Down the intellectual rabithole

Parts of me want to write. Parts of me want to learn new things. There's a tension between those two groups of parts. And then there's me--if, in fact, I exist. Ask me what I want you'll get an answer that supports the writing-wanting parts. "I want to write," I'll say. Or something, claiming to me, will say.

So here we all are, all the members of the Internal Family System, writing. We're writing, instead of learning new things. If you're a Part who wants to write, I hope you're happy. Or at least not terribly unhappy. And if you're a Part that wants to learn new things, hang on. You'll learn things.

The thing is: I learn new things when I write. It's not as though writing is a loss for the "let's learn new things" faction. But the process is slower. And it's kind of painful. And there's a reason.

Life is unsatisfactory. So says the Buddha and Steven B. Hayes of ACT Therapy and lots of other people. Including me, from time to time. All of life is unsatisfactory, but some parts are more unsatisfactory than others. Learning new things is unsatisfactory because the new thing doesn't answer all outstanding questions. And because learning new thing A means I'm not learning new things B, C, and D that I'd also hoped to learn. And worse, because new thing A introduces me to new things E-M. So my list of new things to learn has just gotten longer. Learning is unsatisfactory.

Writing about what I've learned is even more unsatisfactory. Note that being more unsatisfactory is NOT the same as being less satisfactory. It's not a reduction in a positive good. It's a superabundance of something negative, the same way that "less pleasure" is not in any way the same as "more pain." If I write about topic A then I'm not writing about B, C, and D, and I'm not learning about E, F, and G.  But writing is even worse. I'm writing sentences, each of which is unsatisfactory. And the paragraphs, are unsatisfactory in so many other ways. They may be in the wrong order. They may be unnecessary. They may be too short, or too long.

It gets worse. The cause of many forms of unsatisfactoriness are outside me, but some are caused be me. There's the fact that there are 24 hours in a day. There's the fact that knowledge is being created faster than I can possibly absorb it. There's the fact that everything on the internet is linked to every other fucking thing, so that everything I learn leads to everything I haven't learned. These are all outside mt. But the fact that a sentence sucks is no one's fault but my own. So many of the dissatisfactions of writing proceed come from me. From what I've written. From the way that I've written it. That makes it twice as worse.

The thing is, there's nothing to be done. Or is there?

I can't make the dissatisfaction go away, but I can change its meaning. Maybe.

When I was an adolescent, I remembered just a few days ago, I reveled in my suffering. I was proud of my angst. I was contemptuous of the kids who seemed to glide through life unaware of--well, unaware of almost everything. Life is easy when you do what you're told to do, think what you're told to think, say what you're supposed to say, feel what you're supposed to feel. Life is easy when all the answers are known and all you have to do is do your best. But not for me.

I remember walking our dog, one cold clear winter's night, looking up at the stars, and wondering when--or if--my real parents would arrive and take me home--away from this planet. I didn't belong here. Everything was alien to me. Wrong. Ill-fitting.

I remember the discomfort I felt--my teen-aged self might have called it pain--and how the very fact of my pain made me special. Better.

Perhaps I would do well to recover that point of view. Perhaps it would help me if I embraced my discomfort; if I ran toward it rather than away. Perhaps I'll publish this, and go do something else uncomfortable and dissatisfying.

Perhaps I'll do it now.

Ideal writing environment

Periodically, I get to thinking (whining) about improving my writing environment. I’ve got ideas about an ideal environment. I’d like to turn those ideas into reality. Or at least to turn them into a blog post.

My current environment is a patchwork. And I’ve done some experiments. I’m up the learning curve on Google’s APIs and the node/javascript ecosystem and development environments.

I can build it. And maybe I’m gonna.

Current process

I dictated the first draft of this post using Google Docs on my Android phone. Now I’m editing with a browser-based version of Google Docs. I use the keyboard to navigate and make smaller changes, and Voice Typing for larger changes and additions.

When I finish this version (I have) I will select and copy what I’ve written, switch to Blogger, start a new post, and paste what I copied. (Which I have done.) In Blogger I’m doing a little more editing because things look different. And I’m using Grammarly to catch spelling and grammar errors.

