I’ve heard people repeat a few theories for why Game of Thrones started so well and ended so badly. Most of these theories don’t make sense.

Theory 1: David & Dan are good at adapting books, but they didn’t know what to do when they ran out of book.

Seasons 1 through 4, which adapted the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire, are up there with the greatest television shows ever made. Season 5, which adapted the fourth book and part of the fifth book, was mediocre. If this theory were true, season 5 should have been on par with the earlier seasons, but it wasn’t.

Furthermore, season 6 was better than season 5, even though season 5 was still based on the books, and season 6 wasn’t.

Even more, David & Dan wrote some excellent original content in the earlier seasons, such as the extended arc with Arya and the Hound in season 4 (see this scene, which wasn’t in the books).

Some people say, well they know how to write short scenes, but they don’t know how to write story arcs. Then how do you explain the famously terrible dialogue in the later seasons?

Theory 2: David & Dan were always bad showrunners.

I hear this one a lot. There’s some evidence for this theory—prior to Game of Thrones, David was best known for writing X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a famously bad movie), and Dan had no prior writing credits. But if they’re bad showrunners, why were the first four seasons so good? I can buy that bad showrunners might accidentally create a pretty good show, but I don’t see how they could accidentally create one of the best shows of all time.

Theory 3: David & Dan lost interest and started phoning it in.

This explanation makes more sense because it can explain the nearly-monotonic decline in quality. But it still can’t explain why season 6 was better than season 5. And the timing doesn’t entirely work out—people usually say this about seasons 7 and 8, but season 5 was clearly worse than the previous four seasons, and it seems less plausible that they’d lose interest that early on.

Theory 4: Good writing emerges through a mysterious process that no one really understands.

This is my favorite theory. Many occasionally-great writers can’t consistently replicate their success, writers can’t tell which of their works will become popular, and nobody fully understands what makes great writing. That’s why, for example, Jane Austen thought Pride and Prejudice was her worst book, even though it’s what she’s most remembered for. Or why The Matrix is my favorite movie of all time, even though I like zero (0) one (1)¹ other Wachowski movie. (The Wachowskis are another example of artists who occasionally produce brilliant works and most of the time don’t, and it’s not clear why.)

Or why people used to talk about good art coming from a muse—you didn’t write that brilliant story, you just wrote down the words that your muse gave you, which is just a poetic way of saying you have no idea how you came up with it.

This is kind of a non-explanation: “the reason Game of Thrones was inconsistently good is because lots of things are inconsistently good and we don’t know why.” But at least it turns a localized mystery into a much bigger mystery about the general nature of creativity.

Posted on Sep 05, 2022

Consumers want to know which products are good without having to buy them first. One way to do that is by reading reviews.

There are third-party services that provide product reviews. Unfortunately, almost all of them are useless because they inevitably fall into the Review Service Vortex of Death.

Review services have a fundamental incentives problem stemming from two facts:

1. Businesses don’t want to get bad reviews and they will pay a lot of money to have fake good reviews written, or to have bad reviews removed.
2. Consumers can’t tell when a review service is removing bad reviews.

Therefore, any review service, even if consumers pay to use it, is incentivized to accept businesses’ money to remove bad reviews, thus making the service useless for consumers. And it can get away with this behavior for a long time.

The biggest reviewers—including Better Business Bureau, Yelp, and Trustpilot—have all fallen into the Review Service Vortex of Death, and should not be trusted by consumers, but they continue to be used because it’s not common knowledge that they delete bad reviews in exchange for money. (And indeed, it’s hard to even prove that they do.)

What can consumers do about this? I don’t know. Businesses like Amazon, that make their money from retail sales, are less likely to fall into the Vortex, but they’re still vulnerable to businesses giving themselves fake reviews.

(I did write a review article one time—a review of donor-advised fund providers—and a couple of providers have subsequently emailed me to ask me to include them in my article. But sadly¹, they didn’t offer me any bribes.)

Posted on Jun 20, 2022

Notes

As an investor, you might invest in an index fund because you want to get unbiased, diversified exposure to the market. You don’t have to figure out which stocks will beat the market if you simply buy every stock.

But when you invest in an index fund, usually that means the fund can now vote on your behalf. The more stock an index fund owns, the more voting power it has. Generally speaking, the big index fund providers (including Vanguard and BlackRock) will vote in ways that align with their own corporate values—their top (stated) priorities are to increase climate change mitigation and workforce gender/racial diversity.

Regardless of whether you want this voting behavior, it means these index funds are not passive. By putting your money in an index fund that votes, you are implicitly claiming that it will make better voting decisions than the market.

(For that matter, any time you hold something other than the global market portfolio, you’re making an active bet. Sadly (and surprisingly), there aren’t any single index funds that offer the global market portfolio. But I digress.)

Posted on Apr 20, 2022

Epistemic status: Highly speculative; unburdened by any meaningful supporting evidence.

I’ve written something like 200 essays for school. Writing those essays did not teach me how to write. Writing for fun taught me how to write.

