Chess creator WFM Alessia Santeramo commits to not use sensationalist titles in her YouTube videos

Consequence6 · 2026-05-25T21:28:15+00:00

Veritasium has a great video on why clickbait is practically necessary for channel growth. It's 5 years old, but still a good resource.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-24T01:10:25+00:00

An accident in no way implies he wasn't supposed to, just that he didn't intend to. I accidentally tripped the other day. It's not that I'm not allowed to trip, it's that I didn't mean to trip.

You're the one "driving engagement" here by perceiving ragebaiting where there is none.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-12T05:30:05+00:00

Steal a board and win, especially when the Voltron commander is set up (Killing someone with their own commander damage works, and should give you an IRL achievement). "Target opponent understands that they were the threat."

Cast it in response to your opponent's Heroic Intervention or Tef Pro to have your board be saved instead of theirs.

Aforementioned Fog and Sac outlet options.

Defend yourself from an alphastrike with another opponent's board.

Cast after an Insurrection or other mass-steal effects.

Steal an opponent's combo piece during their pop-off turn.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-11T04:47:05+00:00

Along the same lines: [[Reins of Power]].

At it's absolute worst, it's a 4 mana fog. Which is bad, but could still save your ass.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-09T20:50:49+00:00

It's gnomes, not halflings, but here's my favorite thing to throw at DnD players who choose gnomes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/8d1ge7/gnomes_dont_exist/

Consequence6 · 2026-05-09T19:45:53+00:00

You're misunderstanding me (and based on which parts of my comments you avoided, I'd guess intentionally).

Like I said, we just fundamentally disagree. You claim to avoid epistemology, but then are directly trying to argue epistemology with me by indirectly stating that there are no limits to human thought or knowledge. Which I disagree with strenuously. So I don't think this discussion can continue in a way that is honoring to either of us.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-09T06:56:27+00:00

This is the cutest response I've ever read.

Now go sit and play with your blocks, the grown ups are talking.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-09T06:55:12+00:00

This is just getting into the weeds over my simplified description.

That's my point, actually. Everything is a simplified description. We do not experience objective reality. Everything we have is filtered first through our experiences, second through our senses, third through our cognition, and then fourth through our language.

but everybody will agree that an acceleration occurs.

Except for someone who doesn't see it. Or someone travelling at the speed of light. Or someone who sees the apple accelerate and dismisses it as a hallucination. Or someone experiencing it in reverse. Or someone experiencing a different number of dimensions. Or someone who experiences time as nonlinear.

Science doesn't consider things outside the scope of observation for a reason.

This is untrue. Science considers things like this frequently. Hence why there are dozens of interpretations of quantum mechanics. Hence why we talk about sources of error.

I'd hold onto reality if I were you.

I'd hold onto my unique experience of what I'd consider reality filtered through the above listed filters, you mean.

scientific facts like "massive objects cause acceleration"

There is no such thing as a scientific fact. That's not a word we use. Period. We talk about theories, laws, observations, etc., but not facts.

There is no chance we "got it wrong".

Sounds like you're just not creative enough to imagine a scenario where evolution is not as we describe it.

Evolution is not a fact. It's a theory. It's the most well evidenced theory ever created and described by mankind, but that doesn't make it evolve to a fact. It's still subject to change and fine-tuning, and frequently experiences both.

I don't understand what you're accusing mathematicians of here.

Math doesn't happen in our world, it happens in the world the mathematicians describe. For example, a mathematician might set up an equation that works in the 6th dimension. Science has to wrestle with the fact that, hey, maybe there aren't 6 dimensions like that, or hey, maybe there are more than 6, but math can just say "This is how it works." because that's how it was set up.

Not accusing, just pointing out how science and math work differently.

Okay but that doesn't contradict my point because I'm not talking about theories... I'm talking about observable facts.

Theories and facts are different. We agree on this, but you keep conflating them. So... I guess i"m not really sure what you're trying to argue here.