I write posts in Markdown, and when I’m done I hit some magic keys that tell a Chrome Extension called Markdown Here to change the Markdown to HTML right in Blogger. So I can preview it. Then I tag it and I publish it. Half the time I’ve undone the Markdown to HTML conversion and I forget to convert it to Markdown before I publish, so I need to go back and convert it. Sometimes I forget to tag it. Sometimes I forget what tags I’m using, and make shit up.

What sucks

Starting a new post is a bunch of keystrokes and long waits. Sucks!

Copy pasting between Google Docs and Blogger sucks.

Adding links from reference sources sucks. If I’m writing, and I realize I’m going to want to add a link, I will use the Markdown convention and put the link text in square brackets and follow it with an open and close parenthesis. The idea is that I will later go back and fill in the URL between parentheses. Sometimes I forget. That sucks.

If I’ve found an article to link to and I want to link to it, by name I can’t just copy/paste title. If I do, I get the text and the link, but I also get a bunch of extraneous formatting. So it looks like shit. That sucks! And if the title doesn’t link to itself, as sometimes happens. It does no good even if it looks like crap.

Instead, I have to be in the tab with the article, select the title. Then copy it, switch to Blogger, paste it without formatting. Then I have to put right and left square brackets around what I just pasted. Then I add an open paren. Then switch back to the tab with the article. Then select the URL from the nav bar and copy it. Then go back to the tab with the blog post. Then paste the URL. And then type the closing parenthesis. Sucks.

If I am quoting text from an article, I have to select and copy the text, switch to Blogger, paste the text without formatting, then the Markdown formatting to make it a quote. Finally something easy. In Markdown, a > at the start of the line does the trick. If the text has links and I’d like to preserve them, pasting without formatting loses them all. Sucks! So I have to go back and copy each link and do the square brackets thing and the parens. Sucks.

If I want to link to other posts that I’ve written on the same topic, I have to use Google search to find the posts then painstakingly copy paste a link to each into my new post. Sucks!

Then I have to figure out how to tag this post. I don’t have a good taking scheme, so that’s a pain. Better tools won’t help so much as a better system. But tools could.

And I have to remember the convert from markdown to HTML which I forget about half the time. And remember to add the links for which I’ve added placeholders.

And if I want to do anything more than the simplest kind of editing—like replace one word with another throughout the document I can’t. I have to do them one at a time. Or copy/paste into another editor and copy/paste back. Sucks!

What I’d like

I’d like to go to one place and do everything. Start a post. Voice type. Edit (with some power commands). Check with Grammarly. Add links and text with links more easily. Easily find and add links to my other posts. Preview the Markdown. Check for errors. Automatically convert from Markdown and post to my blog.

Step by step

To start, I can create a project in Glitch that has an editor that will let me type, preview markdown, and then use the Blogger API to post. Automagically Grammarly will work. After that things get incrementally better. So the functions are:

• Basic editing
• Markdown preview
• Post to blog

Post to blog initially means “post to 78YearsOldWTF but I can expand that. I have a bunch of blogs I want to post to. So pick one and go. Why not!

There’s a browser speech recognition API that’s easy to use. It might not be as good at the Google Cloud one but it might use Google cloud secretly in the background. I don’t know. But I can add speech then make it better. So the next step is:

• Add speech

Now I can add some little helper functions like:

• ^K on selected text uses Markdown conventions
• ^V with tagged content converts it

The more I write, the simpler this seems to get! Post and give it a try.

​

The last barrier to change

For me, the last barrier to making a change in viewpoint or behavior that removes a barrier to productivity or creativity is this: “I could have done it all along.” And of course, I could have. All I did was change my mind. I could have changed my mind at any time. I just didn’t. 

That realization leads to this: “By not changing my mind earlier, I’ve been wasting my life.” Not my whole life. Just a goddamned big part of it. By being stupid.

And is there anything worse than being stupid? Stupidly, I don’t think so.

The idea that I’ve wasted months and years of my life—that I could have produced more and accomplished more—fills me with anguish. Why didn’t I have that thought earlier? There was no obstacle! Nothing but my own stupidity. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

And so on.

To fully get the gain, I’ve to accept the pain. It’s different from the pain of pushing your body to make it stronger. It’s different from the pain of working hard to learn something new. Those are noble kinds of pain. There’s nothing noble about realizing you’ve been stupid. It’s just pain. Stupid pain. And I don’t want it. I resist it. And that just makes it worse.

