A Taxonomy of Magic

This is a purely and relentlessly thematic/Doylist set of categories. 

The question is: What is the magic for, in this universe that was created to have magic?

Or, even better: What is nature of the fantasy that’s on display here?

Because it is, literally, fantasy.  It’s pretty much always someone’s secret desire.

(NOTE: “Magic” here is being used to mean “usually actual magic that is coded as such, but also, like, psionics and superhero powers and other kinds of Weird Unnatural Stuff that has been embedded in a fictional world.”)

(NOTE: These categories often commingle and intersect.  I am definitely not claiming that the boundaries between them are rigid.)

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Maybe I’ll see more on a further read, but here are some missing categories that jumped out at me as answers to “What Is The Magic For?”

Magic as the underpinning of an alternate social order in a Milieu story.  You can’t explore Linta’s version of Cheliax in Project Lawful, unless Detect Thoughts is a thing, and Hell is a thing, and soul-sales are a thing.  Maybe with a lot of work you could come up with a science-fiction society that had the same social dynamics and the same social underpinnings, but why bother?

Magic as the way things would happen to play out given previous assumptions.  Admittedly one sees very little of this, because most Earth authors are not the kind to try out lots of different assumptions and say “Oh hey that one yielded some magic” and then write that up; but I like it.  “Friendship is Optimal” fits this category, for example; the apparent magic of the world works however the author thinks CelestAI would play it.  Heavy overlap with Magic-As-Alternate-Universe-Science, obviously, and even rarer.

Magic as solvable puzzle is another key subtype of Magic As Alternate Universe Science.  You’re not just given the postulates to project them onward; you have to grasp the laws of magic in order to solve a mystery (in which case they must be very understandable) or the laws of magic are the mystery to be discovered as a project of Science (which very few authors can pull off, and doing this right means starting with hidden simple assumptions that you extrapolated neutrally, so that there exists a simpler underlying order to be found).

And finally, the largest elephant in the room once you see it:  Magic as the reification of morality and/or emotion onto environmental structure, so that moral or emotional storytelling can directly use that as a building-block.  Eg, instead of the real world where people try to do Good deeds, there’s Good as a reified thing.  There’s stories you can tell by invoking Fawkes, the phoenix from HPMOR, that would be hard to tell with any complicated human in the same role no matter how Good they were.  When Fawkes screams, or sings, it means something as a primitive brute fact that would be hard to work into any science-fiction story, or make believable if you were trying to substitute any human being in that position; and instead of needing to justify to the reader that some particular human person’s screaming means exactly what you mean to say by that, one can just show the phoenix screaming and pass on.

This sure explains a lot.

Is there anyone who has more details on this? I guess I'm out of touch because I'm not understanding the context of the tweets above.

I know very little insider stuff but Elon just bought Twitter and announced he's going to start charging for blue checks. Journalists love their blue checks so I assume this is a tech vs journalism beef

Ok, so there are two things going on these tweets (you should really click through and read both mattyg's thread and Kelsey's response, they're both good).

The first is the abrupt turn that happened in the mainstream press-- but especially the New York Times, in the middle of the 2010s-- towards very hostile coverage of all things tech. This was really frustrating, because while prior to that the coverage of tech was definitely too adulatory and a correction was needed, this has been way outside the bounds of good journalistic ethics for a while now. And I was on their side for a long time. I held out for a while, and continued to insist it wasn't that bad, until that one week in 2020 when the NYT shat the bed like five times in the space of two weeks, with the piece on Scott, the thing with Taylor Lorenz and Marc Andreessen's comments in Clubhouse (and I fucking hate that guy! do you know how bad you have to screw up to make me defend Marc Andreessen?!) and several more incidents in rapid succession.

And for a while I felt like I was going insane, because I couldn't tell if this was all in my head or maybe it was all in the public interest and I had a biased opinion because of my job. But now Kelsey has confirmed that, no, there was an order from on high to do it this way, facts be damned. (A bunch of people in her replies are completely missing the point, accusing her of thinking "investigative reporting is bad'" No! Invesigative reporting is fine and necessary. Deciding in advance what the tone of a story will be, before you have any facts, and also banning ipso facto any kind of positive coverage, is not. That's absurd.)

