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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Most people already love Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality which is like Harry Potter would be if it was written by Eliezer Yudkowsky[1].

It's sometimes annoying in the ways you'd expect -- I found the first couple of chapters unbearably smug. But it's fascinating for the way it takes the Harry Potter world as a backdrop for presenting a scientific or rationalist worldview.

[1] Because it is Harry Potter written by Eliezer Yudkowsky :)

Harry Potter and the Natural Twenty

Harry Potter and the Natural Twenty is generally reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality but with a DnD munchkinism in the place of rationality.

It's not thought-provoking in the same way, and some of the jokes are tediously obvious, but people who liked Methods often said they found it very enjoyable and funny.

Tales of Magic University (NSFW)

Tales of MU is not technically fanfiction, but it comes from that sort of culture.

It's an ongoing story about a girl who goes to university in a DnD-inspired world.

It intermittently features many common fanfictiony sort of faults, but I also found it very very endearing, and have kept reading all the way through.

If you like the "magic school" genre, it's a good example of it.

It also features a lot of the main character coming to terms with her sexuality, and BDSM, LGBT, polyamory, trans characters, etc, etc. and quite a lot of fairly graphic sex scenes.

Whately Academy Stories (sometimes NSFW)

Whately Academy is a shared-universe fiction writing project about a school for superheroes. Again, it's not technically fanfiction, but has the same sort of style.

There's so much of it, don't try to read all of it. The safest place to start is probably with "Intro" and "Ninja 1" which are about most of the main characters, and start with them settling in to the school. Some of the origin stories before that were rather harrowing, and might be offputting. From then on, I read all the Jade/Generator stories, and then the Ayla/Phase stories.

Some parts I found very annoying or simplistic, but a lot I found very very endearing -- I fell in love with most of the characters, and how they learn to use their fairly random powers in increasingly interesting ways, the intertwining stories show different aspects of them, and how they all grow into who they are in different ways.

All the main characters are transgender, and this is often handled well, but sometimes handled in ways that made me very uncomfortable. I can be more specific if it would help.

Throne of the Crescent Moon has been a little internet-famous recently as a swords-and-sorcery style novel set against a generic arabic world instead of a generic european world, with ghuls, ghul hunters, corrupt caliphs, etc, etc.

The main characters are an ageing ghul hunter, the last real ghul hunter in the city, his young assistant from a sect of ascetic warriors-for-god, a couple of his friends, and a young woman from a desert tribe with the gift of lion-shape.

They separately discover someone is raising unprecedently strong and evil ghuls with the aid of some ancient near-forgotten magic, and try to track him down, but get embroiled in the politics along the way.

Good things

* The setting is interesting
* The characters, while a bit generic, are good
* He does a very good job of showing the characters from each others' point of view -- not spectacularly well, but enough to show the characters from quite different perspectives
* It was enjoyable and easy to read

Bad things

* I couldn't put my finger on this until I read some other reviews, but everything other than the setting was _very_ generic, you know basically what's going to happen by having read the same tropes elsewhere. Towards the end of the book I was a little confused because there was a "twist" I assumed was coming based on the set-up so far, but didn't.
* It's probably better than most swords and sorcery novels for including female characters (there are two good female characters who get about as much screen time as the non-protagonist male characters), but they're not as protagonist-y and some islamic feminist critiques were annoyed that it didn't really reflect any experience of being an arab woman other than what you'd see as a man.

For clarification, this is a blog post about the book entitled, Ready Player One, not an instruction to prepare :)

Ready Player One had a little bit of fame last year. There's a virtual world which becomes a de facto standard, most different games running under the same umbrella system, and also video-conferencing, most education, etc. Its creator dies, and leaves control of the company to whoever finds a secret object secreted somewhere in the virtual world.

Initially there's a massive publicity storm, but after several years, people start to assume it's a hoax, until someone finds the first clue in the trail.

The creator, and many of the people still hunting for the clue, love classic 80s computer games, and much of the book is themed around them.

The book is quite well written. It was an easy and enjoyable read, and I remember many of the characters fondly, and the plot goes roughly where you expect, but with many realistic differences of opinion and reverses along the way.

The big question for any virtual-world novel is how to make doing things in the virtual world matter enough to be tense. There is often some technobabble that makes the experience as close as possible to someone teleporting into a world and then out again.