And yet, what of it? The me that was stupid is Past Me. And he’s gone. That me that knows better is Present Me. And Present Me now has a new gift to give Future Me: the gift of knowledge replacing the legacy of stupidity that I inherited.

And being mad at Past Me for that legacy is a stupidity that I’ve long since transcended. Whatever his failings and inadequacies, Past Me has given me the gift of life. So thank you, Past Me!

Instead of focusing on the years that I’ve wasted (actually that Past Me’s have wasted) I can enjoy what I have at this moment, and think about the years of productivity that Future Me’s will get to enjoy. Years unhampered by a wrong idea I’ve gotten rid of and the better idea I know possess. Years of creativity.

Looking back to what might have been and regretting it only causes pain. Past me was not ready. Present me is ready. Future me has the world in front of it.

Here are some of my other blog posts on discomfort. I'll be adding to them.

Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting
Family of Mind (Internal Family Systems)
Learning to learn: Gain without pain

Out of my comfort zone

75 years old minus 9 days, WTF? On sleeping and suffering

Whatever it takes
Doing the hard stuff

​

Self Managment 101

What would you think about a manager who only shows up during crises—often caused by poor management? What about a manager who sleeps most of the time? A manager who complains that the stuff he wants isn’t getting done, but doesn’t take time to diagnose the problem and find solutions? Or even offer help? A manager who doesn’t offer to coach? A manager who rarely does post-mortems to analyze failures, but just shrugs and complains?

I would say that’s a pretty sucky manager. And I would say that’s me, managing myself.

I’m a really good crisis manager. So good that I realized, years ago, that I would often create crises so I could show how good I was. I also do a good job when I am managing other people. I look in on them. I check what they’re doing. I suggest improvements. I look for opportunities to teach them to do better. I will lead post-mortems to help them—and me—learn and improve.

With me, managing myself, not so much.

When I’ve been under pressure I’ve done a good enough job self-managing to have developed automaticities that are highly competent. But my automatic behavior does not always get me what I want. And when I don’t get it I—-well, I complain.

If I want to improve (and I do) I need to self-manage. So, what could I do?

My first thought, which may end up being my proposed solution is to set a timer and when it goes off, I need to stop what I am doing, and to put myself in “manager mode.” In manager mode, I need to look back over what I had been doing for the past time period, and…

…do what?

Maybe ask myself how I thought I had done. Maybe look at what I had done and ask myself what I could have done differently that would have been better. Point out things that clearly need Improvement. Maybe give myself a pep talk. Pick one of the things I would have done if I had been managing someone else, and do that.

Maybe after doing that for a day or so pop up another level. Be the manager of my manager and find out from my manager how it’s doing.

It’s 8:00 AM now. As a manager to myself, I know that I am likely to procrastinate and not post this. So I think this is a good opportunity for an initial managerial intervention, to see if I can get this out by 8:15.

And then to report, tomorrow, whether this has been successful.

It’s 8:25. So before I post this (which I will, I promise) a quick post-mortem.

• Yes, I did get it out, close to on time. Yay!
• No, I didn’t get it out when planned.
• Because even though I had set a target time, I did not respect it initially. I procrastinated.
• But setting the target time did help.

So set targets. Like the next check-in will be at 9:00.

For which I need to set a timer.

Just as soon as I post this.

No, before I post it.

Done, and done.

​

Predators, parasites, regulation and intervention in ecosystems

This post is inspired by this talk by Bret Weinstein. I support him on Patreon. The talk emphases a different aspect of the underlying problem. So if you read and like this, you won’t be wasting your time if you watch the video.

Ecosystems

The term “ecosystem” includes both ecological systems and economic systems. They behave in similar ways.

Evolution of predators and parasites

Within any ecosystem, parasites and predators will naturally evolve.

Unregulated growth

Without some form of regulation or invention, evolution will increase the number and kind of parasites and predators up to the limit that the system can support.

Evolution of defensive adaptations

Some hosts evolve adaptations that defend against parasites; some prey will evolve adaptations that defend them from predators. The defenses will only evolve after parasitism and predation starts, and will never be entirely successful.

Evolution of less damaging behavior

Parasites that initially kill their hosts will often evolve so that they don’t kill them, but keep them alive while extracting resources. A dead host is of less use to a parasite than a still-living one. In some cases, parasites will evolve to become mutualists and benefit their host even as they are benefitted.

