Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Addendum: Factorio is getting worse as a game

I posted a while ago about how I loved Factorio but didn’t like Factorio: Space Age. The crux of my argument was that Factorio rewarded players creativity and expression, letting and encouraging the players to find their own solutions to problems and play “their way.” Space Age undid all that, the devs have decided that there is only 1 right way to solve each problem, find their way and do what they want you to do. There is no more player freedom and expression, no more playing “you way,” it’s the devs’ way or the high way.

I decided that Space Age was a bad expansion pack, but at least the base Factorio game was still untouched, right? Well no, Space Age’s “my way or the high way” ideology has also infected the base game. The game has certain achievements for completing it within certain constraints, and now the devs have decided that if you play “your way,” you are no longer eligible for their achievements.

Nefrums, a Factorio youtuber, used to have an amazing series of videos where he completed 100% of Factorio’s acheivements in a single base in a single session, a speedrunning achievement in which he held the world record many times. The only realistic way to complete this gargantuan task was to change the way the game was played to make them possible. The task was still monsterous of course, it wasn’t at all easy by any means, but it was possible since Nefrums was allowed to play “his” way.

Now an update has made playing the game Nefrum’s way no longer possible. When you start a new game, you can see all the little tweaks you can make to how the game is played. There is a warning next to *every single tweak* saying that if you change this setting, you disable some achievements. Obviously it’s no longer possible to play Nefrum’s way since he would change these setting but still get 100% of the achievements in a single base. But again, the devs don’t want you playing “your way,” it’s the devs’ way or the high way.

So now even the base game has decided that if you aren’t playing “correctly,” you need to be punished for your arrogance. The devs have become so insular that they are seemingly enraged by anyone playing “wrong,” so they need to change the game to “fix” them.

Achievements don’t harm the devs in any way, they are purely a motivational factor for the players. If Nefrums wants to get 100% of the achievements by changing the settings, that doesn’t hurt the devs and it doesn’t hurt any of the other Factorio players at all. So there is no reason to change things and disable those achievements except pure spite, pure spite that someone, somewhere might be playing the game “wrong” and getting achievements in the “wrong” way.

Such a shame that the devs I once thought were pinnacles of the video game world have become so spiteful and insular. I don’t think I’ll even play another game of theirs, I’ve been burned badly with how bad Space Age was relative to the Factorio base game, and now they’ve even gone back and changed the base game to make it worse.

Such is life.

Addendum, I’m sure fans and devs might be angry at my post, and attack me by saying Space Age is making hella bank and so I’m just a hater. But I think the evidence shows the wider community agrees with me. Factorio’s base game is rated “Overwelmingly Positive” by the Steam reviewers, a mark of excellence only a very few games achieve. Factorio: Space Age is rated at a mere “Very Positive,” and the recent reviews give it a “Mostly Positive,” meaning barely a majority of the reviewers gave it a thumbs up.

“Mostly Positive” is a very low bar to clear in Steam reviews, only the worse of the worst video games will ever score below “Mostly Positive”. So in grade scales we could say that the base game got an “A,” its expansion got a “B,” and the recent players of the expansion give it a “C,” a barely passing mark.

It’s pretty clear that many many players, not just me, think Space Age is a worse game than Factorio was. If you like it, I am glad, but I don’t like it, please don’t get angry at me for not liking a game you like.

Opportunity Costs in Civilization 6

One of the most important concepts I learned in economics is the idea of opportunity costs.  Every action we take has a cost, not just the cost of the action itself, but the cost of *now not being able to do something else* with either the time or money or both that we just spent.  

A simple example: a company only has 100$ to invest in a machine.  If they buy the machine that makes blue widgets, they can’t also buy the machine that makes red widgets.  Thus, buying the blue widget machine doesn’t *just* cost 100$, it also has the *opportunity cost* of not buying the red widget machine.

There are also opportunity costs with time, if you decide to go to Europe for your holiday vacation, you can’t also go to South America at the same time.  So the cost of going to Europe isn’t just the cost of the time and the tickets, it’s also the opportunity cost of not going to South America (or anywhere else) as well.

As an aside, this is why for some people it can make sense to NOT go to college EVEN IF college were totally free.  The cost of going to college includes the *opportunity cost* of not having a full-time job (if you’re a full-time student).  

A comedian once made a joke that, after graduating college he couldn’t find any work “because the dropouts already had the jobs.”  A funny joke, but it demonstrates a point:  You spend 4 years getting a degree, but if that degree doesn’t measurably increase your employment prospects, you could have been better off spending those 4 years getting work experience at a full-time job.  You could not only get the money that a full time job gives you, but the experience itself would increase your employability and ability to get better jobs.

So the education and degree you’re seeking needs to increase your employability *more* than just doing 4 years of work.  If not, then it’s a net loss *even if your education was free* because you had the *opportunity cost* of not getting those 4 years of work experience.

But I didn’t want to blog about college, I wanted to blog about Civilization again.

The non-gamers in my audience may be tired of my gaming blogging, but I’ve spent a lot of this holiday season playing Civ IV and Civ VI with friends, so I’ve been thinking about this.

I complain that in Civ VI, some of the leaders seem to have traits that are utterly worthless, they don’t feel like they improve your Civ’s abilities any more than having a vanilla Civ with *no* traits.  Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of these, her ability to culture-flip cities feels very underpowered and completely useless, and doesn’t make her any more powerful than a Civ that doesn’t have any abilities at all.

My friend shoots back at this by saying that if you put a lot of resources into it, you can set up a situation in which you culture-flip whole continents in an instant.  And yes, this is theoretically possible.  Does that mean Eleanor is “very powerful in the right circumstances?”  No.  Because of *opportunity costs*.  

See, the cost of putting all your resources into Eleanor’s culture-flipping ability is that *you can’t put those resources into other things*.  You can’t research technologies or build military units if you are instead spending your entire GDP on culture buildings.  Culture isn’t free, and it doesn’t just cost what it costs to produce it, it has the *opportunity cost* of not doing anything else with that money and production.

So in any situation where Eleanor can “culture flip a continent” by spending an absurd amount of resources on culture, any other Civ could just use those resources to win the game with military, or science, or even diplomacy.  

Eleanor’s ability is useless not because you *can’t* use it to do things, but because the amount you have to spend to make her ability not-useless could instead be better used to win the game in *any other way at all*.  Her ability has an *opportunity cost* in that if you try to use it to its fullest, you are by definition not using those resources on better strategies that will win you the game more easily.

And that’s what I feel about a lot of the Civ VI leaders.   Some  leaders have abilities so minor they don’t feel impactful.  Some have abilities that completely change the nature of the game.  And some like Eleanor have these abilities that are actually traps, because the opportunity cost of trying to use their ability to its fullest makes you worse off than if you’d ignored their ability and played the game normally.

