10 Things I Hate In You

[Magdalena Liendo]

Yet, despite the appeal, I soon realized a painful truth: I was more in love with the idea of being a surfer than actually surfing. The thought of catching the perfect wave was thrilling, but the reality involved a lot of crashing, paddling, and exhaustion.

People often approach me, expressing a desire to become writers. The truth, however, is that many of them are drawn to the idea of being a writer, not the process of writing. They want the identity, not the work.

Identifying such areas can lead to the root cause of your anxiety, misery, or dysfunction. Such forced identities create unnecessary friction in our lives and often lead us to defensive behaviors to maintain these illusions.

This realization helped me drop the burdensome faade and accept myself as I truly am. The key to a rich life is finding pleasure in the things themselves, not just in the identities they confer upon us.

After my initial panic, however, I realized, "I've got this!" I remembered that I'd dealt with far worse house catastrophes, survived them, and even thrived. Remembering my past successes gave me the confidence that I would find a way to cope again.

5. Shrink the problem by watching your words. Words like "hate" or "dreadful" only added to my bad attitude. Even tweaking "I hate home repairs" to "I dislike home repairs" was helpful. Using calmer words made me feel calmer. After all, I wasn't going to war; I was just getting my house painted.

2. Set one to three priorities. The state of my house was an emergency that needed my immediate attention. What is your top priority? To find out, Allen suggests asking yourself this question: What situation or project is most on your mind right now?

4. Gather your resources. I asked my neighbors for suggestions and made a short list of painting companies that received rave reviews on my neighborhood NextDoor site. I then checked those companies with the Better Business Bureau site and chose three to contact.

9. Use the "big-steps" approach when necessary. Some tasks don't lend themselves to small steps. For example, another chore on my list is to clean and organize my basement. For this job, setting aside a chunk of time makes more sense.

I soon discovered that I was not the only person with home repairs issues. The paint company I chose could not schedule me until August. (The others had also been booked up far into the future.) I signed the contract and now I wait. On the bright side, I can now tackle the other 34 items on my list.

When someone needed to learn a spell or pick a feat in Dungeons and Dragons, they often stopped the game for 30 minutes to skim the player handbook and decide what to do. The basic rules of the game are over 100 pages! You have so many choices at any given moment of the game. The problem is that understanding all those choices requires a lot of reading.

Hints are like mini-tutorials. A minimal amount of text presented in-game at exactly the right time you need the information. You do have to read, but you do so right in the middle of playing. Hints should be made unobtrusive as possible, preferably with an option to turn them off completely.

Also check out How I Got My Mom to Play Through Plants vs. Zombies. This video by the designer of PvZ is a masterclass in teaching new concepts to players. The learning curve in PvZ is so damn good that, when development was completed, they completely replaced the Help menu with a joke:

I actually tried this with early versions of Golden Krone Hotel. You would encounter a high level foe in a narrow hallway at the start of every game. The only way to advance was by exploiting the main mechanic, killing vampires with sunlight. It did work as a teaching tool and it made people feel very clever. But it also forced experienced players to waste time whenever they started a new run and it sacrificed part of the procedural generation on the first floor. I removed this inline tutorial years ago and never thought much about it.

So Sproggiwood helped me figure out what to do: jam the tutorial right on the start of my game. When the tutorial is over, it jumps straight into the regular game and when the player dies, the next run skips right over the tutorial.

I would definitely agree that Magic is not the perfect example or the most learnable game. Card/board games with a finite and small set of cards are much easier. But actually the potentially infinite breadth of MTG combined with the ability to learn things on the fly is what makes it interesting to me.

In a recent Twitter thread, well-known originalist legal scholar Larry Solum addresses claims that originalists largely endorse the theory primarily because they like its political outcomes. Although Solum himself is more on the left, he recognizes that it is not an accident that originalists are disproportionately libertarian or conservative. Similar charges, of course, are often made against living constitutionalists, who have long been accused of just coming up with ways to constitutionalize their (mostly liberal) political views.

