2025-08-22 23:21:06
More friends should have secret codes.1
If you're at a restaurant and the waiter asks "do you want desert?", you often have this weird back-and-forth where
1) you're trying to figure out if the other person(s) want desert,
2) you're aware of the waiter hovering over you hoping you do want desert.
Which means if you're high in agreeableness, or if the waiter is at all pushy, you'll end up with desert whether you collectively want it or not.
Other situations where I wish I had secret codes include "trying to figure out whether other people want to leave the party yet" and "someone or something is really annoying me and I want to be rescued."
One thing that complicates normal, un-secret question-asking is that it's often hard to differentiate someone asking something for their own sake and asking something for yours. E.g. if someone says "are you tired, do you want to go home?" they might be saying "you look tired" or they might be saying "I'm tired" or most likely "I'm mildly tired so I'm ready to go home if you are, but if you're having a good time still I don't want to drag you away." (In a sense the solution to this doesn't need to be secret codes, just short codes for each of the possibilities).
Through my colleague Caroline's excellent newsletter I started watching the detective show Elementary. It got me thinking: which jobs are most over-represented on scripted television? I estimated the TVland population of each job by taking the % of scripted scripted shows and applying it to the US working population; I geminied these numbers and haven't checked them, so take this as a fun thing not a true thing:
| Field | Real Life Pop | TV Pop | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Police | 800k | 32m | 40x |
| Medicine | 1.1m | 16m | 15x |
| Law | 1.3m | 8m | 6x |
Multiple sources claim 30%+ of scripted dramas are police procedurals, which is insane; I bet if you broke that down to police detectives vs real life population you'd get an even better ratio, but I can't find the stats.
[^1]: of course, I don't technically know how many friends already have secret codes, but my sense is few do.
2025-08-20 22:29:15
About ten years ago I invented a game called Person Do Thing: players are given a very small number of simple words they can say to describe more complex target words. For example, lazy might be person no want do thing.
It took me ten years to get this game professionally manufactured, and in the intervening time I lived in fear that I would eventually run into someone who'd say oh, that sounds exactly like [already existing boardgame X you didn't know about].
I actually did run into people saying this a vast number of times, but when I looked up those games afterwards they did not seem especially similar.1
Fundamentally, this is pretty surprising. The concept and implementation of the game are both extremely simple and even home-makeable; I think in principle Jane Austen characters could have played it in their parlours. I have met people who are shocked to learn I created it, because they think of it as like rock paper scissors or hopscotch, games that were somehow Always There.
Meanwhile, there's a ton of people searching in the idea-space of Fun Games – professional designers or highly invested amateurs, desperately seeking new and original ideas that will stand out in the market. So there are obvious-in-retrospect ideas lying out in plain sight and motivated people trying to find them, and yet somehow the twain are not entirely meeting.
I think this points to a fundamental tension in the world of invention and discovery at large. While I do love games, "why are great game ideas left undeveloped?" is less important civilizationally than the same question for clean energy / materials science / hard tech.
And in the science and tech spheres, "why are we leaving low-hanging fruit unplucked?" is at minimum a massive opportunity and at maximum an urgent crisis. A vast amount of human flourishing and/or suffering may hinge on whether we can make e.g. nuclear fusion happen ten years sooner. And yet.... as best I can tell, we're not doing a great job of figuring out why we're not doing the best job of figuring new things out.
One theory about why we struggle to pick low hanging fruit in science is about the incentives in academia. Basically, if you're a PhD student, you need to research something unobjectionable. If you work on something paradigm-breaking you will often annoy the people who ultimately grade your work, and most big ideas inevitably don't pan out anyway. (Perhaps it's even worse for you if your idea does pan out, making your committee-members' lifetime work obsolete!)
That's before you even get to the Looking Silly Effect, where grad students are embarrassed to bring a crazy-sounding idea up, or to stick to it after they float it and other people tell them it sounds crazy (which many great ideas initially are).
As such, you're much safer working on a small, unimportant extension of the existing paradigm than a big hairy audacious goal. A 90% chance of making 0.1 unit of impact is more valuable than a 1% of chance of having a million units of impact, so we get a lot of small incremental improvements while world-changing inventions sit uninvented for decades.
But I think the world of board games is an interesting counterpoint here. It doesn't require advanced training to do,2 and there's relatively low barriers to entry for new creators (certainly compared to academia). And for obvious structural reasons, "this idea sounds silly" is not a big obstacle for games (although certainly other people's enthusiasm can make or break people's willingness to keep exploring a certain avenue).
And yet, the outcome in games-design world seems similar to me as in science: many unpublished games I see feel like small, unnecessary tweaks on a great existing model, and yet people will spend vast amounts time and treasure on bringing them to market. And I believe (though can't prove) that many extremely lush fruit are hanging un-plucked and well within our grasps.
