I am confused about how to invest in 2021. 

I remember in college, talking with a friend who was in a class on technical investing, and he was mentioning that the class was talking about momentum investing on 7 day and 30 day timescales; I said "wait, those numbers are obviously suspicious; can't we figure out what it should actually be from the past?", downloading a dataset of historical S&P500 returns, and measuring the performance of simple momentum trading algorithms on that data. I discovered that basically all of the returns came from before 1980; there was a period where momentum investing worked, and then it stopped, but before I drilled down into the dataset (like if I just looked at the overall optimization results), it looked like momentum investing worked on net.

Part of my suspicion had also been an 'efficient markets' sense; if my friend was learning in his freshman classes about patterns in the market, presumably Wall Street also knew about those patterns, and was getting rid of them? I believed in the dynamic form of efficient markets: you could get rich by finding mispricings, but mostly by putting in the calories, and I thought I had better places to put calories. But this made it clear to me that there were shifts in how the market worked; if you were more sophisticated than the market, you could make money, but then at some point the market would reach your level of sophistication, and the opportunity would disappear.

I learned how to invest about 15 years ago (and a few years before the above anecdote). At the time, I was a smart high-schooler; my parents had followed a lifelong strategy of "earn lots of money, save most of it, and buy and hold", and in particular had invested in a college fund for me; they told me (roughly) "this money is yours to do what you want with, and if you want to pay more for college, you need to take out loans." I, armed with a study that suggested colleges were mostly selection effect instead of treatment effect, chose the state school (with top programs in the things I was interested in) that offered me a full ride instead of the fancier school that would have charged me, and had high five figures to invest.

I did a mixture of active investing and buying index funds; overall, they performed about as well, and I grew more to believe that active investing was a mistake whereas opportunity investing wasn't. That is, looking at the market and trying to figure out which companies were most promising at the moment took more effort than I was going to put into it, whereas every five years or so a big opportunity would come along, that was worth betting big on. I was more optimistic about Netflix than the other companies in my portfolio, but instead of saying "I will be long Netflix and long S&P and that's it", I said "I will be long these ten stocks and long S&P", and so Netflix's massive outperformance over that time period only made me slightly in the black compared to the S&P instead of doing much better than it.

It feels like the stock market is entering a new era, and I don't know what strategy is good for that era. There are a few components I'll try to separate:

First, I'm not actually sure I believe the medium-term forward trend for US stocks is generically good in the way it has been for much of the past. As another historical example, my boyfriend, who previously worked at Google, has a bunch of GOOG that he's never diversified out of, mostly out of laziness. About 2.5 years ago (when we were housemates but before we were dating), I offered to help him just go through the chore of diversification to make it happen. Since then GOOG has significantly outperformed the S&P 500, and I find myself glad we never got around to it. On the one hand, it didn't have to be that way, and variance seems bad--but on the other hand, I'm more optimistic about Alphabet than I am about the US as a whole.

[Similarly, there's some standard advice that tech workers should buy less tech stocks, since this correlates their income and assets in a way that's undesirable. But this feels sort of nuts to me--one of the reasons I think it makes sense to work in tech is because software is eating the world, and it wouldn't surprise me if in fact the markets are undervaluing the growth prospects of tech stocks.]

So this sense that tech is eating the world / is turning more markets into winner-takes-all situations means that I should be buying winners, because they'll keep on winning because of underlying structural factors that aren't priced into the stocks. This is the sense that if I would seriously consider working for a company, I should be buying their stock because my seriously considering working for them isn't fully priced in. [Similarly, this suggests real estate only in areas that I would seriously consider living in: as crazy as the SFBA prices are, it seems more likely to me that they will become more crazy rather than become more sane. Places like Atlanta, on the other hand, I should just ignore rather than trying to include in an index.]

