

But it doesn’t just show up in the economy. It’s also there in the curse of cryonics:

If something is important but doesn’t pay well, it’s hard to get people with expensive skills (or even the cheaper skill of “noticing important problems”) to do it. Cryonics could conceivably compete for talent with the tech industry, because it pays in expected utility and the glow of a holy mission — but AI safety crushes it on both fronts.5

My employer, 80,000 Hours, is at war with the Sort. We take people who could earn millions of dollars in a frontier lab or corporate law firm and nudge them toward jobs that pay much less but might save the world.

We also have to fight the internal Sort that misallocates talent even within our AI safety bubble. I’m writing a profile on fieldbuilding — the unsexy work of developing talent and building infrastructure to help the field grow. It’s a lot like tech recruiting: the best candidates are AI researchers and ace networkers, but the researchers want to write papers and the networkers want to write policy. Our current strategy is to yell “please do fieldbuilding — nine out of ten leaders say it’s more impactful!” and hope that people listen.

Ways to get around the Sort:

Pay more money. This is the obvious and most visible answer. You see it whenever the smartest college grads flock to a new field. Trad finance -> quant finance -> AI. 

Unfortunately, doing this requires enough money to outbid the companies that already bought the smartest people and put them to work making more money.

Add a sprinkling of prestige. When 80,000 Hours and Coefficient Giving yell about fieldbuilding, we’re making a rational argument about impact — and also sending a signal that trustworthy, competent organizations will be proud if you run conferences instead of writing papers (in a world where papers are considered “cool”). 

On a grander scale, Teach for America got quite a few Yale grads to take ordinary teaching jobs — though few stuck around.6

Make the work more fun. Many professional Magic: the Gathering players also play poker. I’d guess that poker pays between ten and infinity times as much per hour. But Magic is more fun, so the pros trade lucrative time in fancy casinos for sub-minimum-wage time in conference centers with concrete floors.

The best fanfiction is considerably better than Amazon’s top fantasy novels, especially if you correct for the absence of editors. Nonetheless, its authors write for free: HarperCollins won’t let you put Naruto in your story (or show him in a three-way with Hinata and Sakura).

Dig deeper for talent. Every so often, society cracks open a new source of human talent. It sends everyone to school; starts hiring women; builds fútbol academies in Brazil and chip factories in Taiwan. 

For a while, it looked like our next expansion pack would come from ending lead poisoning and giving kids the right amount of iodine. But artificial brains came faster. We’re about to have all the talent we can use; I hope it doesn’t Sort us out of existence.

There are some people the Sort can’t reach.

My wife is a cancer surgeon. Most cancer surgeons do the job because they love removing cancer. As long as the patient survives, they’re satisfied. 

My wife prefers the art of reconstruction: putting patients back together with as much function as possible. (This week, she returned an ear to its rightful place and gave someone a new nostril.) Most people like her wind up doing facial plastics, which pays better than surgical oncology and gets you home earlier. But she likes saving lives too much to give up on cancer.

I don’t know what the world can learn from my wife. She’s unrelentingly stubborn and insanely dedicated to healing — the person who helped me found an effective altruism club and then almost boycotted the whole concept because 80,000 Hours told her not to be a doctor. But even if she doesn’t generalize, it’s pretty cool to watch her shrug off one of the century’s primary sociological phenomena through sheer willpower. Love you, Tammy!

 

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The Valley of the End

“Everyone who knew of my righteous triumphs has died.”

— Kraft, “Winter in the Northern Lands” (Sousou no Frieren)

 

Dear NotebookLM,

What do you know about the Naruto Manga Battledome?

You have described your involvement with the Naruto Manga Battledome as an addictive hobby that shifted from a competitive to a nostalgic focus over several years.

When?

January 26, 2009: You recorded that you officially won the Manga Battledome Tournament, though you noted a “strange lack of satisfaction” following the victory.

August 16, 2013: You mentioned looking over the “new Manga Battledome” and recommending it to your brother, Eli. During this time, you spent several late nights “thinking very hard about theories of optimal team construction” and even developed a draft for a WordPress post on the subject.

October 16, 2013: You admitted to a “disastrous Naruto binge” while you were supposed to be writing an essay about the Manga Battledome.

I still have the notes for that essay. Better late than never.

 

Naruto isn’t one of the truly great manga. It has 700 chapters, and the last 200 were bad. Masashi Kishimoto put every one of his beloved characters on the same stage for a showdown, but it took four years to finish and bled the life out of the franchise.

But those early chapters? Before ninjas became gods, and every battle came down to the color of a man’s eyes? When you’re a 14-year-old boy, that shit hits.

New to Naruto and wondering, is Rock Lee vs Gaara still one of the best fights later on? : r/NarutoPowerscaling

Naruto wasn’t even meant to be a game. It’s a comic about ninjas, drawn one chapter at a time with only faint regard for logic. The powerscaling is wildly imbalanced; most of the characters would die if Sasuke Uchiha so much as looked at them.

