In like the 1800s with the railroads. Turns out it’s bad.

Yes. It only looks like magic until you see how the trick is done.

Remember when Lenovo pre-installed spyware on every laptop for years? Dell did the same thing. These “tech” companies are actively detrimental to technology as a concept.

To Dell, Lenovo, HP, any sign of technological progress is taken as an opportunity to cheat and steal.

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experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range.

This thesis comes from a study that correctly attributes Dunning-Kruger‘s metacognitive gap to “statistical noise,” which is why the author claims that the effect is an illusion.

He’s not even wrong, and far from invalidating the very intuitive, very obviously correct DK effect, the study just explains it.

Greater familiarity with your own abilities is part of skill acquisition, so when you guess your “score,” you do so with more precision. More importantly, however, because you’re in the upper bell curve, random guesses have much more room when you underestimate your performance than when you overestimate it, even if you’re doing so with equal frequency.

Someone who sucks, on the other hand, has way more room to overestimate their performance than to underestimate it.

For instance, if I claimed that my LSAT score would be perfect, I’d still be accurate to within 5 points, so my overconfidence hardly seems like hubris.

Compare that to a business major I knew who guessed he would score in the 75th percentile only to end up in the 5th percentile. The gap between his mediocre expectations and the brutal reality of being illiterate was substantial. And yet, it almost seems unreasonable to expect him to guess accurately! What is he supposed to say, “I’m gonna get a zero”?

The point is, the DK effect is a statistical artifact, and that changes absolutely nothing.

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Why not?

People are such goddamned babies.

Looper (time travel)

• The Perfect Run --> Deadpool + Groundhog Day, almost literally. The MC is overpowered and hilarious, the world is a gritty cyberpunk-superhero amalgam crammed with action and fantastic character development. The whole series is good.
• Apocalypse: Regression --> World ends, MC goes back in time to save humanity from monsters. Unfortunately, his young self was a bit of an idiot, so nobody believes him. Really entertaining. Sadly, only the first two or three books are worthwhile, since the story loses momentum once he saves the day.
• Reborn: Apocalypse --> similar premise. Prose and character development are much worse, but the plot is better and more intricate. If these two authors had collaborated we’d have a real winner. Still entertaining, although the opening’s slow.

Avatar the Last Airbender is one of the greatest narrative achievements of all time. There is nothing else like it. That said, if we consider books whose young (magically empowered) protagonists are on a quest to save the world, with themes like found family and antiauthoritarianism, we find… Harry Potter! Just kidding, that’s the magical academy trope.

• Are You Even Human --> MC and friends acquire powers, which they need to save the world. Found family + adventure quest + antiauthoritarianism. All the published books are superb. The author is a master of characterization. Her prose is okay, the action scenes are excellent, and the plot is fantastic. The story only slows down in the later volumes, which get some slice-of-life elements.

Mass Effect is one of the coolest stories in sci-fi. It’s an unapologetically tropey masterpiece of action and adventure. I have read 300 sci-fi novels and I’ve never seen anything like it, except some ersatz derivatives, of course, which sucked and shall not be mentioned. That said, if we look for a team of heroes with variegated skillsets under a badass commander trying to save the galaxy from an unknown alien threat, we get…

• The Expanse --> an alien proto-molecule designed to hijack the machinery of life arrives in our solar system and causes a bunch of chaos. One commander and his team are forced to spearhead humanity’s subsequent battle for survival against the aliens.
• The Last Reaper --> the first book follows a formidable MC trying to infiltrate a prison planet. By the second and third books, the story evolves into building a team of misfits led by our overpowered hero to protect the entire galaxy from invading aliens.

Wow, good call. That paragraph was uniquely unpleasant.

The type and genre of other media you enjoy indicates the kind of books you should try (but expand your horizons later).

So, tell me some of your favorite movies and/or tv shows or genres, and I’ll recommend some books.

For example:

• Sci-fi —> Project Hail Mary
• Cyberpunk —> Thin Air
• Vikings —> The Last Kingdom
• FPS dystopia —> Battle Royale
• Romance (comedy) —> Yours Truly
• Romance (literary) —> Wedding People
• Thriller (espionage) —> Gray Man, John Rain
• Thriller (romance) —> The Chemist
• Literature (comedy, drama) —> My Friends
• Western (modern) —> No Country for Old Men
• Horror (sci fi) —> The Watchers, Relic
• Horror (romance, medieval) —> Paladin’s Grace
• LitRPG (vengeance) —> Path of the Berserker
• Philosophy (metaethics) —> On What Matters

I’ve read thousands of books, so tell me your mood.

Aren’t the only people who care basically children? What is the context in which you are spoiling the plot to a children’s show?

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The loophole is that SCOTUS decisions are arbitrary and institutions are meaningless if the rules aren’t enforced.

Parasites.

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