Second, I think the amount of 'dumb money' has increased dramatically, and has become much more correlated through memes and other sorts of internet coordination. I've previously become more 'realist' about my ability to pick opportunities better than the market, but have avoided thinking about meme investments because of a general allergy to 'greater fool theory'. But this is making me wonder if I should be more of a realist about where I fall on the fool spectrum. [This one feels pretty poisonous to attention, because the opportunities are more time-sensitive. While I think I have a scheme for selling in ways that would attention-free, I don't think I have a scheme for seeing new opportunities and buying in that's attention-free.]

[There's a related point here about passive investors, which I think is less important for how I should invest but is somewhat important for thinking about what's going on. A huge component of TSLA's recent jump is being part of the S&P 500, for example.]

Third, I think the world as a whole is going to get crazier before it gets saner, which sort of just adds variance to everything. A thing I realized at the start of the pandemic is that I didn't have a brokerage setup where I could sell my index fund shares and immediately turn them into options, and to the extent I think 'opportunity investing' is the way to go / there might be more opportunities with the world getting crazier, the less value I get out of "this will probably be worth 5% more next year", because the odds that I see a 2x or 5x time-sensitive opportunity really don't have to be very high for it to be worthwhile to have it in cash instead of locked into a 5% increase.

My boyfriend: "I want a version of the Dune fear mantra but as applied to ugh fields instead"

Me:

I must not flinch.
Flinch is the goal-killer.
Flinch is the little death that brings total unproductivity.
I will face my flinch.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the flinch has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Tho they later shortened it, and I think that one was better:

I will not flinch.
Flinch is the goal-killer.
I will face my flinch.
I will let it pass through me.
When the flinch has gone,
there shall be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Him: Nice, that feels like flinch towards

Spoiler-free Dune review, followed by spoilery thoughts: Dune part 1 was a great movie; Dune part 2 was a good movie. (The core strengths of the first movie were 1) fantastic art and 2) fidelity to the book; the second movie doesn't have enough new art to carry its runtime and is stuck in a less interesting part of the plot, IMO, and one where the limitations of being a movie are more significant.)

Reading Kelsey's twitter and thinking about the connection between public health communication and computer security communication. A common meme in public health is something like "we need to go slowly and cautiously and consider all of the concerns in order for the public to trust us", which turns out to be the opposite of correct--the thing where the public health authorities go slowly and cautiously cause the public to, on net, think the thing is dangerous.

The computer security professional is typically in the opposite boat: they want the public to think the thing is more dangerous than it naively seems. ["No, using 'password' as your password will bite you."] If presented with an argument that a methodology should be used because it increases trust, they might look at you like you grew another head; "why would I want to increase trust?"

Is this what's happening for public health people, where they're much more used to thinking about how drugs and treatments and so on can go wrong? Or is it just a standard incompetence / confusion story?

Civilization (the video game series) is 30 years old, and they posted a trailer to Youtube.

I found it... sort of disgustingly delusional? Like, I like the Civilization series a lot; I've put thousands of hours into the games. But:

Your deeds are legendary, and across the world, throughout the internet, everyone shall hear of you. ... You are more than a turn taker; you shape the world.

I think there's something good about strategy games in helping you see through different lenses, develop mental flexibility and systems thinking, and learn to see like a state, and so on. But this is not that! This is saying that, by playing a game of Civilization, you actually become a world leader (or, at least, a famous gamer)? What a pathetic lie.

Thinking about the 'losing is fun' nature of some games. The slogan was originally popularized by Dwarf Fortress, but IMO the game that did it best was They Are Billions (basically, an asymmetrical RTS game where if the zombies break thru, they grow exponentially and so will probably wipe you out in moments). You would lose a run, know why you lost, and then maybe figure out the policy that meant you wouldn't lose the next time.

Another game I've been playing recently is Terra Invicta, a long game (technically a pausable RTS but much more like a TBS?) with a challenging UI (in large part because it has a ton of info to convey) where... I don't think I ever actually lost, but I would consistently reach a point where I said "oh, I didn't realize how to do X, and now that I know how, by missing out on it I think I'm behind enough that I should start over."

