One interesting idea in this space is Compensating Differentials. There is a mismatch between the jobs that people want to do and the jobs that need doing. Wage differences help to reduce the mismatch.

When an ordinary persons tries to optimize their life they face a trade-off. Stick to the line of work they like, which too many other people also like, and be poorly paid, or try something worse for more money. Non-ordinary persons may strike it lucky, finding that they personally like a line of work which is necessary and unpopular and thus well paid. The compensating differential is free money, but only for an eccentric few.

Returning to the plight of the ordinary person, they face a puzzle. They would like to make the right compromise to maximize their happiness, but the labour market is continually offering them six of one and half a dozen of the other. If they stick to the work they love, but for less money, it is a lot less money and not clearly worth it. On the other hand, that sucky job that pays really well turns out to be really hard to put up with and not clearly worth the extra money. If you are a typical persons, with common preferences, then compensating differentials make the peak broad and flat.

That could be fairly upsetting. One might like to have a clearly defined optimum. Then one can say "I'll change my life, do X, then I'll be as happy as I can be." But most changes have matching advantages and disadvantages. One can easily feel lost.

That could be fairly liberating. With a broad plateau, you don't have to be too careful about avoiding sliding down the slopes at the sides. You are free to be yourself, without great consequences.

Check out Erfworld. It starts off as a webcomic, moves to narrative for the parts that are best done in a narrative style, and then jumps back to webcomic format for battles. It hits all of those marks you mention, as well as a standard that I hold personally. I think that rationalist fiction is at its most compelling when it creates a world with new rules, and sends the empiricist out to learn them. It's easier to show how to learn things empirically when there's still low-hanging-fruit to be plucked, and there have to be people in the story who don't know things in order to show the advantages of knowledge.

One of the catchphrases that develops is, "We try things. Sometimes they even work."

I think there is a tale to tell about the consumer surplus and it goes like this.

Alice loves widgets. She would pay $100 for a widget. She goes on line and finds Bob offering widgets for sale for $100. Err, that is not really what she had in mind. She imagined paying $30 for a widget, and feeling $70 better off as a consequence. She emails Bob: How about $90?

Bob feels like giving up altogether. It takes him ten hours to hand craft a widget and the minimum wage where he lives is $10 an hour. He was offering widgets for $150. $100 is the absolute minimum. Bob replies: No.

While Alice is deciding whether to pay $100 for a widget that is only worth $100 to her, Carol puts the finishing touches to her widget making machine. At the press of a button Carol can produce a widget for only $10. She activates her website, offering widgets for $40. Alice orders one at once.

How would Eve the economist like to analyse this? She would like to identify a consumer surplus of 100 - 40 = 60 dollars, and a producer surplus of 40 - 10 = 30 dollars, for a total gain from trade of 60 + 30 = 90 dollars. But before she can do this she has to telephone Alice and Carol and find out the secret numbers, $100 and $10. Only the market price of $40 is overt.

Alice thinks Eve is spying for Carol. If Carol learns that Alice is willing to pay $100, she will up the price to $80. So Alice bullshits Eve: Yeh, I'm regretting my purchase, I've rushed to buy a widget, but what's it worth really? $35. I've over paid.

Carol thinks Eve is spying for Alice. If Alice learns that they only cost $10 to make, then she will bargain Carol down to $20. Carol bullshits Eve: Currently they cost me $45 to make, but if I can grow volumes I'll get a bulk discount on raw materials and I hope to be making them for $35 and be in profit by 2016.

Eve realises that she isn't going to be able to get the numbers she needs, so she values the trade at its market price and declares GDP to be $40. It is what economist do. It is the desperate expedient to which the opacity of business has reduced them.

Now for the twist in the tale. Carol presses the button on her widget making machine, which catches fire and is destroyed. Carol gives up widget making. Alice buys from Bob for $100. Neither is happy with the deal; the total of consumer surplus and producer surplus is zero. Alice is thinking that she would have been happier spending her $100 eating out. Bob is thinking that he would have had a nicer time earning his $100 waiting tables for 10 hours.

Eve revises her GDP estimate. She has committed herself to market prices, so it is up 150% at $100. Err, that is not what is supposed to happen. Vital machinery is lost in a fire, prices soar and goods are produced by tedious manual labour, the economy has gone to shit, producing no surplus instead of producing a $90 surplus. But Eve's figures make this look good.