Still, in the early days of the internet, a few nerds desperate for content mashed up the comic with barroom boasting, correspondence chess, and competitive debate. And the result — the Battledome, now hosted on Fanverse after the death of NarutoForums — is one of the better games I’ve played.

You start with 76 points. You can buy anyone you want.

For one point, you get Sakura, a 12-year-old with a pocketful of shuriken and zero combat skills.

For 48, you get a man who killed the king of the desert and turned him into a puppet that fires blocks of poisonous metallic sand the size of houses. You can’t hit him with weapons, because that puppet is also Magneto. He has 99 other puppets.

Both have their uses.

The battle begins. Two teams gather in one of the series’ iconic locations. Both players publish a strategy, then a counter-strategy. Everyone argues.

Creator contends that Jiraya can ascend to Sage Mode before Killer B runs across the valley where Kiba nearly died.

Tiocfaidh retorts that even a tortoise like Usain Bolt could make it across that valley in seven seconds flat, ample time to reach Jiraya, and furthermore that the official databook clearly demarcates the difference between ordinary clones and shadow clones, making Tsunade’s part of the plan completely useless.

We vote. Maito Gai kicks in Tsunade’s teeth. Jiraya takes a lightning sword to the face mid-meditation. Neji deflects Shizune’s needles and explodes her heart with a palm strike. Creator drops from the bracket.

There’s no one way to build a team, or fight. Everyone has a weakness. Some characters can’t hit you if you’re flying on a clay bird. Some of them bleed when you stab them — and you can’t just give your blood away like that. Some of them aren’t aware that if they stand around without moving, the little blond girl with pitiful chakra will take control of their minds.

(Sakura knows about the little blond girl. That’s why she’s worth a point.)

At the end of my character arc, I battled Materpillar in the Valley of the End (where, in chapter 699, Naruto finally punched the evil out of Sasuke). I took advantage of Orochimaru, the series’ first Big Bad, and his oft-forgotten ability to summon gigantic inexplicable gates that have nothing to do with his other abilities.

Materpillar, you see, didn’t realize that simply standing on these gates would let me hit him even if he flew on a clay bird.

Naruto: The Valley of the End, Explained

The Battledome faded out in 2015, when the manga ended and its fans wandered away. It lives on in the spirit of r/whowouldwin and the Vs. Battles Wiki. But much as I enjoy those spaces, I miss the tournament structure, and the surprising competitive balance of the Naruto metagame. You can’t run a tournament on One Piece cartoon logic or Dragon Ball beam struggles; for all of Kishimoto’s faults, he drew realistic landscapes and legible fight scenes anchored by something resembling physics.

I wonder if anyone from those days still remembers me? As a writer, a gadfly, an annoying little snot, a champion?

More about that “strange lack of satisfaction” I felt upon winning:

That sentence comes from my fourth journal entry. I think of the first entry, three days before, as the beginning of my adult life — the first time I sat down to consider what I wanted and who I was becoming.

Imagine waking up from a sixteen-year blackout and hearing “you just won the Naruto debate tournament!” What would that imply about your priorities? Would you be happy?

At 16, I was ambivalent. At 20, somewhat embarrassed: when I went to college, I realized that other people spent high school learning to program, or at least winning real debate tournaments. The Battledome made me think about falling behind.7

At 32? I still wish I’d learned to program back then. But at least I was part of something, however small. And it’s nice to see who I was before the journal — to see that I was, in fact, someone.

Between 2007 and 2009, I wrote multiple novels’ worth of content on my road to the title. Tonight, I realized it was all still there.8

The result: I went on a disastrous Naruto binge while I was supposed to be writing an essay about the Manga Battledome.

But this time, I finished the essay.

 

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Clean Something Day

On holidays, we all agree to make time for something important.

On Thanksgiving, we visit family (and our families know to expect us, and most people have the day off). On Halloween, we dress up and act silly and roam the streets (and everyone rolls with it, and the streets are safe and well-lit). 

What other important things do we struggle to find time for?

Cleaning comes to mind. We all have clutter; it weighs on our minds and drains our energy. We should take a day each year to beat it back.

On Clean Something Day, everyone takes time to clean. It can be physical or digital. It can be your space or someone else’s — even a public space. You can clean with friends or strangers. The only rule is to end the day cleaner than you started.

Three days of cleaning, years apart, gave me this idea:

San Francisco

I went to visit a friend. He was happy to see me, but clearly distressed by the state of his bachelor apartment. After his third apology “for the mess”, I suggested we cancel our plans and clean the place instead: “I’ve just been reading Marie Kondo and I want a chance to try it out.” (This was true.)

I knew him well enough to think he’d appreciate the suggestion, and I was right. After a couple of hours, his apartment looked much better — the kind of space he could un-bachelor in, so to speak — and I’d learned more about his life in the course of sorting random objects (“Was this book any good? Where did you thrift this shirt?”).