Similarly, in Factorio/Satisfactory/Dyson Sphere Program, I think I often reach a point where I say "oh, I've laid things out terribly / sequenced them wrong, I should start over and do it right this time."

But... this is sort of crazy, and I don't quite understand what's up with that part of my psychology. For a game like Satisfactory, I'm nearly strictly better off deconstructing everything and laying it out again than starting over (and often better off just moving to a new start location and leaving the old factory in place). Even for Terra Invicta, I'm probably better off using the various compensatory mechanisms ("you were too slow building moonbases, and so other people got the good spots? This is how you take over bases with a commando team") than restarting. 

It's more like... wanting to practice a performance, or experience the "everything goes well" trajectory rather than figuring out how to recover from many different positions. Why am I into that slice of what games can be?

One frame I have for 'maximizing altruism' is that it's something like a liquid: it's responsive to its surroundings, taking on their shape, flowing to the lowest point available. It rapidly conforms to new surroundings if there are changes; turn a bottle on its side and the liquid inside will rapidly resettle into the new best configuration.

This has both upsides and downsides: the flexibility and ability to do rapid shifts mean that as new concerns become the most prominent, they can be rapidly addressed. The near-continuous nature of liquids means that as you get more and more maximizing altruist capacity, you can smoothly increase the 'shoreline'.

Many other approaches seem solid instead of liquid, in a way that promotes robustness and specialization (while being less flexible and responsive). If the only important resources are fungible commodities, then the liquid model seems optimal; if it turns out that the skills and resources you need for tackling one challenge are different than the skills and resources needed for tackling another, or if switching costs dominate the relative differences between projects. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and it takes time and effort to build up the ability to handle that detail effectively.

I think there's something important here for the broader EA/rationalist sphere, tho I haven't crystallized it well yet. It's something like--the 'maximizing altruism' thing, which I think of as being the heart of EA, is important but also a 'sometimes food' in some ways; it is pretty good for thinking about how to allocate money (with some caveats) but is much less good for thinking about how to allocate human effort. It makes sense for generalists, but actually that's not what most people are or should be. This isn't to say we should abandon maximizing altruism, or all of its precursors, but... somehow build a thing that both makes good use of that, and good use of less redirectable resources.

So I've been playing HUMANKIND over the last few days and think I have the hang of it now. It's by Amplitude Studios, who also made Endless Space, Endless Legend, Endless Space 2, and Dungeon of the Endless (which was my favorite out the of four; also apparently I wrote up my thoughts on ES2).

The basic engine is the same as those games, and most similar to Endless Legend; the world is a hex-map that's broken up into pre-defined territories, each of which can only have one outpost/city. Each hex generates some resources on its own (fertile land giving you food, forests industry, etc.), but you only work the hexes immediately adjacent to the districts you build (including the city center), and districts vary in what resources they collect. [Build a farmer's quarter next to a forest and you don't collect any of the industry, but build a maker's quarter and you do.]

The core gimmick that differentiates it from Civilization / Endless Legend is that rather than picking one nation/race, you pick one culture from each age. (So no more Abraham Lincoln wearing furs / a suit at the beginning of the game, both of which were nonsense in different ways.) Instead you might be the Babylonians, and then the Carthaginians, then Khmer, then Mughals, then French, then Japanese (which was the path I took in my most recent game that I won). You end up building a history (both in continuing buffs and districts that remain on the field), and picking things that are appropriate to your setup. (In Civ, having Russians get a bonus to tundra tiles is sort of terrible because maybe the RNG will give you tundra and maybe it won't, but having one of the faith options be a tundra bonus is fine because only someone who knows they have lots of tundra will pick it. This makes everything more like that.)

The other relevant facts are: 1) the cultures seem to vary wildly in power (or at least appropriateness to any given situation), and 2) you pick from the list whenever you age up from the previous age, and 3) everyone starts as a nondescript nomadic tribe. (Which, as a neat side effect, means you do much more exploring before you place your first city, and so you have much more choice than you normally get.) So rather than starting the game as the Babylonians, you're racing to see who gets to be them. Wonders, the typical race dynamic of the Civ games, are minimized here (there aren't that many of them and they aren't that great), replaced by these cultures.