When I was in high school, I used to complain that the essays I was required to write were both boring and unhelpful, and I’d learn more by writing essays about whatever I wanted. But if my teachers had let students write whatever they wanted, I don’t think most of them would have gotten very far. I don’t think I would have gotten very far, either. There’s a big difference between

me: I have an idea! I will write about it!

versus

teacher: Please have an idea and write about it.

me: What should I write about? I dunno, I guess I could write about X, I can probably force myself to come up with something to say about it.

Instead of writing something detached from ordinary life, like literary analysis, should high schoolers be taught to write something relevant, like emails?

In fact, I was taught how to write emails in high school (although that was only a small % of what we did), and the teaching was counterproductive. The way my teachers taught me to write emails was significantly wrong, and probably would have hindered my career if I had listened. (As a basic example, they said to always start an email with “Dear [name]”. Nobody starts emails that way in real life.) All the people with jobs who write emails somehow managed to un-learn the anti-lessons that they were taught.

But even if my teachers had taught me how to write emails correctly, it wouldn’t have mattered. If I have to slog through a purposeless assignment that I don’t care about, anything I learn from it doesn’t stick. I only learn from doing things if I’m doing them for a reason.

In conclusion, it’s impossible to force someone to learn good writing. They have to want to write.

Posted on Mar 22, 2022

I see many people criticize existential risk reduction as naive or arrogant. “What, you think you can save the world?”

I’m not going to dispute this. Yes, it’s naive and arrogant, and that’s a good thing.

There are countless movies about saving the world. Lots of people fantasize about saving the world (or, at least, my friends and I did when we were kids, and I still do). Ask any five-year-old child, and they can tell you that saving the world is awesome. But it takes a particularly subtle and clever mind to understand that actually, trying to save the world is a silly waste of time.

But actually, the five-year old was correct all along. Saving the world is, in fact, awesome! We should do it!

The mature, adult response is that you can’t save the world, and you should be content with contributing to society in your own small way. I could make some clever argument about scope sensitivity or universalist morality or something, but I don’t need to. You already know that saving the world is awesome. Everybody knows it, they’ve just forgotten.

Climate change is the only mainstream cause that at least has a plausible case for saving the world. And indeed some climate change activists think in those terms. Even though I believe it’s unlikely that mitigating climate change can save the world, it’s still admirable to try. I would like to see more people try. Ask yourself: What could destroy the world, and how do we stop that from happening?

Posted on Mar 18, 2022

Confidence: Likely.

Cross-posted to the Effective Altruism Forum.

Ordinary wealthy people don’t care as much about getting more money because they already have a lot of it. So we should expect to be able to find overlooked methods for rich people to get richer.¹ Wealthy effective altruists might value their billionth dollar nearly as much as their first dollar, so they should seek out these overlooked methods.

If someone got rich doing X (where X = starting a startup, excelling at a high-paying profession, etc.), their best way of making money on the margin might not be to do more X. It might be to do something entirely different.

Some examples:

(Edit 2024-03-18: This paragraph did not age well…although the point about retaining equity is still valid.)

Sam Bankman-Fried increased his net worth by $10,000,000,000 in four years by founding FTX. He earned most of those zeroes by doing the hard work of starting a company, and there’s no shortcut around that. But, importantly, he managed to retain most of his original stake in FTX. For most founders, by the time their company is worth $10 billion or more, they only own maybe 10% of it. If Sam had given away a normal amount of equity to VCs, he might have only gotten $2 billion from FTX instead of $10 billion. In some sense, 80% of the money he earned from FTX came purely from retaining equity.²

It has often been said that scholars don’t read their own citations. Out of curiosity, I decided to go through one of my longer essays to see how many of my citations I read.

(I actually did this exercise a while ago, around the time I published the original essay. Today I was going through my personal journal and found my notes on the exercise, and I thought it might be worth sharing publicly.)

The results:

• My essay cites a total of 37 academic papers.
• For 9 citations, I read the entire thing top to bottom and took notes to help me remember.
• For another 6 citations, I skimmed them but didn’t read carefully or take notes.
• For the remaining 22, I only read the abstracts.

Every informative essay or research paper should include a summary at the beginning. Write your summary with the expectation that most readers will ONLY read the summary. The summary should tell most readers everything they need to know. The body of the article only exists to provide context and supporting evidence.

I realize I’m fighting a losing battle on this one and most people don’t care if they behave uncharitably toward their opponents. People are always gonna mock people they disagree with. But I don’t like it.

Inspired by Applied Divinity Studies’ Unemployment Part 2

Many people, such as Cal Newport, say that you can only do about four hours of deep work per day. I am a lot worse at deep work than that.

When I worked full-time as a software developer, I tried pretty hard to avoid distractions and stay focused on work. At the end of each day, I made a quick estimate of how much I got done that day. I rated myself on a 5-point productivity scale. A fully productive day, where I spent the bulk of the day doing meaningful work, earned the full 5 points. My estimates were by no means objective, but according to my own perception, I scored 5 points on a total of 91 out of 602 work days (that’s 15%). A 5-point day usually meant I spent around four hours doing deep work, and most of the rest of the day doing important shallow work.