San Diego

I lived at One Miramar Street, which houses hundreds of UC San Diego students. Before they built a bridge, the only way to reach the university on foot was an informal trail through a hole in the fence. A few homeless people set up camp there for a time; they left behind hundreds of cans, bottles, and wrappers, which blew in the wind and wound up covering the entire path.

I used the path myself, and it made me feel a bit sad to see the mess. One Saturday, I got tired of feeling sad and decided to solve the problem. (Most of the problems I face in life are much larger; I felt almost lucky to find one I could handle myself in a few hours.) I bought some gloves and brought a box of trash bags and cleaned. It was a weekend, so there weren’t many students walking; when I saw one, I said something like “just cleaning up!” and no one bothered me. It was also good exercise. That evening, after a shower, I felt cleansed myself.

The path stayed clean as long as I lived there; I felt a bit happy whenever I saw the absence of mess. We didn’t have any more visitors – but if someone had camped out, I’d have cleaned again after they left.

Berkeley

Today, I sorted the last of the 662 post ideas I brought to Inkhaven, many of which expired before they could be written. My shoulders feel lighter, and I can’t stop smiling when I look at my sparkling, well-tagged Notion database. I can’t wait to write 23 more posts this month. If Clean Something Day had existed all this time, I might have restarted the blog years ago.

Ways to celebrate

  • Visit someone with a messier house — maybe a parent of young kids? — and help them get it under control.
  • Get your friends together for a digital purge party (unused subscriptions, ancient emails, overstuffed folders…)
  • Assemble a volunteer army and clean one of your city’s parks or beaches.
  • Clean your garage. (Doesn’t have to be fancy!)

Whatever you do, set aside the evening to have fun — either in the space you cleaned or somewhere else rewarding.

This can also be a day to celebrate the people who spend their lives cleaning:

  • Leave a tip for the office custodians, or your neighborhood garbage collectors.
  • Organize a gift for the janitors at your child’s school.
  • Give your stay-at-home spouse a break and take over housecleaning for the week. If you don’t know what that entails, this is a good time to learn.

What’s the date?

I suggest March 20 for the spring equinox. Spring cleaning already exists — what better way to start the new season?

But since many people already clean in spring, a fall date would offer year-round coverage. So my second option is October 9th — Marie Kondo’s birthday.

 

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Grover Norquist is a Fractional Murderer

I’m writing this from a tax party. Six people sit on couches and force themselves to finish filing — a task that is very boring and should mostly belong to the government. Despite the lo-fi tunes in the background, the mood is not good.

I was going to write about protein bars today, but to honor our wasted time, I’m unsheathing this long-held rant. Here’s to all the people filling out forms on couches across America.

 

The average American’s life contains around 650,000 hours.9 They’ll spend a few hundred hours filing taxes.

If the U.S. were like most developed countries, that number could instead be close to zero. Japan, Germany, and many others “pre-populate” tax returns to some degree — estimating what people owe, rather than making them calculate it themselves. Someone with a simple tax situation might spend only a few minutes reviewing and approving the number. California tested a program like this, ReadyReturn, in 2005.10 The results led Brookings to estimate that most filers would save around four hours each year (and some would save more).

While ReadyReturn’s test users loved it, the idea never became a federal program. Intuit (TurboTax) and other tax prep firms spent millions of dollars lobbying against it. They found an ally in Grover Norquist, an anti-tax advocate who claimed that pre-populating tax returns would (a) let the IRS overcharge people and (b) make taxes less unpopular.

I haven’t found evidence for (a). From what I’ve seen, pre-population reduces tax evasion but also makes it easier for people to notice and claim deductions. If anything, people who were already paying taxes might save money — even discounting the money and time they’d save on tax prep.

With (b), Norquist holds that Americans’ lives should be worse and more annoying because we’ll hate our taxes more, and then vote to reduce them. Some wonks want us to waste money and time on things that won’t do much good; Norquist wants us to do it on things that hurt us! This argument seems outright silly when I think about all the countries that pre-populate (I’m sure their people still prefer low taxes) and the implication that four hours a year is exactly the right amount of annoyance. To quote Sam Hammond: “Why not require taxes to be filed quarterly, on papyrus, while doing push-ups?”

Norquist’s war on efficiency pairs weak arguments with high costs. If pre-populated returns could save 50 million Americans four hours a year, that’s 200 million hours — roughly 300 American lifetimes. Let’s say Norquist holds 20% of the responsibility for holding back this policy.11 How different is that from killing 60 people each year?