People didn’t like Civ IV’s leader system because every leader drew from a limited pot of abilities.  Gilgamesh is Creative/Protective, while Catherine the Great is Creative/Imperialistic.  From my perspective, that’s unique, *no one but Gilgamesh has that specific combination of traits*.  From other people’s perspective though “they’re both creative so they’re too similar to be cool.”  

These people who say this seem to really be drawn to Civ VI because every leader has *completely unique abilities* not seen anywhere else.  But from my perspective “many of those abilities are worse to use than just ignoring the ability and playing the game normally.”  Leaning into your “special ability” can have an opportunity cost, and no one but me seems to recognize this.

So in the future, please think about opportunity costs, both for college and for your video games.  Making a nation have a super special ability isn’t actually cool if leaning into that ability makes you worse off than if you’d ignored it and played the game normally.   Opportunity costs are real, even if not everyone understands them.

So whatever happened with Aduhelm?

Aduhelm and Leqimbi were hot news a few years ago. They are both antibodies that work as anti-Alzheimer’s disease drugs by binding to and hopefully destroying amyloid beta. The hypothesis that amyloid beta is the causative agent of Alzheimer’s, and that reducing amyloid beta will lessen the disease, is known as the Amyloid Hypothesis. And while the Amyloid Hypothesis is still the most widely supported, I wonder if the failures of Aduhelm and Leqimbi to make much of a dent to Alzheimer’s disease has damaged the hypothesis somewhat.

Because think about it, the whole job of an antibody is to help your body clear a foreign object. When antibodies bind to something, they trigger your immune system to destroy it. And this is why you get inflammation whenever you get a cut or scrape, antibodies will bind to whatever microscopic dirt and bacteria that enter your body, and your immune system flooding that area to destroy them is felt by you as inflammation.

And we know that Aduhelm and Leqimbi are working as antibodies against amyloid beta. They bind strongly to amyloid beta, they induce inflammation when given to Alzheimer’s patients (although inflammation in the brain can cause multiple side effects), and tests show that they seem to be reducing the amount of amyloid beta in the patients who take them.

Yet the prognosis for Alzheimer’s is not much better with these drugs than without them. Maybe they just aren’t destroying *enough* amyloid beta, but they are barely reducing the rate at which Alzheimer’s patients decline in mental faculty, and are not at all causing patients to improve and regain their mental state. Maybe the brain just *can’t* be fixed once it’s been damaged by amyloid beta, but you’d hope that there would at least be some improvement for patients if the Amyloid hypothesis is correct.

This has caused the field to seemingly split, with many still supporting the Amyloid hypothesis but saying these drugs don’t target amyloid beta correctly, with others now fractured in trying to study the many, many other possible causes of Alzheimer’s diesease. Tau, ApoE, neurotransmitters, there’s lots of other stuff that might cause this disease, but I want to focus on the final hail mary of the Amyloid hypothesis: that the drugs aren’t targeting amyloid beta correctly.

Because it’s honestly not the stupidest idea. One thing I learned when I researched this topic was the variety of forms and flavors that *any* protein can come in, and amyloid beta is no different.

When it’s normally synthesized, amyloid beta is an unfolded protein, called “intrinsically disordered” because it doesn’t take a defined shape. Through some unknown mechanism, multiple proteins can then cluster together to form aggregates, again of no defined shape. But these aggregates can fold into a very stable structure called a protofilament, and protofilaments can further stabilize into large, long filaments.

Each of these different structures of amyloid beta, from the monomers to the aggregates to the filaments, will have a slightly different overall shape and will bind slightly differently to antibodies. One reason given for why Aduheim causes more brain bleeds than Leqimbi is because Aduheim binds to the large filaments of amyloid beta, which are often found in the blood vessels of the brain. By siccing the body’s immune system on these large filaments, the blood vessels get caught in the crossfire, and bleeding often results.

Meanwhile other antibodies are more prone to target other forms of amyloid beta, such as the protofilaments or the amorphous aggregates.

But what amyloid beta does or what it looks like in its intrinsically disordered state is still unknown, and still very hard to study. All our techniques for studying small proteins like this require them to have a defined shape. Our instruments are like a camera, and amyloid beta is like a hummingbird flapping its wings too fast. We can’t see what those wings look like because they just look like a blur to our cameras.

So maybe we’ve been looking at the wrong forms of amyloid beta, rather than the filaments and protofilaments which are easy to extract, see, and study, maybe we should have been looking at the intrinsically disordered monomers all along, and we only studied the filaments and protofilaments because we were *able* to study them, not because they were actually important.

There’s a parable I heard in philosophy class about a drunk man looking for his keys. He keeps searching under the bright streetlight but can never seem to find them. But he’s only searching under the streetlight because *that’s where he can see*, he isn’t searching because *that’s where his keys are*.

Endlessly searching the only places you *can* search won’t necessarily bring results, you may instead need to alter your methods to search where you currently can’t. And if the Amyloid hypothesis is to be proven true, that will probably be necessary. Because right now I’ve heard nothing to write home about Aduheim and Leqimbi, many doctors won’t even proscribe them because the risk of brain bleeds is greater than the reward of very marginally slowing a patient’s mental decline, not even reversing the decline.

I no longer directly research Alzheimer’s disease, but the field is in a sad place when just 4 years ago it seemed like it was on the cusp of a breakthrough.

Why does the Civ VI AI feel so incompetent?  Part 2: Examining how it was made. 

When I was last writing about the Civilization series, I was complaining about how the AIs in Civ VI feel much stupider than the AIs in Civ IV.  I encourage you to read that post, because this one is a direct follow-on. 

In brief, there were a lot of ways AIs could threaten you in Civ IV.  They could send their military to attack you, they could use their production to build wonders before you could, they could use their culture to steal the hearts and minds of your people, making your own cities flip to their side in the process. 

In theory, all these methods still exist in Civ VI, but the AIs are very incompetent at executing them.  None of the Civ VI AIs can threaten you with their military, wonder-building, or culture the way AIs could in Civ IV.  And I think the reason is one of Civ VI’s biggest selling points: unstacking the map. 

See, Civ IV militaries came in “stacks,” where 20 to 100 different units could all sit on one tile together and attack wherever they wanted.  Defeating these stacks meant you had to have a stack of units all your own, and some people complained that this made warfare just a numbers game without any tactics.   

I think those complainers were dead wrong, but regardless Civ V was the first game to “unstack” the military, forcing 20 units to all sit on 20 different tiles instead of stacking together to attack you.  Civ VI continues this trend, and coincidentally Civ V and Civ VI have the same problem in which warlike AIs are incredibly bad at war.   

But while Civ V was the first to unstack the units, Civ VI went further in “unstacking the map.”  In Civ IV and Civ V, your city could have any number of buildings in it that you wanted, built at any time.  So you could build a Forge for +25% production, a Library for +25% Research, a Market for +25% gold.  The question then becomes, which buildings should you build, and in what order? 

