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Stable, but Stuck: When Nash Equilibria Fail Us

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I’ve been reading Inadequate Equilibria recently, and it sent me down a familiar but still slightly unsettling line of thought: how often systems end up in states that are stable, self-reinforcing—and clearly not very good. This is usually where the idea of a Nash equilibrium comes in. In simple terms, it describes a situation where no individual actor can improve their outcome by changing their strategy alone, assuming everyone else keeps doing what they’re doing. The system settles. It stops moving. But that doesn’t mean it’s optimal. It just means it’s hard to escape. The classic example is the prisoner’s dilemma. Two actors, each making individually rational choices, end up with a worse collective outcome than if they had coordinated. What makes it powerful is not that it is a thought experiment, but that it maps disturbingly well onto real-world systems. A system can remain balanced even as both sides make it worse. Arms Races: Stability Through Mutual Escalation The Cold ...
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Inadequate Equilibria — When Smart Systems Stay Stupid

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Some books are valuable because they tell you something new. Others are valuable because they give shape and clarity to things you had already half noticed but never fully articulated. Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck belongs firmly in the second category for me. Written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the book asks a deceptively simple question: why do entire systems, institutions, and even civilizations sometimes remain stuck in arrangements that are obviously worse than they could be? That framing immediately appealed to me. I had recently read Steven Pinker’s Rationality , which I enjoyed even if I did not necessarily feel I learned many entirely new things from it. Pinker’s focus is largely on why it is difficult for individuals to think rationally. Inadequate Equilibria , by contrast, shifts the lens outward. It asks why whole societies can get trapped in patterns that seem plainly inferior, and why such systems can persist for so long despite their flaws. ...
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Sisterhoods of Power: How Female Orders Shape History in Fantasy and Sci-Fi

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One of the recurring patterns in fantasy and science fiction is the appearance of powerful female institutions operating quietly behind the scenes of history. Sometimes they are mystical sisterhoods guarding ancient knowledge. Sometimes they are magical orders advising rulers. In other cases they function as religious organizations, diplomatic networks, or even militant orders enforcing ideological orthodoxy. Power rarely sits on the throne—but it decides who does. What makes these institutions particularly interesting is the kind of power they represent. In many cases, they stand in contrast to the more familiar structures of authority in speculative fiction—kings, generals, and chosen heroes who wield power openly and directly. These sisterhoods operate differently. Their influence is quieter, longer-term, and often less visible—shaping outcomes without appearing to control them. Rather than ruling openly, they act through training, knowledge, and long-term strategy. Their members ad...
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The Future Might Not Be AI — It Might Be Copies of Us

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Reading The Singularity Is Nearer  recently reminded me of another book that left a strong impression on me years ago: The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth . Both books attempt to grapple with a future in which intelligence transforms the world. But the paths they imagine could hardly be more different. Kurzweil’s vision centers on artificial intelligence: machines that eventually surpass human intelligence and begin recursively improving themselves. It is the familiar “singularity” narrative—rapid, runaway technological growth driven by minds that are no longer biological. Robin Hanson, however, proposes something stranger and in some ways more unsettling. In his world, the dominant intelligence of the future is not artificial at all. It is us. Or rather, copies of us. The Age of Em Hanson’s central concept is whole brain emulation . Instead of trying to invent artificial intelligence from scratch, we might simply scan a human brain in enough detail...
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Beyond “Lesbian Necromancers in Space”: How Necromancy Evolved in Modern Fantasy

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“ Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! ” That was how science fiction author Charles Stross famously described Gideon the Ninth in a promotional blurb for the book. The full version is even better: “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless emperor! Skeletons!” Like the best blurbs, it manages to be both accurate and completely ridiculous. Readers quickly shortened the line to the now-famous meme “lesbian necromancers in space” , which spread widely across reviews and social media and became one of the most recognizable descriptions of the novel. But while the phrase is funny, it also points to something interesting. Necromancers have become one of the most flexible archetypes in modern fantasy and science fiction. Once they were almost always villains: dark wizards raising skeletons and commanding armies of the dead. But contemporary authors have expanded the concept dramatically....
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Detective Hole: Another Brilliant Mess

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Some character types never seem to leave crime fiction. One of the most persistent is the brilliant but broken detective: socially difficult, emotionally damaged, and very often drunk. Netflix’s adaptation of The Devil’s Star , released under the title Detective Hole , returns to that well-worn template with Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole. It is a familiar setup, and by now arguably an overused one, but it still works often enough that the genre keeps coming back to it. My own first encounter with this type of character was probably Robbie Coltrane as Fitz in Cracker . That remains a hard version to beat. I happened to rewatch it a year or two ago after stumbling across it on a streaming service, and it held up remarkably well: messy, abrasive, intelligent, and more believable than many later variations. Since then, the same basic archetype has appeared again and again: the alcoholic genius, the socially misaligned investigator, the detective who can solve everyone else’s problems but not his...
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From Wonder to Uncertainty – A Reading Journey Through Cosmology

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My first real encounter with cosmology—outside of science fiction—came surprisingly early. I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I picked up The Collapsing Universe by Isaac Asimov. In Swedish it was titled Svarta hål och kosmiska ägg (“Black Holes and Cosmic Eggs”), which, in hindsight, might be one of the most wonderfully strange titles imaginable for a middle school student browsing a library shelf. I found it while preparing a five-minute school presentation—and ended up reading the entire book twice. When the day came to present, I enthusiastically talked about stellar fusion in the Sun, how stars evolve over time, and how massive stars can collapse into neutron stars or black holes. Looking back, I suspect most of my classmates were completely lost somewhere between hydrogen fusion and gravitational collapse. But I also remember the teacher seeming impressed, which probably reinforced the feeling that I had stumbled onto something exciting. More i...
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