So I think: anti-soldier is still, "I don't like myself when I turned soldier and was really good at it." For all of "Ok, the War Doctor can call himself Doctor and we're buds now." And I get that. I think the Doctor is in that sense like Oppenheimer, who was a really great bomb designer and then wished to God he…

Have you read the book? It's not "meant to warn of the dangers of adultery". If anything, it's meant to warn of the dangers of warning of the dangers of adultery. And to warn about hypocrisy. And to warn about blaming women for things that men also do. (Whoops, is that feminist?) But it doesn't have a happy ending, so…

Really, some days, I just give up on other readers, fans, etc. "Oh, that writer/artist/director whatevs, I didn't like the last thing he did, so I don't understand why ANYONE KEEPS EMPLOYING HIM, he should be a hobo in an alley and someone should set him on fire." Aaron has written a lot of great, interesting and…

I think you're really wrong about Cuaron and Harry Potter. It was not as dramatic a bit of auteur restructuring of a franchise as Batman Begins or as big a gamble as Jackson's LOTR, but there was a dramatic difference in feel and authenticity between Cuaron's HP and Columbus' utterly by-the-numbers HP.

It really comes down to whether you've got an imaginative GM *and* imaginative players. Every single one of these things could be interesting in the right context. Many of them imply a world that includes mischevious or trolling wizards who are actively out to mess with people who expect to find the Mighty Blade of…

Imma gonna disagree with this one. Perfect twist.

The most common example everybody gives is

Every single goddamn thing about Tyrion's voyage south through Essos needs to be cut, forgotten, obliterated. We need to meet no one introduced in that voyage, we need to see nothing of it. It is utter, ghastly filler. If it turns out that Jon Connington and Aegon Targaryen actually matter at all beyond the next…

This will be seen as a defense of the people that the essay (and entry) are meant to critique, and I do not mean that for a second. But the problem is that this kind of argument, if you take it seriously as an assertion about neuroscience, applies just as devastatingly to science and "rationality" itself as it does to…

This assumes so much that I don't think is warranted. Ok, it is fine to say (for example) that AIs will not be obsessed with the wrong kind of efficiency, that this is really about human cultural fears projected onto AIs, but the entire article is premised on equally dubious assumptions: that AIs will not have…

Heinlein's Time Enough for Love—time traveller Lazarus Long eventually has a ...meeting...with his mother.

Wartortle at Victoria Falls.

I think that's possible to model. My guess is that the rationally poor decision gets made more often if the game is going to be repeated or there is any possibility of reciprocal unfairness. A prisoner's dilemma game plays out differently if the players will be playing many rounds and know they will be playing against…

Maybe for some things (driving) there is not anything like a wide distribution of skills. Meaning there are a small number of people who accurately think of themselves as recurrently bad drivers, then there is everybody else. After all, what do people even think it means to be a better driver than everyone else? That…

I propose that no movie ever again should have the line of dialog,

The key issue is that this is not about DC editorial being homophobes (though that's possible). It's about DC editorial being dedicated to a weird historical re-enactment of the comic-book 1990s, with all that entails, including certain kinds of fetishes about violence, impossible female anatomy, shoulderpads,…