If you already know you’re going to build all 3, then you should build the Forge first.  It’s bonus of +25% production will speed up how fast you build the Library and the Market after its finished.  But maybe you are in a severe economic crunch, and you just NEED GOLD NOW.  In that case, maybe build the Market first, and then maybe skip on the library and forge so you city can focus on producing wealth and not spend its scarce resources building infrastructure. 

Or maybe your city produces a lot of science, but almost no production or gold.  Is it worth building the Market and Forge in that case?  Maybe you should *just* build the library and be done with it. 

These are all simple ideas, and you can easily see the AI thinking of the game like an excel spreadsheet and just trying to maximize its values at the end.  The AI sees its running out of gold, it builds markets in response.  It sees a city with high science, it builds a library there.  It sees a city with good everything, it builds Forge first, then Library and Market after.   

The AI in Civ IV is really just deciding what order to build things in, and when.  Its goals can be thought of as simple profit-maximizer functions, and it can be coded in the same way.  The programmers who actually built this AI then had a straightforward job in front of them: adjust how the AI weights each one of its goals until you find a system that makes the AI play reasonably well.   

You can downweight Libraries if your playtesting reveals that the AI is going bankrupt by building those instead of Markets.  You can upweight Forges if the AI is foregoing them to focus only on science and gold.   

Up- and downweighting just chances where the AI puts its build orders in the city queue, and while there’s a lot more to build in Civ IV than just Forges, Markets, and Libraries, the build queue itself is quite simple to grasp. It’s easy to visualize the build queue by just writing it out, and it makes sense that you could try to use it to improve the AI’s intelligence while sitting in front of your computer trying to program the game. 

But with unstacking the cities, there’s no longer just a build queue.  It isn’t just about *when* you build things, but also *where*.  Even explaining this system through text or a spreadsheet is difficult, and you’ll see what I mean.  And I believe that this difficulty made it harder to program a “good” AI.  Because instead of a simple build-queue that can be thought of as a profit-maximizing function, you’re suddenly solving a *graphical* problem instead. 

So here’s an example of unstacking the cities.  In Civ VI you’ll still build the equivalents of Forges, Libraries, and Markets.  Only now Forges give bonus production for being near mines and quarries, Libraries give bonus science for being next to mountains, and Markets give bonus gold for being on a river.  Each building can’t stack on top of another building, so you can’t place a Library where you already put your Forge. 

Let’s say we have a city that’s just south of a river, near a mountain range immediately to its west, and has some mines on the opposite side of the river near the mountains (so northwest from the city).   

Well if you put down the Forge near the mines (so across the river), you invalidate using that spot for your Market.  If you then put your Market down on this side of the river, you no longer have any room to place your Library near those mountains.   

Is this easy to visualize in your head?  Do you think it’d be easy to try to program an AI to maximize its bonuses in this system?  I don’t think so, and I think this might be a fundamental problem with the Civ VI AI: it can’t think in terms about graphical problems, it only seems to think about functional problems.  And I think that’s because the programmers programming it also had trouble solving the graphical problems because translating a graphic problem into code isn’t something most people are used to. 

And I think this is the case because Civ IV’s AI *also* had a fundamental difficulty of solving graphical problems.  Most of Civ IV’s gameplay was like those profit-maximizing functions I talked about above: what do you build or research and in what order.  But *where* to place your cities is a more graphical problem, and it was one problem the AI was unusually bad at. 

Here’s an example of Civ IV’s graphical problem: where to settle your city?  You’re playing as Egypt, and Egypt’s special unit is the War Chariot, which requires Horses.  You see there is a Horse resource a ways east of some Wheat, and to the northeast of the Horse resource is Fish.  Wheat and Fish both provide a lot of food, and food is the most important resource of all in Civ IV (as it is in real history).   

So you want to maximize your food AND get the Horses, but how can you get all 3 of these together in a single city?  Settling closer to the Wheat gives you a city that’s off the coast and can’t get to the Fish.  Settling closer to the Horses means you have to wait until borders expand to get either the Fish OR the Wheat.  Settling closer to the Fish means you have to wait until borders expand to get the Horses. 

Again, this problem of where to settle cities is probably very hard to visualize.  And while a skilled player will quickly learn to solve this problem, it seems the Civ IV programmers couldn’t get the AI to solve it.  The AIs will regularly settle cities in terrible spots where they can’t get any resources or can’t get as many resources as they *should* get. 

Again, I think the graphical problems of Civ IV were harder for programmers to visualize and program for than the profit-maximizing problems, and that’s why Civ IV is worse at the game’s graphical problems, like settling cities, than it is at the profit-maximizing problems, like when to build its Forge, Library, and Market. 

I think as the games’ problems have become more and more graphical, the programmers who are used to coding functions haven’t been able to keep up.  And that leads to a severe disconnect between how the programmers want the AI to behave an how it actually does. 

I think my final piece of evidence for this is the 2021 patch for Civ VI/ 

In the Civ VI 2021 patch, the Devs tried their damndest to finally make the AI smarter.  They did this by making the AI overemphasize science to a ridiculous degree, hoping that if the AI could have a tech lead against the player than all its other problems would fall into place. 

This didn’t work because the AI was still building Libraries in terrible places, it was just now building more of them and invalidating good locations for Markets, Forges, and everything else.  The huge overemphasis on libraries created AIs that would blow through the early-game research before stalling out due to a lack of money and production to build buildings in the later eras.  The AIs still couldn’t win technology victories, or even beat the player in technology, but when you captured their cities you’d find tons of libraries built in spots that should have had a Market or Forge. 

It sounds like the Devs faced exactly the type of graphic problem I’ve described, but tried to solve it with a profit-maximizing solution.  The AI can’t research well?  It’s very hard to teach them *where* to place libraries, so just tell them to build *more* of them.   

I don’t know what can be done to fix this, maybe force the devs to have a copy of the game running on a second monitor as they program, or introduce some training about how to translate a graphical problem into a code-able solution.  But I think this difficulty of solving graphical problems is why the Civ VI AI is so much dumber than the Civ IV AI, all the biggest problems in Civ VI are graphical. 

Why does Civ VI AI feel so incompetent? Part 1: Examining the AI in its natural habitat.

I’ve talked before about Civ IV and Civ VI, two great entries in the much-beloved Civilization series of video games.  I’ve talked before about how the Civ IV AIs feel like they’re a lot “better” at playing Civ IV than the Civ VI AIs are at playing Civ VI.   

Civ IV AIs aren’t smart, they make dumb mistakes, but they are competent and threatening both to the player and each other.  Civ VI AIs are incompetent and unthreatening, they simply don’t know *how to win* even if they are OK at surviving and acting as a speed bump.   

Let me get deeper into how the AIs could “threaten” you in Civ IV.  I don’t know if “threaten” is the right word, but we’ll go with that.

The most obvious way an AI can threaten your empire is they could go to war with you.  A warlike leader like Alexander the Great could just build military units nonstop and attack you.   