Overall, tho, I think the net effect is significantly increasing the 'rich get richer' dynamic and makes for a less satisfying game. One method of asymmetrical balance is to say "well, it's alright if the cultures are unbalanced, because then the drafting mechanics will create a meta-balance." But when the drafting mechanics are "the person in the lead picks first", you end up with a probably dominant meta-strategy (and then the best available counter-strategy which is trying hard to play catchup).

At my current skill level (who knows, maybe I'm doing the naive strategy), it looks to me like the dominant move is 1) make one mega-city and 2) stack lots of cultures who have emblematic districts that give you buffs based on population size / number of districts. You can have only one such district per territory, but you can have lots of territories in your city (limited only by your influence and the number of territories other players will 'let' you have). So when each Khmer Baray gives you +1 industry per population, and you've combined ten territories into your megalopolis with 100 population, you now get 1k industry/turn out of that, instead of the 100 you would have gotten from having ten cities each with their own Baray. And then later you get the Japanese Robotics Lab, which gives you +2 industry on each Maker's Quarter, and so that leads to a +20 bonus on each of the ten, for +200 industry (and another +200 industry from the effect of those Robotics Labs on themselves).

[There are countervailing forces pushing against the megalopolis--each additional territory you add to a city increases the cost of the next, so actually I had one big city and then five or six small ones, but I think I hadn't realized how strong this effect was and will do something different next game.]

So far... I think I like it less than Old World, but it has interestingly different solutions to many of the same problems, and it's covering a very different time period.

A year ago, I wrote about an analogy between Circling and Rationality, commenters pointed out holes in the explanation, and I was excited to write more and fill in the holes, and haven't yet. What gives?

First was the significant meta discussion about moderation, which diverted a lot of the attention I could spare for LW, and also changed my relationship to the post somewhat. Then the pandemic struck, in a way that killed a lot of my ongoing inspiration for Circling-like things. Part of this is my low interest in non-text online activities; while online Circling does work, and I did it a bit over the course of the pandemic, I Circled way less than I did in the previous year, and there was much less in the way of spontaneous opportunities to talk Circling with experts. I put some effort into deliberate conversations with experts (thanks Jordan!), and made some progress, but didn't have the same fire to push through and finish things.

A common dynamic at the start of a new project is that one is excited and dumb; finishing seems real, and the problems seem imaginary. As one thinks more about the problem, the more one realizes that the original goal was impossible, slowly losing excitement. If pushed quickly enough, the possible thing (that was adjacent to the impossible goal) gets made; if left to sit, the contrast is too strong for work on the project to be compelling. Something like this happened here, I think.

So what was the original hope? Eliezer wrote The Simple Truth, which explained in detail what it means for truth to be a correspondence between map and territory, what sort of systems lead to the construction and maintenance of that correspondence, and why you might want it. I think one sort of "authenticity" is a similar correspondence, between behavior and preferences, and another sort of "authenticity" is 'relational truth', or that correspondence in the context of a relationship.

But while we can easily talk about truth taking preferences for granted (you don't want your sheep eaten by wolves, and you don't want to waste time looking for sheep), talking about preferences while not taking them for granted puts us in murkier territory. An early idea I had here was a dialogue between the 'hippie' arguing for authenticity against a 'Confucian' arguing for adoption of a role-based persona, which involves suppressing one's selfish desires, but this ended up seeming unsatisfactory because it was an argument between two particular developmental levels. I later realized that I could step back, and just use the idea of "developmental levels" to compartmentalize a lot of the difficulty, but moving up a level of abstraction would sacrifice the examples, or force me to commit to a particular theory of developmental levels (by using it to supply the examples).