Effect of interventions

Interventions and regulation to reduce the harm caused by parasites and predators will change the number and kind or predators and parasites in a system.

Response to interventions

Once intervention or regulation have taken place, new or different predators will evolve to take advantage of the changed landscape. Some existing parasites and predators will grow in numbers.

Need for evolving intervention

Because parasites and predators evolve in response to interventions, interventions must also continuously evolve to reduce the damage that parasites and predators have caused.

Opposition to intervention and regulation

You might be opposed to intervention in or regulation of an ecosystem if:

• You believe that there is something innately good about naturally evolved predation and parasitism and the natural order should not be disturbed
• You believe that interventions that are intended to reduce the damage caused by predators and parasites will make things worse
• You are a symbiote who benefits from predatory or parasitic behavior
• You are yourself a predator or parasite

Ecological intervention versus economic intervention

From a purely ecological view, human beings are predators and parasites. The human economy depends on human intervention in natural ecological systems.

This has been good for some human symbionts—dogs for example. Most kinds are more numerous and probably healthier and live more pleasureful lives because of humans. It’s been a mixed bag for some other creatures. There are more chickens, but the cage-raised ones might have worse lives than their free ancestors. It's good for news species that might develop from humans stirring the evolutionary pot. But it's been horrible by species decimated or extinguished by humans.

If you believe there is something innately good about naturally evolved predation and parasitism I think we have nothing to discuss.

Some people believe that all interventions in an economy—even those that that are intended to reduce the damage caused by predators and parasites—will make things worse.

It might be true, but by analogy with ecological interventions, it’s unlikely to be true. There are unintended consequences and interventions need to change with circumstances, but the facts are clear. We feed and supply the world through massive, continuing, and evolving interventions in ecological systems. If we did not intervene, ecological systems would produce about as much biomass as they do with intervention. It’s just that most of it will not be useful and much of what would otherwise be useful will be consumed by parasites.

Yes, the interventions have unintended and undesirable consequences. And as these problems show themselves people are working ways to change interventions to increase the benefits and to reduce the harms.

Without changing interventions, the parasites and predators that have adapted to the current environment will continue to evolve and grow to the carrying capacity of the environment.

(To be elaborated in an upcoming post.)

​

Epistemic Learned Helplessness, so it doesn't get lost

I wrote here about Epistemic Learned Helplessness, a super-useful idea based on an essay by Scott Alexander.

Well, the link is broken. And so are all the other links in all the other articles that point there.

Wayback machine to the rescue. The page is on the Internet Archive, here

But just in case it gets lost, I’ve copied it here. I don’t think Scott will mind.

[Epistemic Status | Probably I’m just coming at the bog-standard idea of compartmentalization from a different angle here. I don’t know if anyone else has noted how compartmentalization is a good thing before, but I bet they have.]

A friend in business recently complained about his hiring pool, saying that he couldn’t find people with the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don’t like it. He told me a good portion of the point of CfAR was to either find or create people who would believe something after it had been proven to them.

And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn’t until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went “Wait, no, that would be the worst idea ever.”

I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average high school dropout. Like I mean that on almost any topic, given almost any position, I could totally demolish her and make her look like an idiot. Reduce her to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!”

And there are people who can argue circles around me. Not on any topic, maybe, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.

And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn’t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.

And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.

And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable. What finally broke me out wasn’t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah’s Flood couldn’t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth’s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology rather than the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.

I guess you could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments are just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.

(This is the correct Bayesian action, by the way. If I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way, and I should ignore it and stick with my prior.)

I consider myself lucky in that my epistemic learned helplessness is circumscribed; there are still cases where I will trust the evidence of my own reason. In fact, I trust it in most cases other than very carefully constructed arguments known for their deceptiveness in fields I know little about. But I think the average high school dropout both doesn’t and shouldn’t. Anyone anywhere - politicians, scammy businessmen, smooth-talking romantic partners - would be able to argue her into anything. And so she takes the obvious and correct defensive manuever - she will never let anyone convince her of any belief that sounds “weird” (note that, if you grow up in the right circles, beliefs along the lines of astrology not working sound “weird”.)

This is starting to sound a lot like ideas I’ve already heard centering around compartmentalization and taking ideas seriously. The only difference between their presentation and mine is that I’m saying that for 99% of people, 99% of the time, this is a terrible idea. Or, at the very least, this should be the last skill you learn, after you’ve learned every other skill that allows you to know which ideas are or are not correct.