(If you've been reading my posts long enough that this attitude comes as a surprise, I should state that I am retracting this post. I believed it at the time, and then the situation just kept getting more and more ridiculous, and now we know why.)

The second bit is, as Matt says, that because a lot of leading figures in tech have gotten so annoyed at their treatment in the press recently, they've conjured up this theory about how journalists attach tons of status and self-worth to their blue check marks. And Matt is saying, no, this really isn't true at all: the fact that journalists all get blue checks by default is more of an implementation quirk of Twitter and nobody really cares. I have no reason to doubt him on this. So what's sort of funny is that apparently Elon got caught up in the same hatejerk as the rest of tech, and thought that "bluechecks" really did put tons of value on their verified status and could be extorted out of money for it. Which is probably a mistake, and one that's going to cost him literally billions.

tl;dr we live in the stupid timeline, tech "thought leaders" and the journalists covering them are all awful

Sometimes I go to myself "you know, I don't understand what NFTs are" and then I go look it up again and discover, yes, actually I do know what NFTs are. It's just that every time I read about them again I'm left going "this CAN'T be it, there has to be something else to make this make sense" and the answer is always no.

my life: this, but for all of Earth

Today I learned that in Germany, you can get insurance for your insurance–basically, it pays for legal expenses if you have to sue your first insurance (or otherwise incur legal expenses) for not doing what they should.

I actually kind of love this. I wonder if it would work in other countries; here, for instance, what health insurance is obligated to pay for is specified quite particularly by law.

So people in my circles posted this and be like:

“Hey.”

Me:  No.

“This tumblr post feels incomplete.”

Me:  Stop it.  I’m watching you.

“The obvious question -”

Me:  Has it ever occurred to you that maybe normal human beings are capable of just having insurance on their fucking insurance

Your ideology – if it gets off the ground at all – will start off with a core base of natural true believers.  These are the people for whom the ideology is made.  Unless it’s totally artificial, they are the people by whom the ideology is made.  It serves their psychological needs; it’s compatible with their temperaments; it plays to their interests and preferences.  They’re easy to recruit, because you’re offering something that’s pretty much tailor-made for them. 

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Okay, people who understand statistics, help me out.

My understanding is that the most common proper scoring rule is log odds, where you add the log odds of everything you predicted.

So if I predict 99% chance the sun will rise this morning, and it does, I get ln(0.99/0.01) = 4.59.

Then if I predict 99% chance the stock market will go up tomorrow, and it doesn’t, I get ln(0.01/0.99) = -4.59.

For a total score of zero.

This feels intuitively bad? If I made one 99% prediction that was right, and then another 99% prediction that was wrong, I should be way in the hole. I shouldn’t be back to zero unless I make ninety-nine 99% predictions that are right and one that is wrong.

Am I using log odds wrong, or is there some better scoring rule that naturally captures the intuition that 99% failures should count for more than 99% successes?

@so8res writes:

That makes more sense, except that in log odds, guessing 50% always gives you 0, but IIUC this way guessing 50% always gives you -0.69.

It sounds like maybe there’s no scoring rule that both penalizes you worse for being confidently wrong, and has guessing 50% when you genuinely don’t know neither gain or cost you points?

Here’s one helpful intuition:  Your score should be the same whether you predict the pieces of events separately or together.

That is, suppose the event is that the Democrats take the Senate and pass a law outlawing healthcare.  You should score the same, regardless of whether I ask you:

1)  What is the probability that “The Democrats take the Senate and outlaw healthcare”?

2a)  What is the probability that the Democrats take the Senate? 2b)  Given that the Democrats take the Senate, what’s the probability that they outlaw healthcare?

In other words, if event A&B actually happens, we’d like score(P(A&B)) = score(P(A)) + score (P(B|A)).  If you aggregate scores by addition, that nails down the log-probability part (as opposed to, say, log odds).

As for the second part of your question, about not being penalized for saying “50%” on 50-50 events, while still being penalized for overconfidence, one answer I gave a while ago is that we could compare your self-expected score to your actual score.  If you say 50-50, you expect to lose one bit, and then you actually lose one bit, so you’re at par.  If you say 75-25 for heads vs. tails, your expected loss according to you is 0.75*log(0.75) + 0.25*log(0.25), which in base 2 is -0.81 bits.  So if you actually see heads, your net score is +0.39 (you did a little better than you expected of yourself) and if you see tails it’s -1.18 bits.  If you predict maxentropy, or 50-50 for coinflips, you always end up with a net score of 0.  We can also decompose complex events into subevents, and still end up with the same net scores.