I also got more in touch with the difference between 'explanatory writing' and 'transformative writing'; consider the difference between stating a mathematical formula and writing a math textbook. The former emits a set of facts or a model, and the user can store it in memory but maybe not much else; the latter attempts to construct some skill or ability or perspective in the mind of the reader, but can only do so by presenting the reader with the opportunity to build it themselves. (It's like mailing someone IKEA furniture or a LEGO set.) Doing the latter right involves seeing how the audience might be confused, and figuring out how to help them fix their own confusion. My original goal had been relatively simple--just explain what is going on, without attempting to persuade or teach the thing--but I found myself more and more drawn towards the standard of transformative writing.

I might still write this, especially in bits and pieces, but I wanted to publicly note that I slipped the deadline I set for myself, and if I write more on the subject it will be because the spirit strikes me instead of because I have a set goal to. [If you were interested in what I had to say about this, maybe reach out and let's have a conversation about it, which then maybe might seed public posts.]

Steam Wrapped got me thinking about games from 2023, so here are some thoughts/recommendations/anti-recommendations. The theme of this year for me was apparently RPGs made by studios whose RPGs I had played before:

• Baldur's Gate 3: Game of the Year for a reason; took me a bit over a hundred hours on the hardest difficulty setting. (They've since released a harder one.) Doesn't require experience with Dungeons & Dragons, 5th edition specifically, or the previous Baldur's Gate games, tho those enhance the experience. Much more a continuation of Larian's previous RPGs than of the old Baldur's Gate series, which I think is a good thing? Extremely flexible and detailed; you can often be clever and get around things and the game rewards you for it.
  RPGs like these are often made or broken by the quality of the companion NPCs, and I think the crew they have you assemble is a memorable one worth getting to know. Something about playing it felt like it captured the D&D experience (both upsides and downsides) pretty well? Theater kids were involved in the creation of this game, in a good way.
• Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: a sequel to their previous open world Zelda game, and IMO the best 'sequel' I've seen? In the sense of, they know you played the first game, and so now it's the same thing, but different.  Set only a few years after the first game, the map is basically the same (with the new features being mostly vertical expansion--there's now a skyworld and an underworld), your horses from the first game are available in the stables, many recognize you as the guy that saved the world recently. The new physics engine is nice, but the overall plot is... simple but neat? Continuing the theme of "the thing you expect (including novelty!), done competently"
• Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader: a new game, and the first Warhammer 40k CRPG. I'm still going thru this one and so don't have a fully realized take here. Made by the people who made Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, both of which have an overworld management map plus standard RPG character progression / combat. In Kingmaker, where you're the baron of a new region carved out of the wilderness, I thought it didn't quite fit together (your kingdom management doesn't really matter compared to the RPG plot); in Wrath of the Righteous, where you're appointed the head of a crusade against the Worldwound, I thought it did (mostly b/c of the crusade battle mechanic, a HoMM-style minigame, tho you could see seams where the two systems joined together imperfectly); in Rogue Trader you're a, well, Rogue Trader, i.e. someone tasked by the God-Emperor of humanity to expand the borders of the Imperium by operating along the frontier, and given significant license in how you choose to do so.  You own a flagship (with thousands of residents, most of whom live in clans of people doing the same job for generations!) and several planets, tho ofc this is using sci-fi logic where each planet is basically a single city. There's also a space-battle minigame to add spice to the overworld exploration.
  I am finding the background politics / worldview / whatever of the game quite interesting; the tactical combat is fine but I'm playing on the "this is my first time playing this game" difficulty setting and thinking I probably should have picked a higher one. The Warhammer 40k universe takes infohazards seriously, including the part where telling people what not to think is itself breaking infosec. So you get an extremely dogmatic and siloed empire, where any sort of change is viewed with suspicion as being treason promoted by the Archenemy (because, to be fair, it sometimes is!). Of course, you've got much more flexibility because you inherited an executive order signed by God that says, basically, you can do what you want, the only sort of self-repair the system allows. (But, of course, the system is going about it in a dumb way--you inherit the executive order, rather than having been picked by God!) The three main 'paths' you can take are being Dogmatic yourself, being an Iconoclast (i.e. humanist), or being a Heretic (i.e. on the side of the Archenemy); I haven't yet seen whether the game sycophantically tells you that you made the right choice whatever you pick / the consequences are immaterial or not.
• Starfield: Bethesda's first new RPG setting in a while. It was... fine? Not very good? I didn't really get hooked by any of the companions (my favorite Starfield companion was less compelling than my least favorite BG3 companion), the whole universe was like 3 towns plus a bunch of procedurally generated 'empty' space, the outpost building was not well-integrated with the rest of the game's systems (it was an upgrade over Fallout 4's outpost-building in some ways but not others), and the central conceit of the plot was, IMO, self-defeating. Spoilers later, since they don't fit well in bulleted lists.
• Darkest Dungeon II: ok this isn't really an RPG and so doesn't belong on this list, but mentioning it anyway. IMO disappointing compared to Darkest Dungeon. I'm not quite sure what I liked less well, but after 16 hours I decided I would rather play Darkest Dungeon (which I put 160 hours into) and so set it down.