The people I know who are best at taking ideas seriously are those who are smartest and most rational. I think people are working off a model where these co-occur because you need to be very clever to fight your natural and detrimental tendency not to take ideas seriously. I think it’s at least possible they co-occur because you have to be really smart in order for taking ideas seriously to be even not-immediately-disastrous. You have to be really smart not to have been talked into enough terrible arguments to develop epistemic learned helplessness.

Even the smartest people I know have a commendable tendency not to take certain ideas seriously. Bostrom’s simulation argument, the anthropic doomsday argument, Pascal’s Mugging - I’ve never heard anyone give a coherent argument against any of these, but I’ve also never met anyone who fully accepts them and lives life according to their implications.

A friend tells me of a guy who once accepted fundamentalist religion because of Pascal’s Wager. I will provisionally admit that this person takes ideas seriously. Everyone else loses.

Which isn’t to say that some people don’t do better than others. Terrorists seem pretty good in this respect. People used to talk about how terrorists must be very poor and uneducated to fall for militant Islam, and then someone did a study and found that they were disproportionately well-off, college educated people (many were engineers). I’ve heard a few good arguments in this direction before, things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae, and this meshes with fundamentalism better than it meshes with subtle liberal religious messages.

But to these I would add that a sufficiently smart engineer has never been burned by arguments above his skill level before, has never had any reason to develop epistemic learned helplessness. If Osama comes up to him with a really good argument for terrorism, he thinks “Oh, there’s a good argument for terrorism. I guess I should become a terrorist,” as opposed to “Arguments? You can prove anything with arguments. I’ll just stay right here and not do something that will get me ostracized and probably killed.”

Responsible doctors are at the other end of the spectrum from terrorists in this regard. I once heard someone rail against how doctors totally ignored all the latest and most exciting medical studies. The same person, practically in the same breath, then railed against how 50% to 90% of medical studies are wrong. These two observations are not unrelated. Not only are there so many terrible studies, but pseudomedicine (not the stupid homeopathy type, but the type that links everything to some obscure chemical on an out-of-the-way metabolic pathway) has, for me, proven much like pseudohistory in that unless I am an expert in that particular field of medicine(biochemistry has a disproportionate share of these people and is also an area where I’m weak) it’s hard not to take them seriously, even when they’re super-wrong.

I have developed a healthy dose of epistemic learned helplessness, and the medical establishment offers a shiny tempting solution - first, a total unwillingness to trust anything, no matter how plausible it sounds, until it’s gone through an endless cycle of studies and meta-analyses, and second, a bunch of Institutes and Collaborations dedicated to filtering through all these studies and analyses and telling you what lessons you should draw from them. Part of the reason Good Calories, Bad Calorieswas so terrifying is that it made a strong case that this establishment can be very very wrong, and I don’t have good standards by which to decide whether to dismiss it as another Velikovsky, or whether to just accept that the establishment is totally untrustworthy and, as doctors sometimes put it, AMYOYO. And if the latter, how much establishment do I have to jettison and how much can be saved? Do I have to actually go through all those papers purporting to prove homeopathy with an open mind?

I am glad that some people never develop epistemic learned helplessness, or develop only a limited amount of it, or only in certain domains. It seems to me that although these people are more likely to become terrorists or Velikovskians or homeopaths, they’re also the only people who can figure out if something basic and unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider it.

But I’m also glad epistemic learned helplessness exists. It seems like a pretty useful social safety valve most of the time.

​

Games people play

I’ve gotten interested in games as a way of understanding some of the things that fascinate me. Politics. Economics. Personal interactions. The list goes on.

What is a game? I started by looking for a good definition. Wikipedia had lots. And they were fine. But none of them suited me. So I made up one that I liked. Because I can. You got a problem with that?

So here’s the definition of “game” that I’ll be using. When I say “game” I mean this:

A game is an activity, defined by a set of rules, in which participants interact with one another and with the environment and produce quantifiable outcomes.

On this definition, football, baseball, and other sports are games; so are chess, checkers, and poker. Even activities with a single participant—like solitaire—meet the definition.

Let’s go bigger. An economy is a game, intertwined with other games—for example, every economy is intertwined with a political system. And every economy or economic segment is intertwined with other economies and segments. And each of these games is composed of internal sub-games.
The aggregate of all economies is a game, which is embedded in a set of still larger games.