(However, if we’re comparing your performance to anyone else’s this way, we ought to use the same expected base scores / starting points across both cases, or just compare regular log scores to regular log scores.  On the “net score” method you always expect a score of 0 yourself, but you can expect somebody to score better than you if you think they have more information than you.  "Net score” or “score minus expected score” is a rule for comparing your performance to yourself - for checking whether your model is doing as well as it expects to do, without considering whether somebody else’s model does better.)

This concludes today’s rendition of “Here is my answer to your question, which on the face of it would seem to be the only possible answer.”  Postrats may now begin searching for a way to feel superior to it.

Level 1: Porn with plot

Level 2: Porn with social commentary

Level 3: Porn with troubling philosophical implications

Level 4: Porn with maddening revelations of humanity’s place in the cosmos

Level 5: Porn with math

So I know I’m not the first to ask this, but if this post isn’t specifically about The Erogamer, I’d like to know what other literary work it was about.  Or could even plausibly have been about.  So far as I know, Erogamer was it for Level 1&2&3&4&5 porn.  And now that Erogamer has ended, I’d even take Level 1&3 porn or Level 1&5 porn rather than just falling sadly back to Level 1&2.

Bad: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, but nobody picks up on it for various implausible reasons.

Good: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, and everybody “knows”, but in spite of countless people’s best efforts nobody can actually prove it.

“Literally everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose,” said the woman sitting across from me in our candlelit dinner. “The superheroes know it. The villains know it. The guy on the street knows it. Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon know it. The Enquirer doesn’t break the mask code when they print your picture because they don’t even bother mentioning who you are. If I need to have conversations with you pretending not to know that Bruce is the ‘Goose, we’re going to be the only two people on the planet pretending that.”

My expectations for this date’s viability were starting to sink. She was saying intelligent things, and saying them with remarkable confidence and self-possession for somebody who thought she was talking to the Masculine Mongoose himself. It was impressing me and more than slightly turning me on. But the conversation had taken a turn I’d been down before, and not a promising one. “I don’t want to get into a relationship under false pretenses,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like if I slept with you under the impression that you were just an ordinary playboy millionaire, instead of a superhero.” She sipped from her champagne glass, visibly trying not to smile.

“Look,” I said, trying to make my voice as persuasive as I could. “Just like you say, everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose. People have believed that for eight years. And in all that time, nobody has ever managed to prove anything - never mind suggestive evidence, nobody has ever shown it for certain. Shouldn’t that give you pause?”

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I would read an entire novel series about this concept. 

To her dying day, reporter Terri Green would remember the look on Bruce Kent’s face as the assassin stepped out of the crowd, holding the gun.

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(5000 words.  This story takes place chronologically before the first two Bruce Kent fics, but should be read afterwards.)

There was no warning. One moment I was waiting in line at the Gothic Cityville branch of the First Financial Bank to get a cashier's check made out, trying to ignore the whispers coming from before me and behind me. Bruce Kent is very rigorous about pretending to not be the Masculine Mongoose, as everyone knows by now. Bruce Kent acts uncomfortable around people who whisper when they recognize him, just like he would if he was a normal human being who'd gotten mistaken for the Mongoose somehow. Keeping up the act at all times, yeah, that's me all right.

The next moment, the glassed front door of the bank shattered into pieces around a woman stomping through in giant flaming power armor.  She was followed shortly after by ten other goons in smaller suits of flaming power armor.  When I say 'flaming' I don't mean that it was decorated in red and orange, I mean that the powered suits were emitting gouts of fire from built-in spouts.

Professor Pyrofessor had somehow, God help her and both of us, managed to pick that exact moment to rob this particular bank branch.

Bad: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, but nobody picks up on it for various implausible reasons.

Good: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, and everybody “knows”, but in spite of countless people’s best efforts nobody can actually prove it.

