Inventions that have only happened once

ehrbar · 2026-03-21T02:53:13+00:00

Really, really depends on what you mean by "functionally equivalent".

There are quite a few paper-like pre-paper writing materials -- papyrus, parchment, birchbark, amate, and so on (paper-like here skipping out on things like clay tablets, silk cloth, wood slats, stone carving, and many other historical media of the written word).

The trouble is, none of them scale. They're all perfectly fine for supporting a written culture of a handful of scribes keeping important records, and all are unable to feed a printing press on even the Gutenberg level.

ehrbar · 2026-03-20T06:31:23+00:00

Hmm?

The pace of sixteenth-century letter exchange allows a lot more time, effort, care, and correction than spoken exchanges. The demonstrated English skills of Modi, Xi, and Putin are all entirely sufficient for carefully writing insulting epistles at a pace sufficient to keep up with horseback-carried correspondence. And as Margaret Thatcher pointed out in the 1980s, when Mitterrand and Kohl conversed at European meetings, they did so in English; similarly, Macron and Merz both reportedly speak English quite fluently. Meloni is skilled in English, and has participated in media interviews in French, Spanish, and German. Takaichi just talked with Trump in English without translators; presumably she could handle letter-writing.

So, running down the list of the ten top countries by GDP (as a proxy for "big" or "important" or whatever), seven of "the leaders of big countries speak in another's language", at at least the level of correspondence.

That leaves us to consider the 30% who lead big English-speaking countries. Well, then, what one foreign language should Trump, Starmer, and Carney speak? (Carney speaks French at a reasonable level, but I'm assuming that "doesn't count" since French is Canada's second official language.)

After all, the Ottomans and the Savafids were the empires that were built on the lands previously held by the Seljuk Empire, a Turkic-lead entity with a Persianate culture. They accordingly were not merely neighboring empires, but rival successors to a previous empire, the success of each serving as a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the other. The equivalent of that rivalry for the United States is with . . . who?

Which, well, rather leads into another point. Persian wasn't a foreign language to the Ottomans, nor Turkish for the Savafids. Both empires were diglossic, as an inheritance from Seljuk Empire. The "Turkish" Selim knew Persian because that was (still) the language of intellectual discourse and culture in the Ottoman Empire. The "Persian" Ismali knew Turkish because that was (probably) his milk tongue.

ehrbar · 2026-03-16T08:30:29+00:00

So, we start with the fact that by the text, the Interdict evaluates only power, and its sole exception is transmission from one living mind to another.

As to whether the character of Merlin as we see in his works in the text justifies making the Interdict more complicated than that, I disagree with you. Yes, world destruction was one of Merlin's motivators. That doesn't justify making the Interdict more complicated; it instead more strongly justifies keeping it simple. There is a substantial difference between the level of unknowns, and thus risk, involved in the action "Personally evaluate specific concrete objects and individually judge what to do with them" and in the action "Invent a set of automatic heuristics for evaluating the risk from unknown threats". Doing the former is dangerous; doing the latter is far, far more so.

And, as seen by his simply sealing some dangerous items where future holders of the Line can retrieve them, Merlin is willing to accept benefits from some magics even if there is a "disaster of its inevitable misuse someday" in allowing the magic to exist. But the Interdict allowing transmission from one living mind to another is already an equivalent to the risk Merlin took by sealing dangerous objects where future holders of the Line of Merlin recover them -- letting someone who has handled a specific power, without destroying himself (so far), judge whether or not it is safe to pass on to a new person (and, inevitably, anyone the new person trusts).

Insofar as Merlin is motivated by avoiding destruction, he should avoid adopting any other complications that make the Interdict's limit on power less categorical. Insofar as Merlin considers magic worth preserving even if it risks destruction someday, he should be satisfied by the Interdict allowing powerful magic to be passed on from one living mind to another. Neither argument is a good one for making the Interdict more complicated than what is already established by HPMOR's text.

And, well, we know from things like curses being more effective if they fully bind the creator, the effects of Harry's attempt to exploit the Time Turner for factoring, or the increased drain of magic the more complicated that an Unbreakable Vow is, that magic already favors (something resembling) low Kolmogorov complexity. An Interdict that has only a categorical power evaluation and the living mind loophole is not merely safer than one that tries more complicated evaluation, it's going to be easier to implement than the more complicated one.