The biggest game I can name is the physical universe. We are al participants. It has a set of rules, known as the laws of physics. Until recently they were not known to the participants—at least the ones who play where I play. And for all practical purposes, they are not known—or even necessary—to the participants. But my definition of a game doesn’t say anything about participants knowing the rules. There just need to be participants and rules.

Most of the participants in the physical universe game are not conscious,. But my definition does not require that participants be conscious. Participants participate. They don’t have to be aware of participation.

Within the game of the physical universe is a game called “the game of life.” Within that game is the game of life on earth. It’s possible that the only place in the universe where the game of life is played is this little planet. It seems unlikely, but it’s possible. What’s certain is that we play it here. I like it.

What are the quantifiable outcomes of the game of life, economics, politics and more? We’ll come to those in due time. Be patience, grasshoppers.

Let’s consider a game called Nomic. I found it by searching for “games where you can change the rules.” Technically, you can change the rules in almost all games. For example, the rules of chess are set by FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs), the international governing body for chess. They haven’t changed rules in a while, but in theory, they can do it tomorrow.

Nomic is a game to explore changing the rules of the game while playing it. It was created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber.
Here’s how it works. You get a bunch of people together who agree to follow the default initial Nomic ruleset—or some similar set of rules. A good ruleset for a nomic-like game would contain all of the rules for playing the game, including the rules for keeping score, for winning, and, importantly, the rules for changing the rules.

The winner of a game, according to Rule 208 in the default initial ruleset, is “the first player to achieve 100 (positive) points.” But that’s just a rule, and that can be changed—but only according to the rules for adding, modifying, and deleting rules. The winner could be the first person to get to 200 points. Or it could be the second person to get there. Any modification that’s consistent with the rules for making changes is a valid modification.

The initial rules tell how a player gets points. The rules of nomic don’t define the number system to be used, so technically 100 could be binary. Nor do they include the rules of integer arithmetic which are required to add to one’s score. Nor does it include the rules that would tell you the criteria for deciding when a player’s score met the criteria for “having achieved 100 (positive) points.” These rules could be added, for clarity, if the players cared to do so. I wouldn’t bother.

A game of Nomic is played in rounds, as described in the rules. On each around the person whose turn has come (as described…) proposes a change in the rules. The players discuss the change and vote to accept the proposal or not. There are rules for voting, of course. And players may get points according to whether the rule is accepted and how they voted. Then the person whose turn it is throws a die which gives a number of additional points to be added to their score, even though the rules for addition are undefined and only inferred.

The rules further specify that some of the initial rules are immutable, and some are mutable. An immutable rule cannot be changed. But it can be “transformed” into a mutable rule, and once it is made mutable, it can be changed. To transform a rule requires unanimous agreement. (Rule 109) A simple majority can create a new (mutable) rule or modify an existing mutable rule or repeal a mutable rule. But until the second complete round, it takes unanimity and not a simple majority (Rule 203) unless Rule 203 is amended. And so on.

For a simple example of how this might work, consider Rule 208 which says: “The winner is the first player to achieve 100 (positive) points.” Suppose you have reached 97 points, and the rest of us have no more than 50, and it’s my turn. I might propose to amend Rule 208 to read “The winner is the first player to achieve 150 (positive) points.” If you want to win, you might vote against that rule, and the other players might vote for it. But Rule 204 says “If and when rule-changes can be adopted without unanimity, the players who vote against winning proposals shall receive 10 points each.” So you’d get 10 points for voting against. But since Rule 205 says “An adopted rule-change takes full effect at the moment of the completion of the vote that adopted it,” the goalpost gets moved before you get the extra ten points. So haha you don’t win!

But if everyone was sick of playing, or felt it that my proposal to change the criteria was something like cheating they might vote my change down. Of course, it wouldn’t be cheating. No cheating is possible. It’s just exploitation of the rules to achieve the desired end.

Is cheating possible in Nomic? That’s a philosophical question. Technically, anything that is allowed by the rules, however “unfair” you might consider it, even if you feel it “violates the spirit of the game” would not be cheating. If I figure out a way to win that goes against your idea “the spirit of the game” then haha I win. You can bitch about it. I can laugh at you. We can change the rules so I can’t do that next time. Or you can refuse to play with me. We have options in Nomic. But not in some other games.