Ready Player One does this a bit better than average (there's good reason the ongoing quest needs to be completed without your avatar dying, and being ejected is disorientating, but doesn't have any implausible physiological effects). But it's still not quite plausible.

The world is a bit like Eve Online crossed with Steam. There are many games, worlds, learning environments, etc you can play. But you travel between them in a MMO way, needing to grind for coins to get spaceships or teleporters to different planets, etc, and there are extra-powerful one-off artefacts people can find that have an effect you couldn't normally find. It's consistent, which is very good, but I'm not sure if it's entirely plausible that all these different worlds tie together.

And it's odd that the bad guys are forced to play "by the rules" trying to fulfil the conditions of the challenge by finding the hidden object in the virtual world, rather than finding some way to bypass the intent of it. They do play dirty in the real world, but if you had the resources of a major company trying to hack Eve Online, I assumed they'd succeed, even if they had to suborn a lot of ISPs to do it.

Overall, I'd say if you like classic computer games, virtual worlds, or young adult novels, you should definitely read this, but possibly only once.

One of the books I picked up in Oxfam in Oxford was The Shia Revolution. Wow, I know nothing about the recent history of most of the middle east.

Scalzi's Redshirts is his homage to the "have Kirk, Spock, McCoy and someone else on an away team, and have the last guy die to show how dangerous it is" idea spawned by StarTrek.

On the one hand, it suffers from driving the joke into the ground in some places. On the other hand, it does a reasonable job at taking the premise and building a decent novel out of it. On the third hand, it doesn't explore the premise as far as I'd have liked. On the gripping hand, it looks at it more than most other novels I've read.

In fact, come to think of it, if one already knows the general theme, I might enjoy it a lot more if you skip the prologue (which establishes the "redshirts" theme, but drives the joke into the ground) and start with chapter 1, and get a natural unfolding of "this is a normal introduction to some characters" before becoming "hang on, has anyone else noticed something about these away missions...?" slowly.

I haven't read much economics, but I was interested to read "End this depression now". Published a couple of years ago, but sadly still equally relevant.

Krugman is a columnist, blogger, and author (and nobel prize winner) about economics, and left-wing by American standards.

The book sounded convincing to me, but I don't know enough to vouch for the validity, or the correctness of my summary. I hope someone can offer a more authoritative opinion, especially including people prone to agree and prone to disagree.

The current depression in UK/US and similar countries

As I understand it, the short version is, Krugman says not every depression is based on the same underlying causes as the great depression, but this one is. He wasn't originally convinced, but he saw how this depression happened, and it was just like Keynes described in the great depression.. And that the solution, like in the great depression, is simple even if not necessarily easy: for the government to spend a lot of money.

Government creating money

In the old days, government increased the money supply by literally printing money. Since WWII, the same effect has been achieved by changing the amount of money that the central bank will lend to large banks and the regulations on how much money they're allowed to lend out, and by adjusting the interest rate.

Some people are terrified of high inflation because too much causes hyperinflation, which causes Hitler. This is a serious risk (I think hyperinflation happened in Argentina, but they recovered surprisingly well), but only if the economy is otherwise collapsing and the government chooses to GO ON printing money. In fact, the policies of the last 80 years have been surprisingly successful at keeping inflation at a small but steady rate, and we are in no serious risk of hyperinflation -- in fact we probably need HIGHER inflation, but governments are too scared to push for it.

Usually the government and central bank balance unemployment and inflation by adjusting the money supply and interest rate. This is usually but not always the biggest factor in the economy.

However, we recently had the problem that the central bank lowered the interest rate to near zero, and the government increased the amount of loans available to the large banks, but it still wasn't enough. The money theoretically available to the banks wasn't used, because they were too scared of a repeat of the housing crash, and it didn't get loaned or invested, it just got sat on. This is called a "liquidity trap".

Krugman says that the answer is to go further: if banks won't put money into the economy, the government should do it directly. This will increase government debt, but assuming the economy grows, the effect will still be negligible.

Some people think that the solution is the opposite: that we've run out of money, or that people aren't trained for the jobs we need, and the answer is massive austerity measures. Krugman says this is wrong. Unemployment hit EVERYWHERE, in a manner consistent with "people not creating jobs" not "people having the wrong skills".

Who gets the money

This is the bit that arguably is ideological. In terms of economics, it doesn't matter who gets the money as long as they spend it or invest it, not just sit on it.