In my view, constitutional theory is unavoidably normative, and no interpretive approach can be justified completely independent of its outcomes. For reasons I outlined here and here, I am skeptical of nonconsequentialist justifications for originalism and my qualified support for the theory is based on instrumental considerations. I also think there is no way to justify living constitutionalism without at least some consideration of consequences. At the same time, I do not believe that judges should simply try to reach the best policy outcome in any given case, or that even the best possible methodology can come close to achieving that result indirectly. And my support for originalism is combined with severe reservations about the effects of following that approach with respect to some parts of the Constitution.

Solum also points out that the impression of congruence between legal theorists' views of the Constitution and their political views is artificially heightened by the fact that most scholars spend far more time writing about areas where they think there is such congruence than areas where they believe the two are at odds. That is true of much of my work, as well. Given limited time and energy, it makes sense to devote more of it to issues where stronger enforcement of the Constitution will make the world a better place than those where it is likely to make things worse. That said, however, here's a list of several areas where I think the Constitution gets important issues badly wrong. By that I mean that we get bad outcomes if we follow what I think is the correct interpretation of the document. I have a much longer list of cases where bad outcomes occur because the courts (and other branches of government) have deviated from the correct interpretation in some way.

Article I of the Constitution gives Congress nearly unlimited power to impose tariffs and otherwise restrict international trade. Economists across the political spectrum agree that trade barriers are bad for the economy. They are also severe restrictions on liberty. Moreover, we often cannot count on the political system to police itself in this area. International trade is one of the areas where research shows that voter ignorance and "antiforeign bias" are particularly severe, thereby incentivizing politicians to promote protectionism. The protectionism peddled by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is just the latest iteration of this longstanding problem. Moreover, public ignorance also helps the government and special-interest groups hide the true extent of the negative impact of protectionism. A well-designed Constitution would at the very least make it far more difficult to enact trade barriers than ours does.

Thanks in large part to the Bill of Rights, the US uses juries for a much wider range of cases than virtually any other nation. If the Supreme Court were to fully enforce the original meaning, I think they would have to "incorporate" the Seventh Amendment (which requires the use of juries in most civil cases) against state governments, thereby mandating even more widespread use of juries.

For reasons I summarized in this article, I think such extensive reliance on juries is problematic, at least in cases involving large-scale policy issues and complex scientific evidence. Ignorance and bias on the part of lay jurors can lead to serious errors in such situations.

But my biggest reservation about the jury system arises from the fact that jury service is mandatory, and thereby has become a system of forced labor. I am less convinced than I used to be that the Constitution requires jury service to be mandatory, as opposed to merely permitting it to be so. But even in the latter scenario, the fact that a large-scale system of forced labor is even permitted, still qualifies as a serious injustice. The benefits of jury service, such as they are, can be realized even in a voluntary system.

Another reason to get rid of mandatory jury service is that it is often used to justify other forms of forced labor, such as mandatory voting (an analogy I criticized here) and the restoration of a military draft.

Longtime readers may wonder whether my criticism of the jury system can be reconciled with my qualified support for jury nullification. The answer is that I think juries should be used for a narrower range of cases than at present, and service on them should be voluntary. But in the types of cases where the use of (voluntary) juries is desirable (which includes a wide range of criminal law cases, among others), they should have the power to nullify, at least so long as the scope of criminal law is as egregiously large as is true today.

The Constitution only allows removal of a president before his term is over through the cumbersome impeachment process. That requires a majority vote of the House of Representatives to impeach, and two-thirds of senators to convict. Even then, removal is only permissible if the president has committed a "high crime or misdemeanor" (though many scholars argue that does not necessarily require a violation of criminal law). Given the vast power of the modern presidency and the enormous harm that a malicious or even merely incompetent president can do, I think removal should be easier. The risk of leaving a malign president in office too long is, at least at the margin, greater than that of improperly removing a "good" one. That judgment is reinforced by the reality that few politicians are actually all that good, or all that worthy of being entrusted with vast power. I would not want to allow Congress to remove the president by a simple majority vote, like a parliamentary prime minister. But we would do well to reduce the size of the necessary supermajority in the Senate, and to eliminate the requirement that the president can only be removed for a "high crime or misdemeanor."

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