But that’s not the only thing AI leaders could do, they could also build wonders that you wanted to build.  In Civilization, there are these unique buildings called “Wonders” which can only be built once in the entire world.  Think of the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or the Statue of Liberty.  Every Civ in the game gets a chance to build these wonders, but whoever built it *first* gets the wonder and all the benefits of that wonder, while everyone else gets a crummy consolation prize.   

These wonders gave powerful benefits, The Great Wall for instance would completely stop barbarians from entering your territory.  You might really want that wonder to protect yourself.  So let’s say you start building the Great Wall, but another Civ across the map finishes their own Great Wall mere moments before you were about to finish yours. They get the Great Wall with all its benefits, you get no Great Wall and a crummy consolation prize, AND you invested a lot of production into that wonder that you could have spent on something else.   

An industrious leader like Rameses had the perfect traits to outbuild you in wonders.  So if he was on your map, you had to really plan and strategize how you were going to beat him to get those wonders for yourself. 

AI leaders could also threaten you culturally.  Civ IV had an elegant way of using culture, in that culture decided what parts of the map your empire controlled, and thus what parts you could extract resources from. 

Consider two AI leaders, Julius Caesar of Rome and Louis XIV of France.  They settled their cities right next to each other, and between the Roman and French cities lies a gold resource.  Gold is incredibly valuable, not only does it give you money in Civ IV, but it also counts as a luxury resource that makes every city in your empire happier.  Controlling that gold is key to building a wealthy and powerful nation. 

Caesar is a warlike leader though, he’ll be building non-stop military units in his city.  Louis is a more cultural leader, he’ll build libraries, theatres, that kind of stuff.  These cultural buildings put cultural pressure on the people living between the two Empires, those people will start to adopt more and more French fashion, language, taste, and more and more of them will call themselves French and not Roman.  Because they call themselves French, they’ll work for the French Civ and not the Roman Civ, thereby giving France control over the gold.   

So through the power of culture, France will control the gold and Caesar won’t.  And since Caesar never builds anything but military, he won’t put out the cultural pressure needed to counteract the French culture pressure.  Eventually, French culture might be so strong that the people Rome might get converted into being French, they’ll want to join the French Civ rather than remain Roman because French culture is so dominant.  It will take a lot of military police for Caesar to keep the his people in line, and even then they may revolt out from under him. 

Which is why Caesar usually declares war on cultural Civs that settle next to him. 

But anyway, this cultural pressure is *yet another way* for Civ IV AIs to threaten you.  It’s not enough that you settled powerful cities in good spots, you also have to keep your citizens happy and build then some cultural buildings.  If you don’t, an AI like Louis can settle on your border and convert them all out from under you. 

All these three things: wonders, culture, military, are ways that the AI in Civ IV could affect and threaten you.  You weren’t just playing a game all on your own, Civ IV had AIs on the board who would mess up your every plan at the slightest opportunity, with their military, their wonder-building, and their culture.

Military, wonder-building, and culture all still exist in Civ VI, but the AI can’t really use them to affect a human player. 

Let’s go back to our war example with Alexander.  In Civ IV, Alexander’s main mode was to declare war by marching a force across his enemy’s border that was twice as large as their entire army.  All of these military units could move and attack together, so 20 units could move right next to an enemy city and attack the single archer that was guarding it.  With such a large force, Alexander was basically guaranteed to conquer several cities in his path before his enemies could mount a counter-attack. 

In Civ VI, Alexander is still a warlike AI who likes building units.  But Civ VI has 1-unit-per-tile (abbreviated 1UPT), so all those 20 units are spread out across a very wide area, and they get in each other’s way when they try to move.  If the unit at the front is attacking a city, every unit behind it is blocked from moving forward, and they have to all awkwardly shuffle around to find their own vectors of attack.   

Rather than overwhelming his enemies 20-to-1 like Civ IV Alexander, Civ VI Alexander has his units attacking piecemeal, one-at-a-time, because he can’t get them all into the same place at the same time.  You’d think his 20-to-1 advantage would still ensure he eventually wins, but Civ VI has so many defender advantages, and so many ways to heal units, that his attacks end up petering out in most cases. 

Civ IV Alexander would conquer Civ after Civ until he faced someone with enough of a technology edge to counter his numerical edge.  Civ VI Alexander rarely even takes border cities, and almost never conquers entire Civs.  

How about that wonder example from earlier?  In Civ IV, wonders require a certain technology in order to unlock them, and can be built faster if you have a special resource like Marble or Stone.   

Rameses’s MO was therefore to bee-line for technologies that let him build wonders, try to grab any Marble or Stone he could find, and build his wonders in whatever city he had the most production in.  That was usually enough to net him most of the wonders, and you’d have to bee-line those technologies yourself and outpace him in raw production if you wanted to get any. 

In Civ VI, Rameses is still in the game, still obsessed with building wonders, but he is now MUCH worse at it.  The thing is that wonders now have a lot of specific requirements in order to build them.  You can’t just build the Colosseum in whatever city you choose, you can ONLY build it on FLAT land NEXT TO an entertainment district that ALSO has an Arena in it.   

AIs are really bad at building districts, they always seem to have way fewer than they should and often those districts are placed nonsensically.  The AI also doesn’t plan ahead with their districts, they will happily place their entertainment district in a spot surrounded by hills and mountains so that they have no flat land to build the Colosseum.   And even if the AI builds an entertainment district next to flat land, there’s no guarantee they’ll eventually build the Arena in that district that is required to build the Colosseum.

Many of the wonders in the game have strict requirements like this, so aside from the few wonders with very loose requirements, Civ VI Rameses is just structurally incapable of building wonders.  The Colosseum unlocks in the classical age, and it is a very powerful building, you’d think Rameses would want to build it.  But I can still lazily pick it up in the industrial age *centuries later* because AIs like Rameses will simply *never satisfy the requirements to build it*.   

In Civ VI I don’t need to bee-line technologies, or have super high production.  I just need to be mindful of the wonder’s requirements, and I can build almost any of them at my leisure. 

Finally let’s talk about Culture.  Louis XIV isn’t in Civ VI, but Eleanor of Aquitaine is.  When Eleanor leads France, they should be a cultural powerhouse just like under Louis, right?  Not really. 

See, there’s no cultural struggle in Civ VI like there was in Civ IV.  France can’t settle next to you and steal your gold tile away with culture.  Instead Civ VI works on a first-come-first-served basis, if you get the gold tile first, it’s yours forever barring some unbelievably rare circumstances.   

And in fact, the map is so open in Civ VI that you’ll rarely see a Civ next to you at all.  Civ IV was a mad dash to settle the map before anyone else.  If you were slow, all the good resources (like the gold) would already be taken before you could get to them, leaving you with no resources of your own.  At that point, the only way to get your resources in Civ IV would be either war (like Alexander) or culture (like Louis). 

But Civ VI has more resources than it knows what to do with, I often stop settling cities not because there’s no more room but because I no longer want to have another city to manage.  If someone does take a gold resource, well that sucks, but I can probably find another gold resource somewhere close by.

