So if you can gather that together and get it into the world, the whole effort becomes strongly positive-sum. In the end I stop trying to prove a point (mostly for my ego) and instead get a useful answer that can help everyone.

Thanks again for your great work.

We also get to examine the tools we use to do the research to see if they are indeed the right things to use. We can use the information to develop them further and get more precise and sensitive results or to take a different track entirely. A lot of time is wasted when you bark up the wrong tree.

We learn that we can save the cost and effort of a treatment that does not work (and in some cases is already widely used and expensive). We are shown new possibilities for mechanisms of disease and their possible treatments as alternatives to our primary thought.

It works or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t all is lost. Some people would describe it as a neutral trial, but that looks like just the rhetoric of consolation rather than a proper reframing.

Instead I think there are many things we learn in a positive sense when our primary aim is not shown.

I’ll give an example of something that rages through my part of the scientific colloquy. The terrible problem of when your clinical trial shows that your hoped-for treatment makes no difference. The so called negative trial.

Now this seems clearly to be a framing that is strictly zero-sum.

… for attention or influence. Instead that it should be easier for you to keep going.

The more I learn from your work, and the more I consider game theory, the more I see useful applications in my own efforts. In particular when it comes to reframing thinking so that zero-sum becomes positive-sum.

…expensive letters and so on. I can’t give services in person to these charities (which I think is much more brave and is a much greater gift), so I send some money and get out of the way.

I made my small offer to you as a recognition of your excellence, not as some reward or some demand…

You are very kind James. Currently I am giving some money to 3 charities on a long term basis. My hope is to provide more reliable funding to them to help with planning. I try to make a little other demand on them so that more of what I give can go to the beneficiaries rather than sending me some…

Man, why would anyone want to DDOS you guys?!

All I can say is that it contains avenging robot librarians among the protagonists, which may be of professional interest to you

Power

As a comparator I think about Caxton‘s translation of Sir Thomas Mallory‘s „Morte d‘Athur“. It seems quaint, disorganised and dated held up to modern storytelling, but it is the first of a genre and shows the interesting foundations of the art 2/2

I reflect on my own memory of seeing the film as a 10yo boy and then watching it as an adult. I am two different people and the so are the story-telling and narrative sophistication. I think of it as an important point in the history of fiction, not as an immutable idea 1/x

Fantastic.

Yes. It lines up nicely with CCR in Belfast, so I‘m making a trip of it.