Sagan's Anti-Dragon

In my garage I have an imaginary dragon.  It's not real.  Its just imaginary.  It's a dragon made entirely of the good thoughts and happy feelings of people who like to think there's a dragon out there, somewhere, watching over them.  But dragons aren't real, and neither is the dragon in my garage.

I tell you this, and you tell me that the dragon isn't imaginary.  You insist it's a real dragon that is really in my garage.  So I take you to my garage to show you that it's only imaginary.

We both immediately notice that the dragon is visible.  You tell me that you can see it, and ask if I can see it.  I can see it.  And it's interesting that I'm seeing the dragon, and certainly counts for something.

The Shaggydog Theory: Why George R. R. Martin Doesn't Want to Finish his Song of Ice and Fire Series

Seven years ago, the last update to the legendary A Song of Ice and Fire series came available, the fifth book A Dance with Dragons.  This book was somewhat disappointing to fans of the series.  The books failed to have any of the juicy details readers actually wanted, being not-so-affectionately labeled "Traveling Places and Administrative Tasks: The Book".  The book was also a major disappointment because it came out over five years after the previous book, A Feast For Crows, released in 2005, despite the promise of Martin that the fifth book would be released speedily since he had already written most of it when he divided the upcoming fourth novel into two separate novels.

And then the fourth book came out five years after the book before it, and was also something of a disappointment.  While the third book had betrayals and kingdom-spanning adventures for the future of the continent, the Feast was much slower-paced and almost seems a tangent compared to the promise of the original three books. Almost none of the plot lines were picked up, meaning it was over a decade, when Dragons was released, that fans got to go back to the characters they last read about in 2000 when A Storm of Swords was released.

In the intervening years, Ol' Georgie has been quite busy.... just not busy with anything to do with the book series that has sold millions of copies and was made into the most-pirated television series in history.  Martin has been instead going on tours and writing all kinds of other stories.  Some are tangentially related to the world of Westeros, others not so much.

How to Save Soccer and the World Cup

I'm not really a soccer fan.  Really, I'm not much of a sports fan at all.  But I'm married to a Central American, so every now and then soccer comes up.

Right now the World Cup is going on in Russia.  And from what I understand, there's some problems going on.  I admit I don't know much about it, really, but a friend of mine recently told me his proposal to fix the rules of the game to make things more fair for all the countries involved in this globally important sport.

Giving Clerics Their Due

In the DCC RPG ruleset, many have noted that Wizards are given an extraordinary level of awesome, whereas Clerics sort of get shafted.  A huge amount of space is dedicated to Wizard corruptions, spells, how they find spells, and Wizard patrons.

Clerics have fewer official spells, all the deities get a single line in a table with just their name and alignment, and all Clerics for all deities are given a single Disapproval table that they always roll on.  This contrasted with pages and pages of example patrons with complete flavor text descriptions, invoke patron results, patron taints, and patron spells.

In a recent episode of Spellburn, one of the hosts went so far as to say Clerics are useless, suggesting that they should just be combined with Wizards.

All of this is massively unfair to the Cleric class.

Roko's Basilisk and why people were afraid of it

I'm really late on this one, but I wanted to explain Roko's Basilisk, for all the people who heard about it a while ago and never really "got" it.

The idea first started going around the internet a few years ago, and apparently was seriously freaking out a number of people in the Less Wrong forums.  I think I first heard about it from this Slate article, maybe, then spent time trying to find somewhere to explain why this idea was considered so horrfying.  The RaionalWiki explanation likewise failed to shed any light about why anyone would actually be scared of the thing.

The concept builds on a number of premises that float around the Less Wrong community that relate to the technological singularity, namely "friendly god" AI, utilitarian ethical calculus, and simulated consciousness.

The Basilisk is a superhuman AI from the future.  The abilities of this AI are essentially infinite, even up to traveling backwards in time.  The idea of the Basilisk is that it wants you to contribute your money to helping it be built, and if you refuse to help it, it will create a simulation of you and torture the simulation forever.

And so I think a normal person quite understandably has trouble understanding why anyone would even think this is a good B-list villain for Star Trek, much less a cause for existential dread.

But it's actually not that silly.  And once you understand the background to it better, it all makes sense.  So let me explain to you what the Basilisk is in clearer terms, so that you too can experience the angst.   (That was your warning)

The Monty Hall Problem, Bayes Theorem, and a fault in Numberphile

I watch a lot of educational videos on YouTube, in particular the awesome channel Numberphile.  I recently saw their video on the Monty Hall Problem, and was kind of disappointed at what seemed to be a rather pointless calculation that didn't really show the result, and instead showed something that was already kind of obvious.

The video can be found here and explains everything, but let me explain it again for completeness.

The Monty Hall Problem is a classic apparent paradox in probability, named after gameshow host Monty Hall from Let's Make a Deal.  In the show, the contestants are shown three doors and told behind one of the doors is a brand new car.  Behind the other two doors are "worthless" prizes; anything works, but traditionally the problem says the other two doors hold goats.  The player gets to pick any of the three doors, and whatever is behind the door is what they win.  If they pick right they get a car, otherwise they get a goat.

To add tension, after the contestant picks, Monty Hall would walk to another door, a door that the player did not pick, and show them what was behind it.  And look!  It's a goat!  The car is still out there!

In the Monty Hall Problem (not necessarily the show), Monty then asks if the contestant would like to change their mind.

The question is, what is the probability of the player guessing correctly if they swap their pick?