What about moves that are not covered by the rule set? For example, suppose you decided that the best way to win is to insert electrodes in the brains of other players to make them vote the way that you want. I don’t see a rule in Nomic against that, so from a “strict constructionist” point of view, it’s fine. But Nomic is played in the context of national or international law, and I think that putting electrodes in someone’s head without permission might get you thrown in jail. But you could still win. There doesn’t seem to be a rule that disqualifies you if you’re in jail.

Suppose you hypnotize some of the other players so you win. There’s no law against hypnotizing people. And it doesn’t violate the laws of Nomic. So does that make it cheating?

Or supposing you manipulate them? Is that cheating. We’ll see how this is a problem in some other games.

Rules might be ambiguous or in conflict with one another, but that’s not a problem. Nomic has rules (which can be modified, of course) for resolving such situations. Just like a legal system.

The analogies between playing Nomic, and manipulating a legislative and legal system, are pretty obvious. In fact, the name Nomic comes from νόμος (nomos), Greek for “law”.

Nomic reveals some serious, and perhaps intractable problems in any system of law. At the object level, the goal of playing Nomic is to win—by reaching 100 points or as otherwise defined. At a meta-level, the goal is to have fun playing nomic.

The rules let you change the object level goal, and that’s relatively straightforward. There are no rules for quantifying the meta-level goal, but it could be quantified, and it matters. On the meta-level, the other players might change the rules so that they have more fun. But more fun for them might be less fun for you. If your meta-level goal becomes unobtainable, you might choose to quit the game. Assuming they don’t want you to quit, they will try to make the game fun. Or you’ll quit.

And you can quit. It’s in the rules. Rule 113 says you can forfeit. And it also says no penalty worse than losing can be incurred if you forfeit. That’s an important rule. It means that if you quit that the other players can’t, for example, beat the shit out of you. Because losing and getting the shit beat of you would probably be worse than losing and would violate Rule 113.

But Rule 113 is just a rule. It can be modified so that you can’t quit, or you can quit and get the shit beat out of you. That would be no fun. Fortunately, Rule 113 is immutable. That means that it can’t be changed to mutable without unanimity. I don’t know about you, but I’d veto any proposal to make Rule 113 mutable on the off chance that a simple majority of fellow-players would want to beat the shit out of me if I quit.

The game of life (within the game of the physical universe) has its own rules. It’s fun for many of us, You can quit, but according to the rules of the game, if you quit, you’re dead. You can’t just sit and watch. Seems harsh. I’m not sure I would have voted for it. But those are the rules.

For most of the history of the universe, all of the rules of the games were unknown to participants. Even now most are unknown—even to the few conscious participants. The underlying laws of physics are immutable (as far as we know) and many of the rules of life may also be immutable—even with a majority vote.

Human knowledge has turned many previously unknown rules into known rules. And many rules that were thought to be immutable have now become mutable. The rules of the game of life are changing, according to the rules of the game of life for changing the rules.

The game of American government (within the game of life) has its own rules—including rules for changing the rules. There are immutable rules based on the immutable rules of physics and mathematics. There are rules derived from the known and unknown rules of life. Many of the rules of government are written down, but there are so many rules that for no one knows them all.
The rules of government are there for a purpose—not just so that lawmakers can have fun. In the case of the United States Federal government, it’s said to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The rules for what can be done and not done, and how to interpret ambiguities and for deciding what these things mean are embedded in the initial rules and in the rules that have been modified and added. The rules that govern the legislative system (making new rules) and the judicial system (deciding if rules are consistent and how to apply them) continue to be modified. There are rules for changing all those rules, and none of the rules are immutable. Some require a simple majority of eligible voters others require more. Few, if any, require unanimity.

In some extreme cases there just nine eligible voters who decide on rules that affect 300 million people. Some rule additions and changes require a supermajority of a small number of eligible voters. Many of the definitions of eligibility can be changed by a simple majority of eligible voters.

A system of government is a game. You can play the game. You can also game the system. That’s a problem

We can learn a lot by comparing government, politics, economics, law with other, simpler games. Nomic is a rich enough game to help us understand that a system that lets you change the rules might be “gamed” to undermine what most people would agree was its “spirit” and “intent” even while everything that was done was according to the rules.

​