So my cities very rarely are right on the border with another Civ’s, meaning that even if she wanted to, Eleanor couldn’t steal my tiles like Louis could.   

And besides, the AI can’t build culture any more than it can build wonders.  As I said, the AI doesn’t build enough districts, and they certainly don’t produce enough culture from those districts to matter.  You can’t culture flip tiles, but you can still culture-flip cities, and Eleanor’s special ability in Civ VI is supposed to let her better at this than anyone else.  She’s so good, Civs can’t even use their military to keep cities in check the way Caesar could in the Civ IV example.   

But when I’ve played against AI Eleanor, she never has any success with culture-flipping.  She doesn’t produce enough culture districts, she doesn’t produce enough culture, and her cities are usually so far away from mine that her culture-flipping couldn’t happen even if I ignored culture entirely and went for a pure military victory. 

I wanted to make this point about how the AIs in Civ VI don’t seem to play their game as well as in Civ IV.  I’ve harped on this point a lot over the years, but I wanted to bring in some specifics because in my next post, I’d like to tackle the *why*.  I don’t know for sure, but I think that a very important change in the Civ series made coding AIs for it a MUCH bigger headache, and that has led to stupider AIs overall. 

Stay tuned… 

The Great Disruption Part 2: A laundry list of failed predictions

I wrote earlier about The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding, a book which claimed to be an unerringly scientific prediction of the future of our climate’s future, but was in reality a pseudo-religious call to action in favor of degrowth ideology, with every counter-argument ignored without even a retort. I’ve meant to write for a while but all I have is a laundry list of grievances against the book. This is the streams of my consciousness, so let’s go.

The author understands a tiny bit of economics, and understands that technology does not destroy jobs but rather lowers costs. The powered loom didn’t destroy jobs in the clothing industry, more people work in this industry today than before it’s invention. Rather the powered loom lowered the price of clothes such that all of us can afford many more pairs of clothes than could our ancestors. Lower prices, more efficiency, more consumption.

But he considered our human drive for technology to be a “pathology” because “it doesn’t work” (in what way?). He seems to claim that our lives are not tangibly better than our predecessors, we just have “more stuff.” I strongly disagree, I live a life of much more comfort an ease than did my parents on the 20th century, and I can even point towards tangible benefits since he wrote his book in 2008. The ability to call my family no matter where either of us are has greatly eased my mind when my family are taking a long cross-country trip. I no longer worry that they may be stuck or stranded without help, or that they’ve taken a wrong turn and gotten lost. Both of those are impossible as long as smart phones exist.

Furthermore, Paul believes that we reached the limits of resource extraction in *2005*, and that the 2008 crash was proof of this. This is again laughable, US oil production has nearly tripled since 2005, China has increased its demand for coal and iron, even food production has continued to increase. There is no way in hell to defend the idea that 2005 was the point where we reached maximum resource extraction, we’ve easily breached that mark every year since 2010. In 2008 when he wrote his book, the global economy was in a recession, and his thesis may have been believable. But with 20 years of growth since then, his claim is clearly bunk.

He claims that he predicted the 2008 crash by looking at resource constraints and ecological changes. Desertification, bleaching of corals, global warming, these were all signs that humanity was reaching the limits of growth and our economy would eventually crash.

But since 2020 our economy has boomed, even if the bottom 99% haven’t felt it. So question for Paul: have those ecological changes stopped? Because if desertification, coral bleaching, and global warming all predict an economic crash, then the only way to account for our economy *not* crashing is to say that those things are no longer happening. Or perhaps Paul’s prediction was bunk and ecological changes *do not* predict economic ones.

Paul also falls into what I call the Paradox of the Evil Billionaire. On the one hand, Paul claims that we all know how billionaires don’t have a shred of patriotism in their bodies, and would gladly sell out their own countrymen to make a quick buck. On the other hand, Paul and others claim that Foreign Billionaires will buy up American farms and send all the food back to their home countries, even though they’d make much more money by continuing to sell that food in America. Note that American food prices are *much much much higher* than in places like China or India, food is worth a lot more here than it is there.

So why are these Evil Billionaires, who *only* care about making more money and *definitely* will sell out their own countrymen for a buck, suddenly being secret patriots by taking a loss in order to send American food back to their home countries instead of selling it for a profit in America?

It’s because Paul (and others) believe in conspiracies more than facts, and the conspiracy that “foreigners are out to get us” is a much more powerful one than “all rich folks are amoral bastards.”

So Paul has this fantasy that in the future, countries will be forced to enact harsh laws on who can own farmland, because there won’t be enough food to go around and people will be sending food to their homelands instead of selling it for the highest price. In reality, farm production has continued to increase and food is still affordable for most Americans. Egg prices for one have crashed in 2025, making them much more affordable than last year.

Paul brashly contends that “2008 was the year that growth stopped.” LOL. LMAO even.

Paul contends that 2008 was only the beginning of a sustained economic downturn and global emergency which would last decades. Here’s some of his predictions, and the results of the past 20 years:

  • Food demand will increase but agricultural output will decrease, causing skyrocketing food prices. Hasn’t happened
  • Fresh water, fisheries, and arable land will run out leading to sky-high prices for food and water. Nope, hasn’t happened.
  • “Sustained and rapid increases in oil prices as peak oil is breached.” LMAO, no.
  • He does claim that “there could be” a global pandemic which shuts down air travel, so he weasels his way into one correct prediction. Still, the pandemic is over and air travel is back, so it didn’t lead to any lasting effects like he claimed.
  • He also puts the global pandemic right alongside “terrorists attacks wiping out a major city,” so I think clearly he was just making shit up that sounded scary. Again no, terrorists haven’t wiped out any major cities.
  • He claims there will be a “dramatic drop in global [stock] markets and a tightening of capital supply.” Again, no.

So basically all of his predictions are bad. He’s a degrowther, after all.

He essentially predicted a mass global crisis because we’d run out of oil and coal. He wasn’t really an environmentalist either, he didn’t think renewables could ever bridge the gap. Rather he just wanted the economy to be *smaller*, and so he created a bunch of fanciful predictions that proved it would become smaller in the future. He was wrong of course, the global economy has never been larger.

Here are also some of the changes he thinks society must make, and WILL make, to stave off the catastrophe, along with my commentary:

  • He thinks the societies that will best cope with the catastrophe will be the ones that start to “ration electricity.” In reality, rationing electricity is a sign that your society is *failing*, not succeeding, at coping with the present.
  • He wants to “erect a wind turbine and solar plant in every town.” This is just stupid on top of everything else. Not every town is suitable for wind or solar power, and besides power generation is done best using *economies of scale*, where lots of power is generated all in one place and then distributed to the markets far away. His idea would be inefficient and bad, so of course it hasn’t happened.
  • He wants to “ration the use of ICE cars,” “ground 1/2 of all aircraft,” “shop less, live more.” No, no, and no. And what does he mean by “live more?” People buy things they want because they think it will improve their lives. When he says “live more” he just comes across as a boomer complaining that society is too fast-paced for his old back to handle, and that he doesn’t like how women wear so much makeup these days. Most of his complaints come across as cultural rather than economic, and these are severely *conservative* cultural complaints at that.
  • He thinks we must (and therefore WILL) stop using fossil fuels by 2024. Hasn’t happened.
  • He thinks that as of 2008 there is “no significant future for coal or oil, short of some surprising breakthrough technology.” Was fracking really all that surprising?
  • “The market hasn’t priced in that all coal and oil companies will be worthless.” LMAO, nope. I’m sure he’s moved the goal-posts by now, but these companies have continued chugging along regardless.