Considerations:

  • Is doing taxes as bad as literally being dead? Four hours a year times forty years of taxation is 160 hours, or four workweeks. If I had to lose one week of life, or spend a full month where my job was “filing taxes” and my salary was negative (TurboTax ain’t free), I’d take door #1.
  • Is taking four hours from 175,000 people the same as killing two 40-year-olds? Killing one specific person is bad for reasons that don’t apply to stealing hours piecemeal. But stolen hours are still real! People could use that time to play with their kids or watch a movie or go to the park.12
  • Shouldn’t we also blame the tax preparers? Yes! Intuit and H&R Block are also killing us. But I can punish those companies by refusing their services.13 And their actions are at least driven by rational self-interest. Norquist just wants me to suffer, and I can’t do anything to make him suffer back. All I can do is point out that he is complicit in the fractional murder of Americans.
  • Don’t we lose even more hours to other stupid regulations and evil schemes? Indeed! This won’t be my last post about the theft of our time.

 

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Posts I Will Not Be Writing

Inkhaven lasts for one month. If you don’t publish 500 words by midnight, you leave the next day.

On the first day, I published at 11:59 pm. On the second day, I published at 11:59 pm and 55 seconds.

I’m a fast writer – the hard part is choosing what to write. I brought a list of 662 ideas with me, collected over thirteen years. After a week of processing, I’ve deleted or archived 170 and tagged 138 for later consideration, with another 354 still in the queue.

Rather than stare at the list of 138 today, I’ll sample from the other 170. These are posts I will not be writing: I think you’ll understand.

 

Past Aaron missed the boat

Ideas logged between 2015 and 2018:

“How to beat ISIS through advertising”

Based loosely on a set of posts from Scott Adams. Today, ISIS is mostly dead, though it outlived Scott Adams.

“Against bioethics”

This was already stale (albeit correct) in 2016. But I wrote an entire essay. And then left it on read for ten years! I could have been playing Pokemon Go instead!

“On trans bathrooms: Get over it.”

I’m sure this would have been the butterfly that won Hillary the election.

“Responding to Tyler Cowen on effective altruism”

Another finished essay. Would’ve worked on the EA Forum had I known the Forum existed. Two years later, I was running the Forum, but it was too late.

“The internet is not fake!”

Max Read claimed the internet was mostly fake. I disagreed. Time has proven someone right: that person is Max Read.

 

Past Aaron did not anticipate Donald Trump

“A brief guide to the alt-right”

The idea was to share a few sample Tweets for people who’d never looked under that particular rock. And now the rock is where we live.

“Are Nazis worth our attention?”

The post asked: why focus on small groups of people with extreme views, left or right, when they aren’t likely to end up holding any power?

“Things I appreciate about the right wing”

It was 80% libertarian stuff and 20% principled conservatism. Claude thinks I should put a punchline here, but you know the punchline.

“Is anyone actually doing something about free speech on campus?”

(Whispers to my past self) “Oh! Wait. Oh. Oh no. Oh god no.”

 

Past Aaron cultivated an air of mystery

“A review of Free Thoughts, by Jamie Whyte”

A review of what? By who? 

The good news is that a book I’ve forgotten entirely probably wasn’t a good choice to review (no offense to Jamie, whoever you are).

“Why buy expensive watches? What does ‘expensive’ even mean?”

I might have been cooking with this, but I didn’t leave a single note besides the title, so I have no way of knowing.

“Politicians are not reliable”

This one had a ton of notes. But they were all excerpts from John Boehner’s Wikipedia page with zero commentary. I think I was just… mad at him?

 

Past Aaron left the mine before he hit diamonds

“A simple explanation of how Bitcoin works.”

I began drafting this in 2015 to make myself learn about Bitcoin. Never finished, never bought Bitcoin. It’s up 28,000%.

“The future paradise view”

This post suggested judging actions by how much they contributed to the chance of reaching a utopian state — with certain boundaries around human rights. It further suggested that the most reliable way to reach utopia would be to sustain economic growth.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Tyler Cowen did it. (He probably had the idea first, too.)

“Shouldn’t there be a way to mass-produce marble statues?”

Monumental Labs did it.

 

Past Aaron hated me and wanted me to suffer

“Time and the minimum basic income”

Aaron! You can’t just write down two concepts and expect me to do the rest of the work!

“I read every chart on Our World in Data. Here’s what I found.”

Nope, nope, not doing that.

“Racism is overrated, because almost everyone of every race is bad at almost everything”

Monkey Puppet - Meming Wiki

From the notes, this had the seeds of a moving essay on the human weakness that unites us all — seeds I will not be planting.

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Progression Realism: Grinding Your Way to World Domination

On her first day of college, Rachel wakes up with a superpower: She can write a plan for the day, and she will always follow it. She won’t open Instagram even once.

She spends that first day asking Claude for strategies to become successful. On the second day, she reads How to Win Friends and Influence People. By the end of the week, she’s on good terms with most of her professors, and she’s caught the eye of a sophomore whose father runs a Fortune 500 company.

Grindset fantasy

In a standard progression fantasy, the protagonist is a weak-to-normal denizen of a magical world who becomes one of the most powerful people in history.