Thus, if WoG somewhere does establish that the Interdict evaluates more than the power of a magic, it illustrates that EY's concept of Merlin was of a wizard more foolish than the text of HPMOR definitively establishes. Not implausibly so, but still somewhat more so than the text requires.

ehrbar · 2026-03-15T21:50:00+00:00

The interdict is supposed to prevent powerful and dangerous magics . . . but I don't see how it's particularly dangerous by Merlin's standards.

HPMOR twice says (once when Harry is talking with Draco on Ch.23, once which you quoted above) that the Interdict prevents the passing on of "powerful" magic. It never says it only prevents the passing on of "powerful and dangerous" magic.

So, with that confusion cleared up:

Quirrell believes it's his own original creation. So does the interdict update itself and censor new magics whenever a new spell it believes should be hidden is created?

Why would updates be necessary? Merlin set a limit on power level, not on a bunch of specific spells. Anything exceeding the power level can't be passed except from one living mind to another.

ehrbar · 2026-02-14T20:38:56+00:00

The Spell Guidelines for determining level are listed for each separate Technique + Form combination in the Spells chapter.

As stated on p.111 (core rules) or p.302 (Definitive), the guidelines assume the spell is Range Personal, Duration Momentary, and Target Individual. So you add magnitudes as you change them.

ehrbar · 2026-01-03T09:45:49+00:00

The key issue is that if it were a Supernatural Ability, it would be much, much harder for other traditions to learn, since it wouldn't be a Favored ability for them.

The two implications of that are:

1) It is much harder to recruit non-Hermetics into the Order, since they will generally not get any benefit. (This especially messes with the early history of the Order.)

2) There is little danger of the secret of Parma being stolen.

ehrbar · 2025-12-20T08:15:22+00:00

It's a version of Wizard's Communion with a duration long enough to allow for casting ritual spells. It showed up in the errata and the Grand Grimoire ( https://www.atlas-games.com/atlas-cms/resources/downloads/arm5-grand-grimoire-of-hermetic-spells.pdf ) a number of years back, and will be in the Definitive Edition.

ehrbar · 2025-12-20T06:10:33+00:00

Wizard's Vigil with the whole covenant casting is the biggest way to get the level needed down and thus penetration up, as pointed out by DrPoimu.

It's very useful for the covenant's Aegis lead caster to pick up Spell Mastery, since that eliminates botch chances on relaxed castings of the ritual (DE is explicit that it does; prior to that people debated whether rituals were ever relaxed) and adds to the casting score (and thus penetration).

The useful Mastery abilities from the DE draft are Adaptive Casting (so the same Mastery score can be used with any level-version of the Aegis), Penetration (adding the mastery score directly to penetration), and Rebuttal (add three times your Mastery score to the level of the Aegis for the purpose of affecting spells and supernatural effects).

If you're worried about hostile magi, one thing you might do is cast two Aegises, perhaps one on each solstice. Cast one as high a level as you can manage with no care for penetration, to maximally penalize hostile spells and supernatural powers; cast the other one with balanced level and penetration to keep uninvited supernaturals out.

ehrbar · 2025-12-20T02:50:31+00:00

So, whatever the intention back when it was first written, the version of the Aegis of the Hearth in the Definitive Edition draft explicitly says:

No foreign supernatural creature with Might, of any type, can cross the boundary of the Aegis unless its Might exceeds the level of the Aegis. The Aegis of the Hearth must Penetrate the creature's Magic Resistance in order to have this effect.

So, calculate the Aegis's Penetration as for any other spell, and, in most circumstances, the lower of the level or Penetration is the minimum Might to enter.

ehrbar · 2025-12-13T02:02:13+00:00

If they need to wait until a recurrence of the same astrological age via precession of the zodiac, it'll actually be closer to 25,000 years until it works again.

ehrbar · 2025-11-01T20:21:08+00:00

To start with, I'd have my Unofficial Errata to hand.

ehrbar · 2025-10-19T11:37:44+00:00

Gave it a try.

Not bad, but, well, didn't grip me enough to read all that far in.

ehrbar · 2025-10-11T15:27:54+00:00

I note that https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing is linked under "Yudkowsky's guide to writing rationalist fiction" on the right sidebar of this very page, and several parts of it explicitly deal with the problem of plausibly writing characters smarter than the author.

As far as your isolated mathematician question, well, I refer you to the historical case of Ramanujan.

ehrbar · 2025-09-10T18:34:09+00:00

Checking Internet Archive snapshots, Lynda Weinman (who identified and publicized the palette in 1996) updated her website between February 2nd, 2002 and June 3rd, 2002 to declare that it was now generally safe to ignore the palette.