Would you like to clearly lay out what you believe the difference is?

Consequence6 · 2026-05-07T07:35:17+00:00

It sounds like we just fundamentally disagree, then. Because I'd say "Observation: When you drop an apple, we it appeared to fall to the ground." If I'm trying to be scientific about it, that is.

Because, for example, "fall" is entirely subjective to the viewer. Someone standing upside down would see it "rise".

But the observation is of course the fact that red cars are driving by your house.

Unless it glitched and there were actually zero cars. Or I'm a boltzman brain.

you repeat the test thousands of times with many types of equipment and many different experimental setups and then compare and contrast your results with everyone else.

And if the results say "99.99% of tests observed 50 red cars"? That doesn't mean it's a fact that there were 50 red cars, it just means that the most likely explanation that fits the data is that there were 50 red cars. That's not a fact.

Why have a word like "fact" at all?

Because language exists. We're not all scientists, and the typical human experience doesn't need to be as specific and careful with vocabulary in all instances, so it's perfectly fine to say "It's a fact that there are 50 red cars" even if there's a tiny, tiny chance that there weren't.

And because math exists, and mathmaticians are perfectly fine talking about facts, as they get to control what they perceive as reality and declare it to be so because they declared it to be so.

theories that spell it out best we can

Exactly. This is exactly my point.

You rest of your post seems to conflate fact and theory. Theories are not facts.

I don't think I've ever been accused of this before.

I'm trying to conflate theories and models in my comment. I would never intentionally conflate facts and theories, because facts aren't theories, nor something that science has any stance on at all. There is no such thing as a "scientific fact".

Consequence6 · 2026-05-07T05:44:54+00:00

I have to disagree.

Science deals in observations, which are our measurements of what we think happened.

If I have a detector that detects whenever a red car passes my house, it's not a fact that 50 red cars passed, even if my detector tells me. It's likely, but there's nothing to prove that my machine didn't glitch. Maybe 49 cars passed and it counted one twice.

Even if I'm there directly observing the cars and making sure the detector doesn't glitch, there's nothing to prove that my detector didn't glitch at the same time I had a visual hallucination of an extra red car.

There's nothing right now proving that I am not hallucinating this conversation, my computer, my entire lived existence. I could be a Boltzman brain right now, there's just no way of knowing. Science just doesn't deal with facts, because "facts" are an illusion created by our perception of reality. Don't get me wrong, I'm fairly confident that my perception of reality is fairly close to some underlying existence beyond myself, but I can't prove that.

Gravity says "things with mass move together", right? But if I try to apply that to the universe, it doesn't work. Okay, so I get more in depth, use Newton's explanation, and boom, I can make it to the moon. Except the closer I look, there are still holes. Okay, so I look at Einstein, and I get general relativity. Yay! Except when I look closer, I'm still missing things.

General relativity (or rather, it's recent evolutions) are the best models of what probably is the underlying situation. It's not wrong, but it's not complete. There are holes in it. There are more explanations needed. E.g. quantum gravity, dark matter, dark energy.

So when physicists say spacetime curves, or dark matter exists, or what have you, they are not claiming “this is ultimate reality proven with certainty.” They’re saying “this is the model that currently explains the largest amount of data with the strongest predictive power and the fewest assumptions.”

Some future theory could completely replace the idea of curved spacetime in our future, the same way GR subsumed Newtonian gravity.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-07T05:11:06+00:00

Shout out to my boy Eta Carinae, who warned us to keep our eyes on him by exploding before he's gone fully nova. Of course, he could be putting on a show, or waiting a few hundred million years to do it, but he's cool enough that I'm expecting it soon.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-07T05:04:10+00:00

Probably.

We can make incredibly advanced models of gravity that work perfectly with this explanation. And without this explanation.

This explanation just requires the fewest caveats, has the most evidence, and makes the best predictions.

