Interim Recap #1

We’re now 10/100 (300?) essays in into this baby (🥳).

Because it can seem like we’ve been taking a random walk thus far and yet I think there’s a coherent thing here I’m trying to get out, I'm gonna be signposting every 10 or so essays with an interim recap. 

So let’s do that right now. 

In the past ten essays we’ve been all over the place: the lopsidedness of the irl skill tree,  antisocial social people, the ultimatum game, magic and magicians, arbitrage, reasoning through what you can't see but must be, how you're not powerless, just under attack, how both competent evil and adversariality hide. Jesus, I can’t breather. What the hell holds all this together?

If we step back, turns out there’s actually a coherent throughline. Three big ideas. Here they are:

• Arbitrage: If there’s a gap between what’s believed and what is true, this gap can be exploited. 

• Hidden: Competent adversaries actively create gaps like these to exploit them. Magicians collect skills that exploit the landscape of gaps.

• Inference: Because magicians and competent adversaries depend on staying hidden, we must infer, using reason to uncover what’s concealed

That’s it… for now 😎

Tomorrow we go back to regular scheduled programming with a new essay. TTYT