Paul also says “I talk to people all the time who understand this *common sense*, they know that despite so-called “experts” saying their lives are improved these past few decades, they don’t feel any better off.” He has just discovered nostalgia, and thinks he’s the only one who understands. Again, he is fundamentally a cultural conservative, things were better in the “good old days.”

Anyway these are just my thoughts on Paul’s book. It really is not worth a read as anything other than blog fodder. It is badly written, badly argued, and hasn’t stood the test of time. I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, I got it at the library instead. But they should really discard it and put something better on their shelves.

EDIT: one final aside: when I posted this post, WordPress suggested I add additional tags to increase it’s reach. They suggested “faith” and “Jesus” as appropriate tags. Why?

Sad but true, Mike Israetel is a sham

I watched this video doing a breakdown of Mike’s PhD thesis. His thesis is riddled with failures across every page. His research was shoddily done, with worthless statistics, and with technical errors littering every single paragraph that he wrote. The thesis proves that he cannot do research, cannot write research, and probably cannot *read* research either, since he misunderstands many of the papers and articles he actually cites.

This is sad to me, because as long-time readers know, I followed Israetel and took his advice seriously.

Why it matters: You may say that a thesis is just some bs he did in college, and has no bearing on his current position. But Mike Israetel’s entire brand is based around his PhD, that he is a sport *scientist* and not just a jacked dude. He mentions his PhD in his every ad and video, and so he wants viewers and customers to believe that he’s giving them *scientific advice*, which would be based on *research and testing* and not just vibes.

Yet Mike’s thesis is proof that not only can he not do research, nor write a research paper, he can’t even *read* a research paper as he misunderstands and misrepresents the papers he cites. He tells his readers that the science that *other people do* is saying something completely different than what it actually says, and that’s a big problem.

So Mike’s advice and supplements and apps aren’t actually based on science, they’re based on vibes just like every other gym bro on youtube.

Why else it matters: Some have said that Mike’s PhD program wasn’t like a “normal” program, and shouldn’t be held to the same standards. His program works closely with a lot of US olympic athletes, and it wasn’t focused on research that will help the broader public, but on learning the specific techniques to help the specific elite athletes that Mike worked with.

But if that’s the case then Mike has no business claiming that his PhD gives his knowledge applicable to anyone in his general audience. He isn’t giving advice that you, the listener should actually take, his supplements and programs won’t help you, specifically, instead they are tailored toward the special subset of people who are genuine olympic athletes, and who require a very different program to succeed than what an average 9-5er needs

Likewise, if Mike’s program wasn’t held to the standards of a “normal” PhD, then it should not have *awarded* him a PhD and he shouldn’t call himself doctor. The standards of a PhD, the reason it confers upon you the title of “Doctor” is supposed to be because it proves you have met the highest standards for science and scientific communication. That you are not only knowledgeable, but able to use and communicate your knowledge effectively to help the scientific community and educate the non-scientific community at large. But Mike’s thesis proves he just can’t do that.

He has not met the highest standards for science, and he has not even met a *high school level* standard for scientific communication. And yet he still trades on his title of “PhD,” using it as a crutch to gain legitimacy, and as a shield to deflect criticism. It matters that his thesis is worthless and that his PhD was substandard, because is means his crutch should be kicked out from under him, and his shield should be broken like the trash it is.

Finally some have said that many of these criticisms are “nitpicks.” But it matters because a PhD-level of research is supposed to be held to the highest standard of quality. You aren’t supposed to publish something without feeling certain that you can defend its integrity and its conclusions, and yet it is clear Mike’s thesis was written without any thought whatsoever. If he had even re-read his thesis once, he would not have typos and data-fails across whole swaths of it.

I have had many typos in my own blog, but these are streams-of-consciousness posts that I usually type up and publish without a second read, I’m not acting like these are high quality research publications. Mike *is* claiming that his thesis is high quality, that’s the whole reason he got a PhD for it, so it being as shoddily researched, as shoddily written, and as completely absent of a point as it is really proves that he should never have been given a PhD in the first place.

So is that the end for my following of Mike Israetel? Will I stop doing weight workouts and go back to running, since everything he says about “how to lose weight” is clearly wrong?

No.

Mike’s research is crap, and it always did skeeve me out that he leaned so hard on his “Dr” label. I’ve never bought his app or his supplements, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take his advice. Most of what he says is the same as what my *real* doctor has told me with regards to losing weight. And while his PhD is bogus it’s clear he’s taken a few undergraduate level science classes and is more knowledgeable than most of the gym bros with a youtube channel.

Ultimately his advice is probably fine on the whole. The low-level advice he gives is mostly the same as what you’ll hear from non-cranks, and the high-level advice he gives is mostly his personal opinions like any other influencer. He’s probably correct in the broad strokes that weight-lifting and caloric deficits are the best way to lose weight. And he’s probably correct that you should focus on exercises that improve your “strength” and ignore exercises that improve your “balance” unless you have an inherent balancing issue you need to improve on. He’s probably also right that the hysteria around Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs is overblown, and that if they help you lose weight you should go ahead and use them. As he says: it’s ok to save your willpower for other parts of your life.

But I have no reason to believe his specific advice around high level concepts like training to failure, periodization, muscle group activation, etc. If you don’t know what those are, then it’s a good idea to ignore what he says about them and just focus on lifting and (if you’re overweight), cutting calories.

I don’t think Mike is a complete idiot who should be ignored entirely. I think he’s a hustler like any other influencer and if the things he says work for you, then do them. But he’s not backed by science like he claims he is, so ignore any of his ramblings if they don’t work for you. Talk to your doctor instead, or an *actual* exercise scientist, although if Mike’s PhD thesis is “the norm” for that discipline, then most exercise scientists aren’t really scientists at all.

I’ve long lamented that the fitness and sports landscape is overrun by bro-science and dude-logic. It’s ruled by the kinds of shoddy science and appeals to tradition that we would normally call “old wives’ tales.” But when a jacked dude says something crazy, like “you should lie upside down to regain your breath so that your blood rushes to your lungs,” a lot of people might say “well he’s jacked, he must know *something*.”

I had thought Mike Isratel was an escape from the wider landscape, and that he was perhaps a trendsetter for actual science to creep into this mess. But it seems he’s just another grifter trying to get rich. Ah well, such is life.