It’s a rising genre: Solo Leveling crushed the 2025 Anime Awards and might be the most popular manhwa, and Dungeon Crawler Carl is currently #7 on the Amazon charts.

Protagonists advance by having a broken magical ability or secret knowledge. But most of them also have a second ability, which typically goes unremarked: something I’ll call “perfect willpower”. They don’t get tired or distracted. They don’t get lost in a good book. They just grind.

But never mind the fantasy

Progression realism (PR) removes the magic and leaves the perfect willpower. Our hero is just like us — sans akrasia. They plan ahead, follow through, and never procrastinate.

Perfect willpower interests me because in theory, we could all have it. Most of us can’t run a four-minute mile with any amount of training, but there is no physical law that stops me from getting up tomorrow, carefully writing out my priorities, and then working on them in order of importance until I fall asleep.

Regardless, I’ve never had one of those days. Even the most productive, driven people on the planet don’t reliably have those days. Something always trips them up — impulsiveness, addiction, unresolved character flaws. Elon Musk used ketamine. Angela Merkel was too reactive. Genghis Khan wasn’t a long-term thinker. And Lyndon Baines Johnson…

…actually, LBJ is basically a PR protagonist. He spent forty years leveraging his friends and responsibilities to seize increasing amounts of power, with insane focus throughout. A fellow politician once said: “I never knew a man could work that hard.” Robert Caro’s The Path to Power might be the first work of progression realism.

At the end of her first semester, Rachel’s grades are perfect. Her boyfriend is head over heels, and she doesn’t plan to leave him for a while — but if she did, his father would still hire her. She’s reading a lot of books (and detailed outlines, courtesy of Claude). Her memory isn’t great, but she’s using spaced repetition to develop a mental map of useful concepts — mostly finance and marketing, with enough science to sound smart and distinguish experts from charlatans.

She sprints and swings a kettlebell twice a week. She has a beautiful personal website and a growing Substack audience. The books make it easy to find ideas, and readers love the way she blends time-tested insights with quirky stories from college life. Some of the stories are even true.

She’s made arrangements to intern for her local representative next semester: some things need to be learned up close, and she plans to win some friends along the way.

Would this actually be good?

In theory, PR combines three successful genres: progression fantasy, self-help, and biographies of successful people. Caro’s books are bestsellers, and non-historical progression realism lets you do the same thing much faster by making things up.

I don’t see why someone couldn’t write an interesting book (or endless webfiction saga) about a normal person grinding their way to world domination one good day at a time. I’d read it!

The canonical way to do this thing I just invented

I’d suggest the following “rules” for the genre. Like any rules, you can break them, but that shouldn’t be the default.

  • Big dreams. You could write PR for almost any goal, but the fun part (for me) is thinking about how someone would optimize for something big: influence, money, fame.
  • No second superpower. The protagonist should be smart enough to learn most things, but they shouldn’t be the smartest person in the story. Likewise, don’t make them supermodel gorgeous or the heir to a vast fortune. It’s more fun to see them acquire knowledge, beauty, and wealth using willpower!
  • Realistic rivals. The worst progression fantasy takes a Very Special protagonist and surrounds them with bumbling idiots to make them even specialer. As a PR protagonist rises to prominence, they should interact with other prominent people, and those people should have enough talent not to get steamrolled. This is the time to pull out supermodels and geniuses — or maybe someone else with the same superpower.

Rachel graduates one year early. Her friends are sad to lose her, but they know she’ll keep in touch; Rachel is incredible at keeping in touch. Her local representative compares her to a young Hillary Clinton, and Rachel knows she’ll have a big endorsement when she makes her first run at local office.

But first, she needs to build a war chest. Her Y Combinator pitch is next week. It’s fine that she never picked up much programming; she has Claude Code and three of the sharpest young engineers on the Eastern seaboard (who compare her to Sam Altman, “but not evil”).

People say the future will be hard for humans, but those people haven’t met Rachel. Yet.

by

Won’t Get Fooled Again (By Humans)

AI is getting better at scams. This is bad for me, because I’ve been scammed by humans, and AI will exploit the same weaknesses much more effectively.

While I can’t predict a superintelligence, I can at least try to learn from my gullible past.

 

“Michael Wong Chang”

My sixth-grade class fell for the Bonsai Kitten hoax years after its debunking. Distressed, I sent the website to my mother; I don’t know what I expected her to do. She explained it was fake.

Weakness: I was ignorant of the world. I didn’t know how to do research. I cared too much about most problems.

Would I fall for this again? I was eleven years old. The hoaxer was an MIT student. They were much smarter than me. The AI will also be much smarter than me. I remain vulnerable.

I’ve gotten better at research. If I take a single minute to consult my defensive AI, it will probably steer me well. I should always take that one minute.

I’ve also gotten better at focusing on real problems. The AI can’t distract me with a kitten. But it could still distract me by threatening my family. I should abandon my family.