So Krugman (and I would agree) says an obvious place to start would be putting back the social safety net the government did cut back on. That would (a) be humane (b) restore a status quo (c) be good the economy for all the usual reasons I think a social safety net is good (d) work, because anyone drawing any sort of benefits (work-related or not) is almost certainly going to need them, and hence spend them, creating economic activity, not sit on them.

Giving the money to large institutions which will sit on them, or use them to reduce the cuts on executive pay or dividends, the proceeds of which are likely to be saved not invested, won't help, because the money will not be used.

However, the UK government has (apparently) been giving subsidies to random companies in the form of guaranteeing loans to them for specific infrastructure projects. I think the "subsidise random companies" model has good aspects on a small scale (because it helps small businesses grow) but is a bad idea as the basis for an economy (because it encourages companies to compete on "how much can we bribe politicians to subsidise us" rather than "how much can we actually do useful stuff). However, even if it's stupidly implemented, it's equally good from an "injecting into the economy" standpoint.

However, we need a lot more of it. From what I can tell, if Krugman is right, we need to reverse the austerity and invest even more money, and many people are still arguing for further cuts.

I haven't read this, but I read a bunch of people ranting about it, and talking it over with Liv, I think I got a handle on what people object to.

The trouble is, it's not supposed to be a book about BDSM. It's supposed to be a book about Beauty and the Beast: "young innocent girl has infatuation with rich, important, good looking guy WHO HAS A TERRIBLE SECRET and they can't be together BECAUSE HE HAS A TERRIBLE SECRET, so in the end she tragically LEAVES HIM / ACCEPTS HIS TERRIBLE SECRET [delete whichever is innapropriate]."

And "was abused as a child, so can only enjoy sex while hurting people" is a proxy for TERRIBLE SECRET: from what I hear, the sexual dominance in the book is a lot more about traditional romance novel "he buys her things and tells her how to run her life" and his kink is mostly treated as a weird abhorrant thing, not an excuse for porn. In other words, it's ironically not a BDSM porn novel, it's a non-BDSM porn novel about BDSM...

But this obviously polarised the demographics. People who think "Eek! He is so depraved!" and enjoy his characterisation as a very dominant sexy man with a TERRIBLE SECRET, obviously don't care whether the BDSM shown is safe or incredibly dangerous, they think it's ALL dangerous stuff that's good for fantasies but you shouldn't try in real life, so it doesn't matter whether you show the less-dangerous stuff or the more-dangerous stuff, in fact, you shouldn't try to pretend it's safe. I think the author is in this category.

But unsurprisingly, writing a book where subculture X is used to mean "evil" is incredibly offensive to anyone who is actually involved with or accepting of subculture X in real life. (Imagine how offensive the book would be if it equated "sex with people of race X" with "evil" instead of equating "sex with spanking" with "evil").

It's not specifically unrealistic: in real life, there are plenty of people who, knowing or unknowing, DO practice unsafe, abusive activities from ANY lifestyle. But it's problematic that the book sets up the expectation that he IS representative.

And people who know anything about BDSM also think that some people might read the book and find that they are interested in BDSM even if they didn't realise it before, but it's unfortunately possible that because the book conflates everything between "stuff which is perfectly safe for people who mostly like vanilla sex to try to spice things up on occasion" and "stuff which is physically and emotionally abusive", they may think a safe and sensible first foray into BDSM not be something like roleplaying token bondage, but an example from the book of things suggested to a sexual and BDSM virgin, such as:

* Tying someone's wrists with something likely to cut them
* Bullying someone into agreeing to something, and then forcing them to go through with it, even when they're showing immediate and dramatic signs of distress
* Bullying someone into signing an illegal and unenforceable "you own me for the rest of my life" contract as a precursor to any form of sexual contact whatsoever.

OK, I wanted to like this more than I did, I probably didn't give it enough attention, but the premise is awesome: a comics retelling of Bertrand Russel's attempts to unify mathematical logic, framed as a flashback from one of his letters, framed by a semi-autobiographical depiction of the authors writing the comic and deciding what to include and how to frame it.

The latter was an inspired choice, as it lets them reframe stuff to be a bit more dramatically appropriate, while disclaiming the changes at the same time.

I recently reread a Ken Follet thriller, The Third Twin, that I read as a teenager. It was reasonably good.

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