The promised Starfield spoilers:

I just finished reading The Principles of Scientific Management, an old book from 1911 where Taylor, the first 'industrial engineer' and one of the first management consultants, had retired from consulting and wrote down the principles behind his approach.

[This is part of a general interest in intellectual archaeology; I got a masters degree in the modern version of the field he initiated, so there wasn't too much that seemed like it had been lost with time, except perhaps some of the focus on making it palatable to the workers too; I mostly appreciated the handful of real examples from a century ago.]

But one of the bits I found interesting was thinking about a lot of the ways EY approaches cognition as, like, doing scientific management to thoughts? Like, the focus on wasted motion from this post. From the book, talking about why management needs to do the scientific effort, instead of the laborers:

The workman's whole time is each day taken in actually doing the work with his hands, so that, even if he had the necessary education and habits of generalizing in his thought, he lacks the time and the opportunity for developing these laws, because the study of even a simple law involving, say, time study requires the cooperation of two men, the one doing the work while the other times him with a stop-watch.

This reminds me of... I think it was Valentine, actually, talking about doing a PhD in math education which included lots of watching mathematicians solving problems, in a way that feels sort of like timing them with a stop-watch.

I think this makes me relatively more excited about pair debugging, not just as a "people have less bugs" exercise but also as a "have enough metacognition between two people to actually study thoughts" exercise.

Like, one of the interesting things about the book is the observation that a switch from 'initiative and incentive' workplaces, where the boss puts all responsibility to do well on the worker and pays them if they do, to 'scientific management' workplaces, where the boss is trying to understand and optimize the process, and teach the worker how to be a good part of it, is that the workers in the 'scientific management' workplace can do much more sophisticated jobs, because they're being taught how instead of having to figure it out on their own.

[You might imagine that a person of some fixed talent level could be taught how to do jobs at some higher complexity range than the ones they can do alright without support, which itself is a higher complexity range than jobs that they could both simultaneously do and optimize.]

I thought I didn't have a Twitter account, but turns out I do, made back in 2009. [Presumably this was just squatting? It looks like I do have one account that I'm following, a professor that I met a month before at IHS.]

...should I use it? I feel like I should at least log in to update my name, but am guessing that I probably 1) won't have anything to say and 2) am already getting most of the value of having a twitter account by checking people's pages about once a month.

While thinking about ELK (we'll see how my submission did before I talk about it), I ended up framing-for-myself why ELK is difficult, which seems good to post (but short enough that I'm going to stick it on my shortform instead of make a top-level post). I don’t think any of the following is 'new' instead of restating things already in the ELK doc.

I think there's a general counterargument to transparency-style approaches solving ELK. Suppose I have a way of checking the AI’s current ‘mental state’ / world-model to see whether or not it believes the sensors are corrupted. Can’t there now be a strategy of “corrupt the sensors and then forget about it”? Transparency analysis on the AI would see it honestly reporting that everything is as it should be.