…no, that won’t work. I should set up a safeword to ward off deepfakes of my wife or mother being kidnapped (or worse, sealed inside glass jars).

 

Brian Wansink and the Field of Psychology

In high school, I read psychology books and struggled with orthorexia. Wansink, who studied how subconscious cues make us eat too much, was my favorite scientist. He was also a massive fraud.

In college, before the fraud was known, I asked one of his research assistants about her job. She didn’t seem enthusiastic. I chalked it up to “RA work is boring”; maybe she’d been asked to massage some data.

The bad vibes pushed me off applying to Wansink’s lab, but I still loved his research. He inspired me to intern with the Rudd Center, doing random undergrad tasks to fight child obesity.14 He never scammed me directly, but I’ll have him represent the replication crisis; I wanted to believe in psychology writ large, and I fell for the same nonsense as most Psych majors circa 2015.

Weakness: I broadly assumed that scientists were honest and peer-reviewed papers were trustworthy. I devoured research that matched my views about the world (like sinister food companies tricking us into overeating — which, to be fair, they are).

Would I fall for this again? Could an AI scammer trick me like Wansink? Play on my assumptions so well that I never think to double-check, because it all seems obvious?

Yes, probably. But I can make it harder by taking strong positions only when I have strong and varied evidence. I shouldn’t rely on any single source.15 And I should follow more people who disagree with me; AI will build beautiful echo chambers and I need to hear voices that won’t confirm my every bias.

 

Gleb Tsipursky

Gleb is a curious figure from the early days of effective altruism — a tireless self-promoter who tried to make his work look popular by creating fake endorsements, fake accounts, and fake social engagement. He got away with it by achieving a few real things, like getting an EA article into TIME (this was a bigger deal back in 2016).

His most toxic practice was tricking earnest young people, including a friend of mine, into taking low-paid contracting roles at his organization (Intentional Insights). He then pressured them to “volunteer” extra hours and “donate” some of their salaries back to him. 

Eventually, some of EA’s top researchers made a list of his sins, and our top polemicist wrote him an informal obituary. He left EA for safer climes.16

I never worked for Gleb, but I did invite him to speak to the EA group I ran at Epic Systems. He gave reasonable (if generic) marketing advice, which I’d have taken less seriously had I known he wasn’t good at marketing.

The scam happened after the talk, when he pressured me into paying him (er, “donating to Intentional Insights”). It was like $100, but he hadn’t said anything about a speaker fee beforehand, and the interaction left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I wasn’t surprised to see his org collapse later.

Weakness: I cared more about being charitable than calibrated; I chalked up Gleb’s low-quality work to an entrepreneurial spirit rather than incompetence. I also didn’t think an effective altruist would just… tell lies.

Would I fall for this again? We live in a world of Glebs: today, anyone can buy a squad of volunteers. I should suspect anyone who measures their success by counting free things (likes, clicks, quotes) instead of scarce things (dollars, firsthand endorsements). Online scores were already somewhat fake; they’ll get faker.

 

Wali Hamidy, DMD

The bonsai kittens toyed with my heart. Brian Wansink exploited my trust in science. Gleb Tsipursky guilted me into a small donation.

Wali Hamidy reached into my mouth, filled it with needless gunk, and charged me several thousand dollars for the privilege. He’s the most effective scammer I’ve ever met.17

It was a shady dentist shakedown like any other: Hamidy claimed that I had horrific dental issues and needed work done right away. (Here’s the full story.) I hadn’t seen a dentist since college, and I didn’t brush twice a day; the guilt was building up like plaque on teeth. I was ready to believe him when he spelled out the wages of my sin.By the time I spoke to my parents about the crown and six fillings — and then spoke on their insistence to my previous dentist, who was baffled — the procedure was done and the bill paid.

Weakness: Confirmation bias goes both ways: I tend to agree with people who call me virtuous or sinful, as long as I already believed it. And while I knew not to trust scientists by then, I still put a lot of faith in doctors (and dentists, why is that a whole different thing?). 

Would I fall for this again? This one combines all the other lessons:

  • When someone gives you surprising bad news, do your own research before you bite.
  • Get a second opinion before you spend 15% of your savings on dental work (or synthesize a virus in your basement for a faceless employer).
  • If someone has a good Yelp score, but the good reviews are generic and the bad reviews are detailed individual stories about their evil tricks, don’t trust the average!

 

Now that I’ve published a complete list of my weaknesses, I feel much safer.

 

Note: I’m at Inkhaven, so you’ll see a lot of new posts this month.

by

Playing Magic: the Gathering for Money

In 2006, I told my father that I regretted being born (in 1993).

“I could have been a successful Magic player. But by the time I’m old enough to travel and buy cards, I don’t think the game will be around anymore. I wish I were older.”

“You wish you were older… so you could play… professional Magic: the Gathering?”

It seems unfair that he’d be so incredulous; he is a titled chess master.18 But he had a point: “professional Magic: the Gathering player” is about as reliable a career plan as “professional ice cream taster”.