Templar Battleforce: X-Com meets Dawn of War in a very disappointing way

I don’t have time to edit again today, but I wanted to post that Templar Battleforce is a game that’s really less than the sum of its parts. It’s currently available for 10$ and that’s probably an appropriate price point, because it’s not a hidden gem or an indie classic but rather a muddled homage to X-Com and Dawn of War.

But some of you might not know what I’m comparing it to, so let me explain.

X-Com was one of the earliest and most highly regarded squad-based tactics games on the PC. I’ve seen both the original game (made in 1993) and the modern remake (made in 2012) top lists of the 100 best games of all time. X-Com puts you in command of a squad of soldiers trying to defeat and alien invasion, and despite your rookies have the life expectancy of a WW1 soldier at higher difficulties, players became instantly attached to their digital avatars thanks to the fun mechanics, varied enemies, and interesting scenarios they could be thrown into. Naming all your soldiers after pop stars, then telling your friends how Taylor Swift hit an amazing shot to blow up a cyberdisk and save Freddie Mercury was exactly the kind of fun that X-Com was made of.

Dawn of War meanwhile was a series of tactical RTS games based on the Warhammer 40k franchise. The Dawn of War series put you in the shoes of a bunch of Space Marines fighting enemies from without and within, with a lot of the enjoyment coming from the over-the-top, dare I say “cool” scenarios you could be faced with.

See, Warhammer 40k (and the Space Marines in particular) are extremely over-the-top in every way. So having your guys drop from orbit onto a burning planet to fight an awakening God with their chainsaw-swords is exactly the kind of “cool” you want to lean in on, and the Dawn of War games delivered. Whether it was endless legions of Tyranids, nigh-unkillable Necrons, or Orks who just love to fight and talk like football hooligans, Dawn of War tried to make each battle feel like an extravagant power fantasy against impossible odds.

So Templar Battleforce is an indie game that tries to make exactly the game I wanted as a kid: an X-Com style game with Warhammer 40k lore. And it just doesn’t work.

The first problem is that the lore is kinda boring. I find myself skipping most of the dialogue and story because it just isn’t interesting. This game gets around the Warhammer 40k trademark by having these “Templars” be slightly different than the Space Marines of Dawn of War, but the game is definitely leaning towards these guys being zany impossible badasses in their own right. And it just doesn’t land, in part I think because the game doesn’t have enough fidelity to *show* cool stuff and relies on *telling* us instead.

We very rarely get a nice comparison point between our Templars and the normal humans who they’re so superior to. And we don’t really get any instances of crazy scenarios that make our Templars seem cool, like the God-chainsaw fight above. You can tell me all you want about how these enemies are so strong they’d tear through any normal human, but with no comparative or stand-out moments of their own, the Templars *feel* like normal humans. They aren’t cool, and to be honest I don’t know how to fix it.

The second problem is that the gameplay isn’t as fun as X-Com, or even as some of the Dawn of Wars like Dawn of War 2. These other squad-based games were fun because of the cool tactics you could do, the cool abilities that you could use, and how the fights encouraged experimentation and rewarded you for your ingenuity. I had moments in the original X-Com of blowing up the side of a building to flank aliens who were covering the doors, and I loved it. And later games gave your soldiers special powers that were integral to victory but also really cool to use, like snipers parkouring up an impossible ledge to get a better vantage point, or heavies using a special shredding rocket that made enemies take double damage from everyone else once they were hit by it.

Templar Battleforce doesn’t really have that. I shoot and I stab my enemies, but I don’t feel like many of my tactics are cool or interesting. I feel like I’m learning the loadouts and correctly reading the maps to find the optimal way to victory.

Part of this may be the design choice that unlike X-Com, Templar Battleforce makes it very hard to dodge shots and stabs. In X-Com a 50% chance to hit was expected, and the game was all about optimizing and improving that chance through your numerous powers and abilities. In Templar Battleforce, missing an enemy is very rare, and there isn’t much you can do to optimize and improve your damage numbers. So instead, it’s mostly a game of calculating how to use your limited movement points to fire as many shots as possible, with the assumption that each shot will do an expected range of damage.

It’s not that there’s *no* special abilities, just that they’re rare and not encouraged by the game mechanics. I like how the Hydra (flamethrower guy) can set down a wall of flame that persists for the rest of the battle. I like that the Engineer can set up turrets. But most of the abilities are just giving you small bonuses and buffs that you don’t usually need because as I said misses are rare. The game doesn’t do enough to make these bonuses and buffs feel impactful at all.

Finally the online community helpfully *discourages* you from investing into the other soldier that might be cooler like the Berzerker or the Neptune, because the game doesn’t give you enough points to spread your investments wide. Instead, the recommended playstyle is to invest heavily into the bog-standard soldier and scout classes, the least interesting classes by far.

The thing is, the soldier and scout *don’t even need to be uninteresting*. To bring it back to Dawn of War 2, that game did a lot to make every class interesting in its own unique way. Now it was real-time instead of turn based, but regardless the units in that game had heavy differentiation in their jobs and abilities. There was huge variety in the range of your weapons, the effects of your weapons, and each unit had a very unique upgrade tree that made you really think about your choices while upgrading.

My Dawn of War scout could go invisible and spam explosive mines at anyone he wanted, my Dawn of War heavy could lock down huge amounts of the map by himself, making enemies duck and move slowly, my Dawn of War soldier could ignore this ability when enemies tried to do it to us, and he could taunt enemies so they’d target him instead of my squishy scout.

These kinds of abilities made me really think about what I was doing with these units and where I was positioning them, and the maps did a lot to encourage this thinking whereas the Templar Battleforce maps just don’t do these things well.

Even better was how Dawn of War rewarded you for experimenting and playing against type. The soldier is by default a ranged-weapon guy, but you could give him his own chainsaw-sword and have him join the melee fight instead. He had a whole upgrade path that made this really effective even, taking less damage from both melee and ranged while locking down his enemies.

The Dawn of War commander could also play this game, he was by default a close-combat specialist, but you could hand him a heavy weapon if you wanted him to stay back instead. By the end of the game he could get an upgrade where he was guaranteed to 1-shot most low level enemies when he did so.

I tried playing against type in Templar Battleforce and it was severely underwelming. A melee-focused soldier is lame and ineffective, and they’ll always carry their ranged weapon just to taunt you for picking the wrong upgrades. A ranged-focused commander also feels underwelming, I can only equip pistols with paltry range and damage, no rifles or heavy weapons for the commander, not even dual-wielding pistols for rule-of-cool.

Finally, Templar Battleforce includes Relics, special items like in Dawn of War that are supposed to be of immense power and cost a lot to use. But unlike Dawn of War there’s no blurb on them to make them interesting, no tales of impossible odds or epic last stands to go along with your hand-me-down, just a name and a bonus that’s 25% bigger than the bonuses on all your other equipment.