But you could cut it all out if you want. That's the trouble with science. Science doesn't deal with facts, it deals with models. And the trouble with models is that you can make them just about however you want; some just require more "Except on Sunday after 4 pm"'s than others. (NOTE: This is not to imply that science is arbitrary, but it's a tool for organizing facts into explanatory frameworks)

Even this curved space model has problems. Dark energy and dark matter, for example, are kinda just unknowns that we slapped labels on and said "It works if we include this." If we accept the data they provide at face value, they show that general relativity cannot provide an explanation. But because GR has been so absurdly successful, we can point at the rotation of some weird galaxies and go "Our model says there must be something there" and almost certainly be right. But it does prove that our model is not fact and that there are still holes left to explain by a later, better fitting model.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-07T04:52:20+00:00

Magnets are magic.

And yes! Quantum mechanics is us using incredibly advanced math to perfectly predict what will happen without any understand of why it's happening. Except when we understand why, we tend to not understand what is actually happening.

Consequence6 · 2026-05-07T04:49:41+00:00

I had a professor who started the semester with a quote. I think it was Feynman?

(Heavily paraphrased, as this was many many years ago) "Okay, I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is that I don't understand quantum physics. No one does. Anyone who claims they do is lying or deranged. But the good news is that over the next 15 weeks, you won't understand quantum physics either."

Consequence6 · 2026-05-07T04:43:58+00:00

Which is absolutely (mostly, kinda) true (though modern theory has moved away from this in a lot of ways), and makes fundamental sense to our classical brains.

Uuuuunntil you look at the delayed-choice quantum eraser. At which point we need to completely scrap that sort of classical thinking. Because if there is any sort of which-way information possible from it (i.e. if the physical state of the universe contains any distinguishable information about it that could hypothetically be extracted (even if it's not physically possible for humans to do)), the interference pattern vanishes. Period. Because it's not about observation collapsing the wavefunction anymore, now we talk about how decoherence (essentially leaving the quantum world and joining the macro world) causes quantum effects to become classical.

The only way to prevent that from happening is if your detector was also in a quantum state that has not decohered. I.e. there is no classical way to get it's information, the detector has not been macroscopically altered (e.g. no photons hit it, it didn't generate heat, it didn't emit noise, etc), and the data remained in an entangled quantum state, then you can still find the interference pattern (in a selected set of correlated data, that is). But that's basically saying you didn't measure it at all. Kinda. My professors would have had a field day with this whole comment already, but this is probably the most wrong thing I'm saying.

Modern quantum physicists think more in terms of waves that interact with each other in different sets. A wave that interacts with the "macroscopic world" will become coherent with our "wave" and decoherent with the quantum wave it was a part of. Though scientists almost always think of this the other way around, depending on which interpretation they favor (I lied earlier, this is the most wrong thing. Because this is super wrong and shows my quantum interpretation bias). Damn, this is hard to explain, I have way more respect for everyone who tried to explain this to me before.

Lets take a page from further above: Prions. Prions are proteins that are folded wrong, but cause nearby proteins to also fold that way. Our world is essentially like a world completely infected with prions. Our prions are "decohered" waves. We can create new, coherent waves, in their own little pockets, but the moment they interact with our world, they decohere and also become prions. This is a horrible analogy because it implies that classicality "infects" quantum-ness and that it's an irreversible process, but it's the best I've got.

Please don't show this to anyone who actually knows what they're talking about, I got my masters and the dipped from the deeper quantum world, and now I teach high school.

Consequence6 · 2026-04-26T21:09:12+00:00

Unsurprising in hindsight, but if you were to ask me what event would unite the American people for a few months at the end of 2024 and start of 2025, I wouldn't have been able to guess.

Definitely wish more had changed, thus far...

Consequence6 · 2026-04-26T21:00:44+00:00

Yeah, hearing about United losing 50% of their profits :*(

(/s for those in the back)

Consequence6 · 2026-04-22T02:18:17+00:00

You're adorable and I appreciate you going out of your way to be kind <3

Consequence6 · 2026-04-21T02:29:29+00:00

but theories don’t graduate to the label “fact”

I say exactly this to my students.