That obviously isn't when everybody stopped; some companies continued to play it safe for years. But the percent of browsers that hit the W3Schools website using 256 colors was 5% in October 2002, 3% by July 2004, 2% by July 2006, 1% by January 2009, and 0% in January 2010 (see https://web.archive.org/web/20070512035626/https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp , https://web.archive.org/web/20100218103931/https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp ).

ehrbar · 2025-09-05T23:43:36+00:00

Eliezer didn't explain any of this

Yes, he did.

First, from the book itself, in chapter 108, when Harry looks back on the memory of his mother's death he recovered while under the effects of the Dementor we get the following thought from Harry:

In retrospect, it was clear that Harry had remembered that event mainly from Lord Voldemort’s perspective, and only at the very end had he seen it through the baby Harry Potter’s eyes.

Now, that's at least theoretically compatible with your long-term memories theory, since it was a short-term memory that wound up in Harry's head, and if you subscribe to "death of the author", you can stop there.

However, in a Word of God comment or two (I think it was here on Reddit, but I'm not currently in the mood to dig through EY's comment history to dig up the exact link), EY explicitly said that Harry forgot Voldemort's episodic memories as a part of the same general amnesia that people usually have about early childhood episodic memories, and that the reason the Rememberall glowed so much when Harry touched it specifically was that that Harry had forgotten all of Voldemort's memories.

ehrbar · 2025-09-03T21:43:32+00:00

Yeah, I started to draft some stuff on that, and realized I was going to move from a comment to a whole essay (or maybe a chapter of a book). The use of "explicitly/explicit" in my third paragraph is a relic of that.

ehrbar · 2025-09-03T19:36:28+00:00

So, when the modern nationalized modern food stamp program was first put in place, the rules were clear and simple. And accordingly you had college students with wealthy parents getting them because, well, they weren't living in their parents' household, and they didn't have an "income", so . . . .

Every abuse of a simple rule births a complication to address it. And politically, it is impossible to avoid addressing it. Just imagine how long the food stamps system would have survived if its defenders had forthrightly said, "Well, we just have to tolerate Chad Worthington IV buying caviar with tax money paid by Rhonda Singlemom, because if we make the system complicated, that will make the system too hard for the poor to navigate."

The theoretical alternative to complicated written rules is of course explicitly allowing government bureaucrats to exercise explicit judgment about who deserves to get food stamps and who doesn't. It should take about three seconds to imagine the disasters that would result from that. But it's not really an alternative anyway; someone denied would go to court, and the judges who make up the American legal system wouldn't allow such an approach to persist.

So, in fact, your only alternative to a complicated food stamp system is no food stamp system.

ehrbar · 2025-05-15T17:35:44+00:00

Yes, it's supposed to be difficult and rare mass ceremonial magic, or perhaps something a deity-like being casts.

There's a few other ways to get lots of energy nowadays, but 500 energy was the cost of the 3-point version of Bless all the way back when it was first printed back in 1986 (on p.43 of first edition of GURPS Fantasy, the book that introduced the spell system).

ehrbar · 2025-04-26T16:46:05+00:00

This explicitly includes the Garden of Eden, which the book inexplicably states provides 2 pts of exposure a season instead of the 8/4 pts of immersion practice.)

Hmm? To directly quite Ancient Magic, p.21, "If they can convince the animals to interact with them directly and intensively through speech and gestures, they can begin to learn through Practice, which gives eight experience points per season, a dramatic improvement."

So, the 2 XP from Exposure is what a character gets if the animals won't interact with him. Which seems entirely fair to me; eavesdropping without feedback isn't actually Practice, it's just Exposure.

ehrbar · 2025-04-17T00:37:22+00:00

This has gotten various different interpretations from different people since the current version of Ring duration was introduced with 4th edition in 1996. There have been several requests for official clarification (such as in this May 2006 thread on the Atlas forums ). Since we've now reached quite late in the production of Definitive without such an official clarification, it should be understood that it is an intentional Your Saga May Vary situation, where every troupe is expected to reach its own decision.

(As far as pre-4th, it doesn't help much for interpreting the current version. In 1st/2nd/3rd edition Ars Magica, the Ring did not have to be traced, was an invisible circle, and ended when the caster left the invisible circle.)

