| A Philosopher's Blog

As I have written in other essays, the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system is surprisingly useful for categorizing people in the real world. This time I will look at chaotic evil.

In fantasy games, players often encounter chaotic evil foes—these include classic enemies ranging from the lowly goblin to the terrifyingly powerful demon lord. Chaotic evil ...

As noted in other essays I’ve written on the subject, it is often useful to look at the actual world in terms of the D&D alignment system. In this essay, I will look at the alignment that many players find the most annoying: lawful good (or, as some call it, “awful good”).

Pathfinder, which is a version of the D20 D&D system, presents the alignment...

This is the third and final essay on Newcomb’s Paradox. In it I will discuss Nozick’s stipulation about the effect of how the player of the game decides. The paradox itself is described in the first essay in this series. Nozick’s condition is that “what you actually decide to do is not part of the explanation of why he made the prediction he made”.

This stipulation...

Newcomb’s Paradox was created by William Newcomb of the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The dread philosopher Robert Nozick published a paper on it in 1969 and it was popularized in Martin Gardner’s 1972 Scientific American column. I described the game in my previous essay in this series.

As a philosopher, a game master (a person ...

One of the many annoying decision theory puzzles is Newcomb’s Paradox. The paradox was created by William Newcomb of the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The dread philosopher Robert Nozick published a paper on it in 1969, and it was popularized in Martin Gardner’s 1972 Scientific American column.

The paradox involves a game controlled by t...