Nor do these relic ever change your tactics like they could in Dawn of War. There’s no sword that damages you when you use it but deals massive damage to the enemies. No pistol with the range of a sniper rifle. No armor that is worse than your default armor but doubles your movement in exchange. There’s nothing here that would make you sit up and say “hey that might be cool to use.” Relics just have the same bog-standard bonuses as every other item only now the numbers are bigger.

Let me finish up with this: I don’t hate Templar Battleforce. I think 10$ is a great price and I encourage you to try it. But I’ve now tried 3 times to finish this game and I’ve always stopped short. The engaging build-a-soldier menus aren’t interesting if there’s no interesting choices like in Dawn of War, the maps aren’t fun if there’s no cool tactics and abilities like in X-Com. “X-Com meets Dawn of War” is exactly the type of game I would have made if I knew how to make games, but as Templar Battleforce proves, making great games is a lot harder than making games, and an interesting premise just isn’t enough.

The Great Disruption: A Degrowth Apocalypse

In 1972, a report on “the limits to growth” was published laying out a detailed argument that there simply weren’t enough resources in the world for economies to continue growing.  In 2008, the fruits of that 1972 paper came to pass, as every grifter who’d read it published a book saying that the financial crisis was proof that economic growth was now at an end.  Richard Heinberg said this in 2010, and in 2011 Paul Gilding did the same.

In a blurb, “The Great Disruption” by Paul Gilding is just like “The End of Growth” By Richard Heinberg, which I reviewed previously.  The two books both claim that resources, *especially fossil fuels* are running out (or rather, ran out back in 2010-2011 when these books were published).  Both books claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by this resource constraint (and *not* by the sub-prime mortgage crisis which actually caused it).  And both claim that since we’ve reached the limits of growth (back in 2010…) we now have to live in a world where no more growth is possible.  We instead need to adopt Degrowth, where we eliminate fossil fuels entirely and shrink out economies and our livelihoods in order to continue living on this earth.

But unlike “The End of Growth,” this book is much more than a thesis, it’s a sermon.  In my opinion, “The Great Disruption” is Paul Gilding’s stab at writing a Degrowther Book of Daniel.  

For those of you who aren’t faithful, the Book of Daniel is one of the primary “apocalypse” books of the old testament.  An apocalypse doesn’t really mean the “end of the world,” rather it literally means “revealing,” and an apocalypse book is when the truth of the future is revealed to a prophet and he writes that truth down for all to read.

In the Book of Daniel, Daniel foresees the rise and fall of several earthly empires, culminating in the rejuvenation of Israel and the eternal reign of God.  It doesn’t matter, says Daniel, that the current world is ruled by tyrants and that the situation seems hopeless.  God will destroy the evil and restore the righteous, and it *will* happen just as Daniel says it will.

In “The Great Disruption,” Paul Gilding foresees the inevitable fall of capitalism and the liberal world order, culminating in a degrowther paradise where we all agree to consume at little resources as possible to maintain the world’s stability.  It doesn’t matter, says Gilding, that the current world is ruled by capitalism and the situation seems impossible.  “We have no other choice” he says, and so everything he says *will* happen, just as he says it will.

This comparison to scripture isn’t an idle one.  The whole time I read “The Great Disruption” I kept noting how it felt like a sermon, not a argument.  Paul Gilding doesn’t really try to persuade the reader that his plan for a degrowth future is the best one, instead he repeatedly asserts that “we have no other choice” and that everyone *will eventually accept* that “we have no other choice.”  And so, once Government, Corporations, and People eventually accept that we “we have no other choice,” they will all begin acting exactly as he thinks they should act, by cutting off fossil fuels, travel, and all consumer goods in order to degrow the economy.

He tries to persuade the reader of some things, yes.  He works to persuade us that climate change needs to be addressed, that there are limits to growth, and that the 2008 financial crisis was the moment when Growth Finally Stopped for all time.  

But he doesn’t ever try to persuade the readers that his degrowth future is possible, feasible, or better than the other options.  He doesn’t even try to persuade us that it will actually happen.  He keeps writing anecdotes about people questioning the possibility and feasibility of his plans and predictions, and he keeps responding the same way: “we have no other choice.”

This is the hallmark of a sermon, or an apocalypse.  In such works as these, The Truth (capital Ts) isn’t something you argue or persuade, but something you announce and reveal, with no room for questioning or doubt.  Any quibbles about the details are brushed aside because “it will happen, don’t question it.”  Instead, the focus is on laying out this revealed future, what will it look like, who will be punished, and who will be rewarded.

I’ll try to write more on Paul Gilding’s book, but I can’t recommend it as anything other that a hoop to be dunked on.  Paul’s predictions and prognostications are all wildly off-base, he doesn’t understand economics *or* energy, and everything he said Will Happen simply Hasn’t.  He wanted to impart a moral imperative into the Degrowth movement, with a vision of the future that was as utopian as it was unquestioned.  But his predictions for the future have all been disproven by our present, and he looks as mad as the Malthusians who believed we’d run out of food in the 19th century.

Overall this book is what I’ve come to expect from degrowthers.  Every single prediction of theirs has been disproven, yet they keep pretending that history is on their side.  I don’t know if they’ll ever learn. But their books give me something to dunk on.

Am I too emotional?

I’ve lived what is probably an average middle class life. I haven’t experienced too many genuine tragedies. Family members die, and I mourn them, but I’ve never experienced any kind of life-defining event that shapes my outlook and makes me brood or lament when I think of it.

Time comes for us all, but I do hope I will avoid such life-defining tragedies if possible.

Nevertheless, I can sometimes get emotional over books or stories. I’ve cried more than once reading certain stories, and even very short and simple ones can tug on my heartstrings. And I’ve wondered if this is common.

I feel like having a physical reaction to books isn’t exactly normal. I’ve never seen other people cry while reading, or pump their fist reading an action book, or have a terrified look on their face reading a horror or thriller book.

So is my reaction the abnormal one?

I remember reading “The Neverending Story” when I was 10, and there’s a sort-of 4th wall break in that book where the character reading the book starts being addressed by some characters in the book. I remember it making me tense enough that I had to turn on the lights in my room to keep reading it, I was worried the characters were addressing *me*.

I remember reading “Of Mice and Men” in 5th grade, and crying a lot when I got to the end.

I remember reading “House of Leaves” in college and being scared to go back to my studio apartment. I stayed abnormally late in the library because I didn’t want to go back to my apartment and fall asleep alone.

Like I said, I feel this pattern of reactions is uncommon, and I’ve wondered why. Why do I seem to react more strongly to books than other people I see?

The only answers I’ve come up with aren’t great ones. Like I said I haven’t experienced great tragedies, but I also haven’t experienced unbelievable joy. I’ve lived my life within very modest parameters of emotion: no extreme highs, no extreme lows.

And maybe that’s the reason. I’ve been lucky enough to not have much to cry over IRL, but also unfortunate enough to have not much to laugh and celebrate over. And maybe having lived a much less emotionally fulfilling life, the only output I have for high emotions is in books.

I don’t know. But I wonder if anyone else is like this