In 2020, I became a professional Magic: the Gathering player.

I hit rank #1 on the online ladder, won a major tournament, and reached the finals of the world championship. Over 100,000 people watched me play on my stream and Magic’s official channels. I made $55,000.

At the height of my power, I was responsible for the banning of multiple cards19 Magic’s parent company offered me a job testing new cards to make sure they weren’t too good. I stuck with professional effective altruism, which may be the greatest sacrifice I’ll ever make for the sake of impartial utility.

In 2022, I dropped off the pro circuit. In 2024, I stopped streaming. I may never play another big event; it takes time to qualify, and time is more expensive with each passing year.

But I’m glad I got to live those years, and people often ask about them. This post goes out to everyone curious about pro gaming — and to the version of me who will read this in 2046 to recover those memories.

Aaron Gertler Wins the First DreamHack Arena Open

What it was like

These are the highlights. In “Extra Materials”, I talk about my path to the pros and what it takes to be good.

Money

I played in five professional tournaments from February 2020—March 2022, earning $70,000. This amounts to something like $23 an hour — and I was one of the world’s winningest players over that span. It’s almost impossible to live off Magic earnings. But I also had a job, so most of my winnings (after taxes) went to charity.20

I also streamed ~20 hours a month for five years. Over that span, people watched me for 150,000 hours, and I made around $5,000. That’s not the usual rate: I wasn’t soliciting subscriptions or donations, and I didn’t run ads. But it’s a tough road even if you pull out all the stops — Magic’s fanbase only supports a few dozen full-time creators.

Preparation

In most esports, you can survive by excelling at one or two specific things: Marth in Smash, Zerg in Starcraft, Thresh in League. But Magic is always moving. New cards come out every few months, and people devise new strategies weekly to beat whatever was winning last week (we call this “metagaming”). At the highest level, choosing the right strategy (“deck”) matters almost as much as playing well.

Before most tournaments, I worked with a team of 10-20 people over multiple weeks. The pressure, long hours, and constant competition were great for bonding — and the occasional schism.21 We’d practice in secret, trying to puzzle out which deck would beat the decks we expected other teams to bring (knowing they were doing the same).22

When I wasn’t prepping for a tournament, I still played several hours a day — devising new strategies, entering small events, and testing decks I might use later. Ahead of the world championship, I learned that I’d played more Arena matches than any other competitor, including many who (through a now-defunct program) received a full-time salary to stream and compete in private tournaments. Looking back, this wasn’t healthy: I cut back on reading, lifting, journaling, and friendship. But I made the finals.

Stress

I sort games by tempo and certainty. Chess demands one decision every few minutes with perfect information. Starcraft, multiple decisions per second in the fog of war.

Magic’s in the middle: one decision every few seconds, just enough guessing to keep things interesting. It’s fun — when you can afford mistakes. Professional opponents punish mistakes.

The bodily experience of Magic:

  • After the tenth round of my first serious tournament, I had the worst headache of my life.
  • In my first widely-streamed professional match, Twitch chat noticed me hyperventilating.
  • Nerves empty my stomach. I used the restroom after most rounds. I knew one player who soiled himself mid-match.
  • During matches, my teeth sometimes chatter with tension. I whistle to release it. When you do this at a virtual tournament, and forget your webcam is being streamed, you make a kissy face at 10,000 people for 20 minutes.

I cared a lot about those matches, and my body knew it. But I felt very calm. My insane amounts of practice let me automate most decisions, and I favored unusual decks that broke my opponents’ patterns, forcing them to think — and make mistakes.23

When you play on stage, in front of a big screen, you get white-noise headphones to keep the audience from spoiling your opponent’s hand. I’d never felt such an intense flow state: total focus, use your training, play to your outs. Peace. (Sponsored by Monster Energy.)

Culture

Magic is old enough to have legends: people I’ve followed since childhood, people I’ve come to know through dozens of strategy articles or YouTube videos. It’s also new enough that its legends are (mostly) still active. In the same tournament, you might see both Seth Manfield (prime LeBron) and Kai Budde (an aging but potent Bill Russell).24

Professional Magic is roughly the size of the NBA. Several hundred players consistently show up at top events. Every year, a few step away from the game while thousands fight to replace them. Everyone knows everyone — they are your teammates, rivals, fellow gamblers, and roommates in motels across America. They’ve seen your streams and read your posts. They understand your jokes. If you’re ever in Richmond, you can sleep on their couch.

Unlike the NBA, Magic doesn’t pay its players much. Almost everyone has a day job; many pros live with parents or roommates. Cards are so expensive that even the most dedicated players borrow decks from each other.25

The vibes are good: sportsmanship, camaraderie, everyone bonding over the same weird hobby. You don’t see many assholes at the top; teams are too important, and antisocial people tend to cheer up at Magic tournaments. (Otherwise, why go?) The occasional cheater is reviled to a degree I’ve never seen in professional sports.26

Finale

The most relaxing match I remember was the world championship final. My opponent, Austin Bursavich, was my teammate; we were playing the same deck. (No schism.) Whatever the outcome, we’d already won. I’d beaten him at Dreamhack; if this were his movie, he’d get revenge.

