“Miscellaneous § The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn”, Gwern2009-08-05 (literary criticism, Sci-Fi, narcissism; similar)⁠:

Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc.

I explain the somewhat arbitrary-seeming death of the popular Star Wars character Grand Admiral Thrawn as being the logical culmination of a tragic character arc in which his twisted (or “thrawn”) cunning & scheming, one of his defining traits, ultimately backfires on him, causing his bodyguard to betray & assassinate him.

• Quickies
• Non-Existence Is Bad
• Celebrity Masquerade Game
  • Requirements
  • Preparation
  • Playing
    • Beginning
    • Middle
    • End
    • Prizes
• Pemmican
• Rock Paper Scissors
• Backfire Effects in Operant Conditioning
• On Being Sick As A Kid
• On First Looking Into Tolkien’s Tower
• Hash Functions
• Icepires
• Cleanup: Before Or After?
• Peak Human Speed
• Oldest Food
• Zuckerberg Futures
• Russia
• Conscientiousness And Online Education
• Fiction
  • American Light Novels’ Absence
  • Cultural Growth through Diversity
  • TV & the Matrix
  • Cherchez Le Chien: Dogs As Class Markers in Anime
  • Tradeoffs and Costly Signaling in Appearances: the Case of Long Hair
    • Boorus: Revealed Preferences
  • The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn
  • On Dropping Family Guy
  • Pom Poko’s Glorification of Group Suicide
  • Full Metal Alchemist: Pride and Knowledge
  • A Secular Humanist Reads The Tale of Genji
• Economics
  • Long Term Investment
  • Measuring Social Trust by Offering Free Lunches
  • Lip Reading Website
  • Good Governance & Girl Scouts
  • Chinese Kremlinology
    • Against Collapsism
  • Domain-Squatting Externalities
  • Ordinary Life Improvements
  • A Market For Fat: The Transfer Machine
  • Urban Area Cost-Of-Living As Big Tech Moats & Employee Golden Handcuffs
    • The Seen and the Unseen
    • External Links
• Psychology
  • Decluttering
  • Optimizing the Alphabet
  • Multiple Interpretations Theory of Humor
  • Efficient Natural Language
  • Cryonics Cluster
    • Reductionism Is the Common Thread?
  • Lighting
  • Possible Amazon Mechanical Turk Surveys/experiments
• Technology
  • Somatic Genetic Engineering
  • The Advantage of an Uncommon Name
  • Backups: Life and Death
  • Measuring Multiple times in a Sandglass
  • Powerful Natural Languages
  • A Bitcoin+BitTorrent-Driven Economy for Creators (Artcoin)
  • William Carlos Williams
  • Simplicity Is the Price of Reliability
  • November 2016 Data Loss Postmortem
  • Cats and Computer Keyboards
  • How Would You Prove You Are a Time-Traveler From the Past?
  • ARPA and SCI: Surfing AI (Review of Roland & Shiman 2002_22ya)
  • Open Questions
  • The Reverse Amara’s Law
  • Worldbuilding: The Lights in the Sky Are Sacs
  • Remote Monitoring
  • Surprising Turing-Complete Languages
  • North Paw
    • Purchase
    • Conclusion
• Leaf Burgers
• Night Watch
  • Liminality
• Two Cows: Philosophy
• Venusian Revolution
• Hard Problems in Utilitarianism
• Who Lives Longer, Men or Women?
• Politicians Are Not Unethical
  • Revealed Moralities
    • A Priori Rates
  • Why?
  • Investigating
    • Uses
• Defining ‘But’
• On Meta-Ethical Optimization
• Alternate Futures: The Second English Restoration
• Cicadas
• No-Poo Self-Experiment
• Newton’s System of the World and Comets
• Rationality Heuristic for Bias Detection: Updating Towards the Net Weight of Evidence
• Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media
• D&D Game #2 Log
  • “Bearer Bonds (Cash On Delivery)”
    • Red Larch (The… Larch)
    • In The Hall Of The Mountain Kodiak
    • Fin
• Highly Potent Drugs As Psychological Warfare Weapons
• Who Buys Fonts?
• Twitter Follow-Request UX Problems
• The Diamond Earrings
• Advanced Chess Obituary

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