“Literally everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose,” said the woman sitting across from me in our candlelit dinner. “The superheroes know it. The villains know it. The guy on the street knows it. Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon know it. The Enquirer doesn’t break the mask code when they print your picture because they don’t even bother mentioning who you are. If I need to have conversations with you pretending not to know that Bruce is the ‘Goose, we’re going to be the only two people on the planet pretending that.”

My expectations for this date’s viability were starting to sink. She was saying intelligent things, and saying them with remarkable confidence and self-possession for somebody who thought she was talking to the Masculine Mongoose himself. It was impressing me and more than slightly turning me on. But the conversation had taken a turn I’d been down before, and not a promising one. “I don’t want to get into a relationship under false pretenses,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like if I slept with you under the impression that you were just an ordinary playboy millionaire, instead of a superhero.” She sipped from her champagne glass, visibly trying not to smile.

“Look,” I said, trying to make my voice as persuasive as I could. “Just like you say, everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose. People have believed that for eight years. And in all that time, nobody has ever managed to prove anything - never mind suggestive evidence, nobody has ever shown it for certain. Shouldn’t that give you pause?”

Keep reading

I would read an entire novel series about this concept. 

To her dying day, reporter Terri Green would remember the look on Bruce Kent's face as the assassin stepped out of the crowd, holding the gun.

He just nailed it perfectly.  The look of shock, of horror, the way he reacted almost as slowly as a normal human, how he instinctively raised his arms to protect his face.  It was incredible acting, every bit as good as you'd expect from the Masculine Mongoose himself.

Bad: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, but nobody picks up on it for various implausible reasons.

Good: Superhero whose secret identity is just staggeringly obvious, and everybody “knows”, but in spite of countless people’s best efforts nobody can actually prove it.

“Literally everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose,” said the woman sitting across from me in our candlelit dinner. “The superheroes know it. The villains know it. The guy on the street knows it. Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon know it. The Enquirer doesn’t break the mask code when they print your picture because they don’t even bother mentioning who you are. If I need to have conversations with you pretending not to know that Bruce is the ‘Goose, we’re going to be the only two people on the planet pretending that.”

yesterday for April Fool’s my workplace had a short training article on recognizing computer-generated faces from real ones and one of the tricks mentioned was “count the teeth” and I just wanted to say that it’s both ironic and kind of horrifying how society has unwittingly cycled right back to IF YE MEET A MAN ON THE ROAD, COUNT HIS FINGERS LEST YE DEAL UNKNOWING WITH A FAE 

Furthermore, the Fae are bad at counting so you can detect their glamours by numbering their teeth.  It’s a perfectly sensible fantasy trope - and yet, I can’t recall reading any stories where that happened in fiction before, you know, it happened in real life.

Cognitive Trope Therapy

“I’m not saying TV Tropes is right about everything,” I typed into the chat window, “but right now it understands your life better than you do.”

I have invented a new form of psychotherapy

I call it Cognitive Trope Therapy

the way it works is that when you have a thought, you write it down

like, say

“You are different from the others. You will never know their innocence… and that is why you should hate your own existence. Die. Die. Die.”

then you figure out whether, if your life were a fantasy novel, these words would be spoken by figures wearing black robes, and speaking in a dry, whispering voice, and they are actually withered beings who touched the Stone of Evil

and if so then you don’t listen

I would write this up as a pop psych bestseller but it would be only two pages long

now

I know what you are thinking

you are thinking “but what if the whispering voice seems like it might have a point”

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I get that this isn’t meant to be rigorous, but “it’s okay to focus on yourself, hurting yourself in the name of effective altruism is bad, why not sit down and rest for a while?” sounds exactly like the sort of think a dark-robed figure would hiss at a protagonist.

You obviously don’t read the same books I do. :P

Wait, am I missing something?

Eliezer on LW: “We should become supremely rational, moving faster than the comparatively timid procedures of Old Science. We must conquer death itself and win immortality, the faster the better, dismissing those who would urge restraint in this effort as hidebound and inferior thinkers. We shall build unspeakably powerful artificial intelligences to rule over us, transform us from weak creatures of flesh into beings of pure information. Then we’ll build giant structures that blot out the stars, and finally realize our destiny of taking over the galaxy.”

Eliezer on Tumblr: “Avoid things that sound too much like what a fictional villain would say.”

I see no fictional villains here.