It turned out to be his movie. When he killed three Edgewall Innkeepers with a single Blazing Volley, I made the Home Alone face for all the fans.27 Then he took the trophy and the biggest check home to his daughters.

Random anecdotes

  • I once played in an invite-only event organized by four-time All-Star Hunter Pence.
  • A big Magic website is running a March Madness-style tournament featuring 64 of the most famous decks ever built. One of them is mine.
  • Even years later, I sometimes get recognized at local game stores — but not often. Most casual players don’t watch tournaments, and my career was brief.
  • After I turned pro, my wife taught herself to play and briefly went viral for getting pretty good ridiculously fast. People accused me of playing on her account; they were wrong.
  • My wife sold some textbooks; the buyer brought her boyfriend to pick them up. He recognized my wife’s name from Reddit and wanted to meet me.
  • Random people from my past turned out to be Magic fans. The CEO of a company I temped for asked me for a match; it never came together.
  • At a conference, I spoke with a leading expert on nuclear weapons policy. After a grim discussion of atomic annihilation, he asked, out of the blue: “Do you know Marshall and Luis?” (Alas, not really.)

Extra materials

My path to professional Magic

I played Magic very badly from 2005 through 2008. I couldn’t afford many cards, I didn’t know good players, and I was still learning to use my brain.

I started again in 2015, after graduating and moving to a city of strangers. I could afford the cards and my fluid intelligence had peaked. I could watch good players online. But my skills remained medium at best. I perceived a massive gulf between myself and the pros on YouTube, and saw no reason to begin the deliberate practice that would bridge it.

In 2019, MTG Arena launched. Unlike the previous online game, it used a ladder system: if you reached the top 1200, you’d see your rank.

The ladder turned me into a maniac. I played six hours a day. I built fifty decks in three months, grasping for any edge that would boost my numbers. I now had a goal I could reach. I knew I wasn’t a pro, but it was still thrilling to imagine that I was one of the top 1000 players.

One of the top 100 players. One of the top 10 players. The top player.

I now had evidence that I was good. I didn’t know what to do with that information.

Coincidentally, a Facebook acquaintance turned out to be a Hearthstone streamer who was… forming a Magic team. We all have that friend, right?

He threw me into a Discord channel where I could, for the first time, practice with strong players. They tried my weird decks and made productive suggestions. They exposed weaknesses that ladder players mostly missed. I built another top deck, then another. My Reddit posts began to get attention; I saw pros use decks I’d built in matches with actual money on the line.

All of this together finally pushed me to enter a serious tournament, alongside my teammates. I won.

How to reach rank #1 on the MTG Arena ladder

Be unusually good at:

  • Solving a small puzzle every few seconds.
  • Being creative without descending into madness.
  • Getting addicted to brief risk-reward cycles with minimal, but positive, expected value.

And then add:

  • Ample free time: My natural predators were burning the midnight oil at Jane Street.
  • Soft competition: Most pros practice with teammates instead of clobbering random scrubs on the ladder.
  • Genetics: Thanks, Dad!

That should buy you at least a month, if you keep playing and don’t let anyone pass you.

Does rank #1 make you the best player in the world?

No.

  • There are many ways to play Magic (“formats”), and Arena doesn’t cover all of them.
  • The ranks can be gamed. The most consistent rank #1 player boosts his winrate by choosing obscure formats with few serious opponents.28
  • There’s no incentive, aside from pride (and YouTube views), to actually reach #1. You don’t win anything extra.29

But for all that, being #1 still means winning ~80% of your matches. That’s very hard in a game with Magic’s variance.

And rankings do have predictive power. When I won my first tournament (a field of 100 players), I was rank #1 on Arena, and my last three opponents were rank #2 on Arena and ranks #1 and #2 in live tournaments.

Storybook Brawl

After I left the pro circuit, I took a break from Magic to focus on Storybook Brawl — an indie autobattler designed by Magic players. It was a very different game, but I could still apply what I’d learned about deliberate practice and creative strategy. After nine months, I was one of the game’s best players.

Normally, “best player in a tiny indie game” wouldn’t mean much. But Storybook Brawl had an edge: it was loved by a wealthy celebrity, one of the richest men in the world. He loved the game so much he played it during Zoom meetings. He loved it so much he bought the company! He began to invest his nigh-unlimited resources in new features, better art, and a world championship with serious prizes — to be hosted at his company’s headquarters, in the Bahamas.

Unfortunately, that celebrity was Sam Bankman-Fried, and one day in November 2022, Storybook Brawl met the same fate as the rest of FTX. I’ve still never been to the Bahamas.