A scientist must be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.
Recent Posts
- Generating Short, Memorable, and Secure Passwords
- Humans are Insecure Password Generators
- My Security Bounty
- So This is How Scientific Accuracy Dies; With 869,000 Subscribers
- Beating Four Dead Horsemen
- Running Team Events
- A Chiller Twitter
- Random Walk Calculator
- In Defense of Lawyers Playing Their Part
- Parker Dimensional Analysis
- The Confidence Game
- On Duct Tape and Fence Posts
- Zombie Philosophy
About
I'm Isaac King. This is the home for all of my writing and other projects that don't fit anywhere else. I write about Magic: The Gathering, mathematics, philosophy, and whatever else I feel like writing about. For more about me, see below.
I take a slightly different approach from most blogs; I don't write very much, but what I do write, I write to be mostly timeless, and I try to keep my articles up-to-date as things change. If you notice anything on any of these pages that you believe to be inaccurate or outdated, please let me know so I can fix it. If you'd like to be notified of new posts you can subscribe in the top right corner.
MTG Rules
- RulesGuru
- Meet a Melvin
- Step By Step: Layers
- Step By Step: Damage
- Step By Step: Dependency
- One Ring to Confuse Them All
- Step By Step: Declaring Attackers
- The Magic Rules are not Complete
- Deep Analysis: Text, Abilities, and Effects
- Stop Trying to Make CR Backups Happen
- Step By Step: Replacement Effect Lookahead
- Grafdigger's Cage and Grist: A Detective Story
MTG Judging
- Confidence
- Card Legality
- Strange Loops
- Spindown Dice
- Trick Questions
- Surviving cEDH
- Teaching Magic
- Watching Magic
- The Worst Crime
- Positive Feedback
- Judge Terminology
- Staying Up To Date
- What is "Cheating"?
- How to Extend Time
- Event Bracket Printer
- Judge Search Engine
- It's Ok To Ask For Help
- Judge Conference Tips
- Card Counting Calculator
- The Lost Art of Shadowing
- Disqualification Information
- You Have To Make a Ruling
- Why Players Don't Call Judge
- Judge Calls in the 21st Century
- Round Robin Results Calculator
- The Philosophy Behind Deviations
- Competitive REL Tournament Primer
- Assigning Blame vs. Solving Problems
- Handling Counterfeits in a Tournament
- Running Effective Roleplay Workshops
- How to Avoid Unnecessary Match Losses
- Guidelines for Writing Good Judge Questions
- Magic Judges are Obsolete; It's Time to Replace Them With Prediction Markets
Other MTG Content
- Magic Math
- Card Name Sorter
- Don't Go to TCG-Con
- Tournament Simulator
- Probability Calibration
- Judge's Tower Design
- Randomness in Magic
- Card Name Regex Golf
- Counterfeits Vs. Proxies
- Misprints I'm Looking For
- In Defense of Pile Shuffling
- The Competitive Megacombo
- Misprint Price Guessing Game
- In Defense of Not Pile Shuffling
- The Economics of Organized Play
- High quality image of the MTG card back
Non-MTG Content
- Trivia Platform
- Twitter Blocker
- Manifold Search
- Disease Statistics
- Fantasy Realms Bot
- Negotiation Assistant
- Manifold Betting Calculator
- Manifold Subsidy Experiment
- Prediction Markets Are Not Polls
- The Hidden Complexity of Thought
- Understanding Subjective Probabilities
- An Actually Correct Explanation of P-Values
- Testing GPT-3's Mathematics Comprehension
- Testing DALL-E 2's Mathematics Comprehension
- An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect
- Rational Agents Cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma
- Human Communication is Complicated and Frustrating
Contact Information and Other Profiles
- Notes
- Github
- Discord
- Manifold
- Wikipedia
- EA Forum
- Lesswrong
- Judgeapps
- Anonymous Feedback
Other Recommended Reading
- SMBC
- Games
- Action!
- Nohello
- Unsong
- Exhalation
- Dollar Street
- Salad Theory
- In My Culture
- Earth Reviews
- Possible Girls
- Planet of Cops
- A Small Fiction
- The story of Jim
- Science Heroes
- Silent Treatment
- How to Disagree
- Notes on Nigeria
- Existential Comics
- #RebootThePolice
- Clapping for Stalin
- Reductionist Magic
- Arguing with Myself
- Social Gentrification
- To Wash It All Away
- Farokh vs. Mr. Beast
- Programming Sucks
- Experimental History
- The Security Mindset
- The Evolution of Trust
- Meaning, the Cryptid
- "Nobody gives a shit"
- The Metropolitan Man
- Who Controls the Dirt
- Cops, crime, and class
- A Practical Guide to Evil
- We're All Hitlerists now
- Do Not Replicate Orders
- The five kinds of paradox
- They Write the Right Stuff
- Mnemonic Map/Acevedo
- The story of VaccinateCA
- The Man Amazon Erased
- The Root of Some Evils
- Structured Procrastination
- A Mathematician’s Lament
- Academic Urban Legends
- The Bitter End of "Content"
- What Colour are your bits?
- Language modeling game!
- Credit Card Debt Collection
- The Gentrification of Disability
- The Missing 11th of the Month
- Mythic Values/Folk Values
- Twitter and Anti-intellectualism
- Who regulates the regulators?
- Not Everything is For Everyone
- Things you're allowed to do
- The Online Business of Torture
- Twelve Recursive Explanations