Which makes me think that part of the issue with invention is something more social or psychological; that we're just not doing a good job collectively of directing our attention to the right places. I don't know how to solve that, but I think it's one of the most important collective questions for all of us.
Thanks to Ben Reinhardt via James Dillard and to Adam Mastroianni for getting me thinking about this question.
[^1]: E.g. I understand why someone was reminded of the game Concept — ~To get others to guess milk, the team might place the question mark icon (which signifies the main concept) on the liquid icon, then cubes of this color on the icons for food/drink and white~ – but also these are very clearly different games.
The most common comp I hear is Poetry For Neanderthals, which came out in 2020 and briefly gave me a heart attack when I heard about it and thought that six years of dilly-dallying had cost me my baby. But the actual rule in Poetry for Neanderthals is that you can say any one-syllable words you like (or: in Ode for Cave Man game, you can say just words with one beat and you can't say words with more beats. If you say words with more beats, that's bad!).
Not to be redundant but: this is in fact a different game from one where you're given a few specific simple words you can say, some of which are bisyllabic, and you can't say any other words (see: in Person Do Thing, person say no-many no-big thing. Person no say other thing, say other thing no good!)
[^2]: that said, there's a ton of insights and tacit knowledge among experienced designers that makes them much better at finding the fun in stuff; it's wild seeing great designers looking at a prototype, they can immediately say "this part isn't going to work" and "this mechanic will cause you this other problem" and be right. But still, this comes into play more for complex games with interlocking parts, and anyone can still stumble on a great idea for extremely minimal, "one rule" games.
2025-08-17 02:17:10
A good reason to not believe in UFOs is that only 13% of tenure-line faculty at major research institutions do. This post attempts to address other, less-good reasons people dismiss them.
To quote someone who made a 150:1 odds bet against UFOs:
the supervast majority of probable alien intellects, would not come here across interstellar distances, quietly and hiding on arrival, and then occasionally fly around in giant visible vehicles
I agree that UFOs seem to act strange, but if they're truly “alien” to us, then we probably can't exclude any behavior as too nonsensical. Fellow humans from different cultures often seem bizarre; an intelligence from an entirely different biosphere is likely even more inscrutable.
(We should expect this to be doubly true for a civilization more advanced than ours, as a less complex system cannot model a more complex one.)
As an example, consider the Sentinelese. They're a population of uncontacted hunter-gatherers, totally isolated from the modern world on a small island in the Indian Ocean.
In the last 50 years, their interaction with global civilization has consisted of:
If you were these tribespeople, it would be difficult to explain the strange and illogical behavior of these aliens:
“They gave us coconuts and an impossibly light and strong dish, but also sent a horrible pink monster that we shot and buried.”
“They absent-mindedly floated by on their little wooden boats to be easily killed, but then summoned a huge and deafeningly loud insect with impervious skin.”
"He came with a boat and clothes of unimaginably fine quality, but spoke in a strange tongue and didn’t still didn’t get the message even when we shot his things full of arrows. We slew him when he returned.”
From our side of the beach, we can understand the intricacies of human civilization that could result in such wide-ranging interactions, but it’s clearly impossible that the Sentinelese would have a model of the outside world that simultaneously included plastic kayaks, anthropologists, domestic pigs, crazy missionaries and helicopters.
This example also conveniently gives an explanation of why UFOs might not interact with us more. When you're that far ahead, you value primitive societies for their anthropological content, and don't want to ruin it by getting involved.
aliens can do whatever surveillance they want using far tinier devices; eg, covalent-bond-strong, micron-sized robots
One consistent thing about the future is that it's both more advanced and less advanced than you'd think. An ancient Roman in late 19th century America would be impressed by 60 mph locomotives and steel so abundant that it could be used to build entire bridges. That said, urban dwellers still getting around on horseback and streets subsequently choked under mountains of manure would seem incongruously primitive.
Similarly, Back to the Future's version of 2015 features flying cars, yet the protagonist is fired via fax. [1]
This is all to say that technology develops in uneven ways, sometimes for historical or path dependent reasons, but just as often because that's how the laws of physics play out. We don't use faxes anymore because data transmission speeds haven't been especially physically bottlenecked, and old fax lines can now carry high-speed internet.
Compare that to aircraft propulsion, where our most advanced hardware is basically an incrementally optimized version of what was first deployed in the 1940s. Below are charts showing the progression of jet engine pressure ratios (an indicator of thrust) and data transfer speeds. Pressure ratios have improved only about 10x since their inception, while data transfer technologies have improved more than 10,000x (note the log scale).
This means that in 2025 we talk on smartphones but drive around in largely the same way we did over a century ago (the Model T came out in 1908).
When physics will decide to ruin your party isn't predictable, and neither are the marvelous unlocks. From how we've seen the technological landscape has developed, we should expect any future to be uneven.