If that strategy works, then I think the hope of ELK has to be not retrospective but prospective: rather than just checking after the fact that it didn’t fool you (because it could fool itself about whether or not it's fooling you), you check before the AI implements any plans that it’s not planning to fool you. But isn’t this just the same problem, where it can construct a plan that will fool the sensors on the innermost layer, create an outer layer that it fools to believe the plan won’t do that, and then you check the plan, both you and the outer layer think the plan is ok, and then the sensors get fooled?

In general, it seems like either A) the thinking is happening where you told it to happen or B) you are checking a black box after the fact to see where the thinking happened, and in the worst case for B I think you can always posit “and then the thinking happened in another hidden spot.” [That is, the ‘reporter’ head can fail to understand what’s happening in the “figure out what’s going on” node, and there’s an incentive to deceive the reporter by thinking in obscure ways.]

As I understand the case for optimism, it deals mostly not with worst-case analysis but with plausibility analysis; I can maybe tell a training story where the thinking is incentivized to happen in observable places and it becomes less and less likely that there’s hidden thinking that corrupts the outputs. [Or I need to have arranged the cognition myself in a way that seems good.]

Prediction Markets for Science came from going on a walk with a friend, mentioning it briefly, thinking that it'd be an element from our shared context, and them going "oh? This is the first I'm hearing of that". [Part of this is that I've been reading Hanson's blog for a long time and they haven't.] It's not the sort of thing I think of as 'new' (I'm pretty sure everything in it is from a Hanson blogpost or is one inferential step away), but also something I'm glad to write a reminder / introduction of.

What are other things you'd like to see me write up, to roughly the same level of detail?

My boyfriend is getting into Magic, and so I've been playing more of it recently. (I've played off and on for years; my first set was Tempest, which came out in October 1997). The two most recent sets have been set in Innistrad, their Gothic Horror setting.

One of the things I like about Innistrad is that I think it has the correct red/black archetype: Vampires. That is, red/black is about independence and endorsed hedonism; vampires who take what they want from those weaker than them, and then use the strength gained from that taking to maintain their status. [They are, I think, a great allegory for feudal nobility, and one of the things I like about Innistrad is that they're basically the only feudal government around.]

Often, when I think about fictional settings, I focus on the things that seem... pointlessly worse than they need to be? The sort of thing that a good management consultant could set straight, if they were a planeswalker showing up to advise. But often meditating on a flaw will point out a way in which it had to be that way (unless you could change something else upstream of that).

Someone observed that monsters often have a potent reversal of some important fact: vampires, for example, have endless life, the consumption associated with life, but none of the generativity associated with life. Human civilization developed agape (mostly in the sense John Vervaeke means it, which I think isn't that far from how the Christians mean it) in part because this is how human genes sustain themselves across time; the present giving selflessly to the future (in part because it's not actually that selfless; the genes/memes/civilization will still be around, even if the individuals won't).

But what need does vampire civilization have for agape? Edgar Markov, the original vampire on Innistrad, is still around. He has a typical-for-humans domineering relationship with his grandson, in a way made totally ridiculous by the fact that their ages are basically the same. (Sorin is about 6,000 years old, Edgar is his biological grandfather, and they became vampires at the same time, when Sorin was 18, if I'm understanding the lore correctly.) There's no real need to move beyond selfish interest towards general interest in mankind if you expect to be around for the rest of history.

[And vampires reflect the perversion of that agape, because they consume resources that could have instead been put into building up human civilization, and are generally uninterested in their human subjects becoming anything more than artists and cattle.]

[Incidentally, I wrote a short story that I will maybe someday publish, where in a world that has Warhammer-esque Vampire Counts, one of them roughly-by-accident mades a nerd court that turns into a university that then becomes a city-state of global importance, roughly because they're able to channel this sort of competitive selfishness into something agape-flavored.]