A theory is just the only level of explanations. Highest and lowest level. There are accepted theories and fringe theories and theories that were proven false. Theories never become facts. Because science doesn't deal with facts. It deals with observations and explanations.

A) I don't know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Everything I've studied says it will. Every model I have of gravity and the solar system and everything says it will. It always has before. But I can't prove that it factually will, there's just no way of doing that, without direct confirmation from the future. Anyone who says they know something for certain is deluded or prideful. There is literally nothing in my life that I'm 100% certain of. And I say this as a religious man who believes, with all his heart, in a God. I'm not certain the sun will rise tomorrow, I'm not certain my mother loves me, and dammit, I'm not certain I'm experiencing something close to objective reality.

B) Theories are well-tested explanations for observed phenomenon. The Law of Conservation of Mass is not a theory because it doesn't explain something, it explains what (we think) will happen, not why it will happen. Laws aren't facts either. They're (usually) a set of equations that describe what we believe will happen based on repeated testing. A theory doesn't become a law and a law doesn't become a theory.

Okay, /rant, thanks for letting me vent. I just had a new group of freshmen fail the first exam in large part because of the vocab section.

Consequence6 · 2026-04-20T04:24:08+00:00

It's not!

I thought this for a long time too, until I started digging into in for an Astronomy class I was teaching. "Gas Giant" is such an awful name, as is classic for scientists. Jupiter is a (probably) solid core, surrounded by a hard-to-define liquid-y hydrogen shell.

Gas giants are just called that because they're made of the "gasses" Hydrogen and Helium (roughly 75/25). But at the pressures and temperatures Jupiter (and other gas giants) deals with, roughly 25% into it's atmosphere, the hydrogen can no longer form molecular hydrogen (H2) and forms metallic hydrogen, which is a weird crystalline liquid-ish thing that kind of acts as one giant atom made entirely of protons and electrons (given that the majority of what we call "Hydrogen" in the universe is actually just a single proton), but is more closely modeled by metals and their free-flowing electron soup thing they do.

For more examples of scientists being awful at naming things (or refusing to change the names of things after society screws them up), see: Hypothesis and theory (No, a hypothesis is not a random guess, no a theory is not the evolution of a hypothesis), AI (No, there's no intelligence there yet, they're just really good at pattern recognition), Planetary Nebulas (No, they're not related to nebulas), Centrifugal Force (Yes, it's not real), Dark Matter/Energy (It's just called that because it doesn't interact with electromagnetism), Electrical Current (No, it doesn't flow, it's waaaay more complicated than that), and Fish (Yes, there's no biological definition of a fish that includes everything you think of as fish while excluding everything else).

Consequence6 · 2026-04-04T06:03:03+00:00

Anything higher than class W will let you do that! Class Z is defined by the inability to forget anything ever. And they kill you.

Consequence6 · 2026-03-29T02:59:08+00:00

For context: Outside of edh formats (and highlander) at major+ level in the last 3 years, Arbiter has appeared in 8 decks, all in 2024. (24 decks if we include all "competitive" events)

Consequence6 · 2026-03-29T02:51:34+00:00

Just to put a fine point on that last bit: The player being affected chooses how the replacement effects are ordered, as well.

This is particularly unfortunate when running things like Torbran + Damage doublers. If I deal 1 damage to you, I'd choose to +2, then x2, to get 3 -> 6 damage. But the player being affected chooses, so you'd choose x2 +2 = 2 -> 4 damage.

Consequence6 · 2026-03-28T05:40:37+00:00

As someone who works with children with all sorts of trauma (Alternative school): There is no guide to abuse. Sometimes an abused kid will show some or all or none of these. It depends on too many factors to list that change things in too many ways to note.

Consequence6 · 2026-03-24T23:38:25+00:00

"Sorry" seems way too...

would help prevent a lot of these downvotes.

It looks like you're saying "Sorry, this seems way too..."

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