I agree that there is a problem with the consumer surplus. It is too hard to discover. But the market price is actually irrelevant. Going with the number you can get, even though it doesn't relate to what you want to know is another kind of fake, in some ways worse.

Disclaimer: I'm not an economist. Corrections welcomed.

Read Krapp's Last Tape. It's one of the greatest things Beckett wrote, and is only two pages long.

Heed its warning.

It is a personal peeve when any explanation of the Bell Inequality fails to mention the determinist Big Loophole: It rules out nearly all local hidden-variable theories, except those for which the entire universe is ruled by hidden variables. If you reject the assumption of counterfactual definiteness (the idea that there is a meaningful answer to the question "what answer would I have gotten, had I conducted a different experiment?"), local hidden variable theories are not ruled out. This leads to superdeterminism and theories which assume that, through either hidden variables stretching back to t=0 or backwards-in-time signals, the universe accounted for the measurement and the result was determined to match.

This is, in fact, what I held to be the most likely total explanation for years, until I better understood both its implications and MWI. Which, in fact, also rejects counterfactual definiteness. MWI does it one better; it rejects factual definiteness, the idea that there is a well-defined answer to the question "What answer did I get?", since in alternate worlds you got different answers.

As story skeletons go, this is a pretty good one; I think it could be made into an interesting story.

So, are you planning to flesh it out?

As I understood the story, the personality whom everyone thinks of as Bill from 30 years ago is actually some other guy, Fred, from 30 years ago, and mysteriously nobody notices, because the story depends on that to make some kind of point about identity.

What is the purpose to making any sort of distinction between the identity of one person, and the identity of another?

On a practical level, it often seems to have something to do with people being more willing to work harder for the benefit of people they identify as 'themselves' than they would work for 'other people', such as being willing to do things that are unpleasant now so their 'future selves' will enjoy less unpleasantness.

Out of the various people in the future who might or might not fall under the category of 'yourself', for which of them would you be willing to avoid eating a marshmallow now, so that those people could enjoy /two/ marshmallows?

Each compartment has its own threshold for evidence.

The post reminded me of Christians talking bravely about there being plenty of evidence for their beliefs. How does that work?

• When evidence is abundant we avoid information overload by raising the threshold for what counts as evidence. We have the luxury of taking our decisions on the basis of good quality evidence and the further luxury of dismissing mediocre evidence as not evidence at all.

• Evidence is seldom abundant. Usually we work with a middling threshold for evidence, doing the best we can with the mediocre evidence that the middle threshold admits to our councils, and accepting that we will sometimes do the wrong thing due to misleading evidence.

• When evidence is scarce we turn our quality threshold down another notch, so we still have evidence, even if it is just a translation of a copy of an old text that is supposed to be eye witness testimony but was written down one hundred years after the event.

I think that the way it works with compartmentalization is that we give each compartment its own threshold. For example, an accountant is doing due diligence work on the prospect for The Plastic Toy Manufacturing Company. It looks like being a good investment, they have an exclusive contract with Disney for movie tie-ins. Look, it says so, right there in the prospectus. Naturally the accountant writes to Disney to confirm this. If Disney do not reply, that is a huge red flag.

On Sunday the accountant goes to Church. They have a prospectus, called the Bible, which makes big claims about their exclusive deal with God. When you pray to God to get confirmation, He ignores you. Awkward!

People have a sense of what it is realistic to expect by way of evidence which varies between the various compartments of their lives. In every compartment their beliefs are comfortably supported by a reasonable quantity and quality of evidence relative to the standard expected for that compartment.

Should we aim at a uniform threshold for evidence across all compartments? That ideas seems too glib. It is good to be more open and trusting in friendship and personal relationships than in business. One will not get far in artistic creation if one doubts ones own talent to the extent of treating it like a dodgy business partner.

Or maybe having a uniform threshold is exactly the right thing to do. That leaves you aware that in important areas of your life you have little evidence and your posteriori distributions have lots of entropy. Then you have to live courageously, trusting friends and lovers despite poor evidence and the risk of betrayal, trusting ones talent and finishing ones novel despite the risk that it is 1000 pages of unpublishable drek.

As Eilenberg-Mac Lane first observed, "category" has been defined in order to be able to define "functor" and "functor" has been defined in order to be able to define "natural transformation".

Saunders Mac Lane, Categories for the Working Mathematician