I should note that believing UFOs doesn't necessarily imply believing in UFO crashes, but I'll address this anyways. As mentioned, technological progress is uneven, which means it's possible to develop the ability to do something usefully before being able to do it consistently.
Our own spacecraft are an example of this, as rocket launches fail a whopping 1-2% of the time. Ironically, our most technologically advanced transport is also our most unreliable by far. We don't know what technology UFOs might use, but if it's near the technological frontier, that's a reason it could have a non-zero failure rate.
There's also the possibility that they simply don't care. Craft could just be forgotten after completing a mission (like Voyager 1), or even intentionally disposable if they're cheap and mass-producible.
You'll have to ask NASA.
In fact, Back to the Future's screenwriter said "We knew we weren't going to have flying cars by the year 2015, but God we had to have those in our movie"—audiences had come to expect them in any vision of the future. ↩︎
2025-08-15 23:16:57
Historically, a lot of my externalized knowledge is stored in chat apps. That is: if a friend sends me a link in whatsapp I don't need to store it anywhere else, because if I ever want to find it again I will associate it with that person and know to search for it in our chat history.
By contrast, if I find a link myself I have to bookmark it, and might never find it again if I forget in which of several possible places I did that. Over time I've worked to be more organized and store things I read/learn/think more cohesively regardless. But I do think there's something social to knowledge, and I wish knowledge-retention apps (of various kinds) made more effort to embed bits of knowledge in the social part of my brain.
We need more words for how well you can/can't hear people on the phone. When people say "can you hear me?" I want a succinct way to differentiate
1) I can hear you but you are quiet
2) I can hear you but there is more background noise than I would prefer, it is annoying
3) I can hear you 100% perfectly for 95% of the time, but intermittently it cuts out
Honestly the phone screen should ask me to vote, while we're speaking, on how good the call quality is, and show that to the other person, so that if the quality is not-great but not so bad that I'm going to complain about it, the person still finds out that e.g. talking on speakerphone consistently creates a much worse experience for their counterpart.
2025-08-13 21:27:00
I sometimes despair about 80/20ing online privacy and security: I fear this is one of those things where you either go to superhuman lengths to get privacy or you accept that you're getting nothing at all. (Richard Stallman abjures cell phones, key cards, credit cards, and browsing the web on his personal computer, while I am unwilling to give up any of these things).
But there's three things I do that I find convenient and mildly helpful. Please note: many times when I recommend software online it immediately gets worse, so apologies if that now happens with these.
Password manager that the nerds tell me is good and effective. I also use it for 2FA codes, which is kind of a violation of 2FA rules, but works for me. It also integrates directly with Fastmail to create arbitrary masked email addresses, allowing me not to give away my actual email to every random internet company.
cost: $36 per year per person, $60 per year for families
Email service that lets me create endless masked email addresses, one for each online signup. I also like having all of that go to a separate inbox from my main personal or work email addresses.
cost: $60 per year per person, $120 for families
Virtual credit cards. Lets you create a new, separate virtual card for every website or purchase.
This is the company I trust least on this list, in that I don't understand how they're making money or what they might do with my data in future, but given my options it feels better to me than giving my Main Card details out to every website.
You can restrict your virtual cards to a single vendor, and/or set spend limits on the cards or shut down individual cards completely, which seems great as a security feature. As a side bonus it helps you easily track where you're spending your money.
cost: free tier is weirdly good enough. Again, don't understand how they're making money.
Bonus note: looking at this list, if you're short on cash, Fastmail seems the most disposable – if you could find another way to generate masked emails you could skip it.
2025-08-11 21:23:31
Here's something that bothers me: various states and countries hold referenda for political decisions.
If the change-attempters win on the first try, a massive and permanent decision can get made based on a single specific moment in time. (Think Britain voting on whether to leave the European Union, for example).
If change-attempters lose, they can try to hold a second referendum later: if "yes" wins the second time the previous "no" vote counts for nothing, while if "yes" had won the first time there wouldn't have been a second chance to say "no". (Think Ireland's referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, or various other parts of the European Constitutional Treaty process)
Both of these outcomes seem weird to me, and it feels like they would be solved by making referenda "best of N" votes. For a sufficiently large issue, perhaps there should be multiple votes over multiple years, and the winner is the one that gets chosen at least 2 out of 3 times, or at least 3 out of 5, or whathaveyou.
I realise this would have downsides – it could be expensive and complex, there would be debates about whether two referenda were on exactly the same topic or a different one that requires a new set of votes, etc.
But for a sufficiently important topic – or in a place like California, with regular referenda ballots anyway – I think it might be worth trying, and I've never heard of it tried (I asked our somewhat-trusty LLM friends and they said it hadn't – if you know of somewhere that does it, please shout).