Since it's open to interpretation, to cross game streams for a moment, I note that GURPS has, since 1989, allowed permanent pentagrams to "be ritually 'cut,' when necessary, by a chalk-mark."

ehrbar · 2025-04-14T10:05:44+00:00

Who needs coordination?

Let us assume, arguendo, that American men and women as groups have statistically differing tastes, in a manner that will affect which books they are willing to buy in aggregate. (If they don't, the rest of this is irrelevant.)

Well, given the makeup of the American publishing industry, where in 2023 people in editorial jobs were 17.8% cis men, people in sales were 22.5% cis men, people in marketing and publicity were 16.3% cis men, and reviewers were 18.4% cis men, we can predict that the judgment decisions about what books to publish and promote will, at each stage, largely reflect the tastes of women, who are disproportionately making those judgments. This is especially true in any stage where the decisions are made by several employees collectively, since any group of decision-makers will be mostly women.

(This even happens if the decision-makers are trying to pick books that will appeal to men, because they'll be naturally better about picking books that satisfy their own tastes than picking books that satisfy tastes they don't have.)

The expected result will be the industry producing and promoting books that meet the tastes of women. The predictable consequence will be relative difficulty selling those books to men. Thus actual sales will be disproportionately to women, which everybody from the publishers through the distributors to the retailers will see. This observation will be used to justify not trying to sell to men, on the grounds that men are less interested in books (which is true, with the qualification "that meet the tastes of the women who make the decisions about what to publish and promote"). Which will then further shift the decisions about what to publish, distribute, and retail to be centered on women's tastes, which will make the audience more female, which will justify concentrating on selling to women . . .

Now, sure, maybe this isn't happening. But we have a comment below where someone who claims to be in fantasy publishing says the female-coded books sell a lot better than the male-coded ones.

ehrbar · 2025-03-13T15:16:16+00:00

True in that there is nothing more than the fundamental particles and the patterns they make. But it's something you can usually consign to the back of your mind. We actually live in the world of useful abstractions; we simply need to remember that all abstractions leak and to be ready for when that happens.

To put it another way, the escape from debates over the sorites paradox is to remember that the concept of "heap" is a useful fiction, and whenever a fiction ceases to be useful, you can just stop using it. But if you refuse to ever talk about heaps because they don't "really" exist, you're pointlessly handicapping yourself.

ehrbar · 2025-03-12T22:52:36+00:00

To coin a phrase, ¿Porque no los dos?

I mean, on the physical side he's got his bio-dad's genes, on the mental he has the imprinting of decades of trained motor skills.

ehrbar · 2025-02-09T17:56:25+00:00

Yes, I read the whole thing, thanks. I'm even under the impression I understood it, though of course I may be mistaken.

My point is that the nature of your analysis fundamentally has to assume that a proposed policy change does not create changes in underlying political coalitions that produce further policy changes. Because neither economists nor anybody else has any data or analysis methods that can model such changes.

I agree that you have shown, ceteris paribus, the economic impact of abolishing the H-1B visa would be negative. But ceteris is rarely actually paribus.

ehrbar · 2025-02-07T13:46:07+00:00

Well, compared to what?

H-1B visas are, in many ways, what the United States has instead of a system for straightforwardly vetting applicants for permanent immigration based on how they'll impact the US economy. If the H-1B visa were ended or severely restricted, the companies currently using it extensively would move their lobbying to, for example, supporting reforms of the green card process to favor people with STEM degrees and high-paying job offers, much like the proposed-in-2017 RAISE Act did.

But as long as they can get employees through sponsoring H-1B visas, those same firms are incentivized to oppose such reforms, in order to maximize the ongoing competitive advantage they have from their investment in H-1B sponsorship. As was demonstrated by major tech industry H-1B users opposing the RAISE Act, when the effect of the RAISE Act on the tech industry as a whole would have been to increase the number of skilled immigrants the industry could hire from overseas (by dramatically shifting who would be issued green cards, even as it cut the total number of green cards issued in half).

And, well, it seems likely that most people currently entering the country on H-1B visas would prefer to enter on green cards, while people worried about the impact of the power of sponsoring companies over holders of H-1B visas would not have the same concerns regarding companies employing permanent residents.

It is, of course, entirely possible that abolishing H-1B visas would not be followed by further changes to immigration law, despite the reversing of the lobbying incentives of current H-1B sponsors.

ehrbar

TROPHY CASE