My name is Parrot, a bird of Paradise

Dear Caroline:

If I am not mistaken, tomorrow is the day when you will have to put yourself into the custody of the BOP for the start of your two-year sentence. I am not too knowledgeable about the American prison system, but I think it is fair to suspect you will be cut off from the Internet while inside. And that means that the probability of my virtual letters reaching you and giving you some support and solace will drastically collapse to 0. With such collapse, the purpose for writing them vanishes.

When I had finished going over most of your extinct blog's entries, I also wrote a post about how my blog entries would be converging rather rapidly to zero. Now, the situation is intensified. I intend to continue reading a book recommendation of yours every month, and perhaps I'll keep posting here from time to time in attention to your future self, who more than 2 years from now might peruse (again, or for the first time) these words.

Ms. Ellison, never forget in the prison days to come that we keep you in our thoughts and in our hearts. While you languish in incarceration, I remain symbolically committed to accompanying you in spirit; as I have already mentioned, I will be pondering Dante's Purgatorio, and time the beginning and ending of its reading with your time in prison. And in a token, but strongly felt, gesture of sharing some degree of your hardship, I will be completely abstaining from some niceties until you are free.

Many years ago, my best friend asked me to write a prologue to a poetry book of his. As it had many Orphic overtones, I found inspiration and images in the golden tablets of this ancient religion, frequently buried in the Roman and Hellenistic periods in the graves of the believers. The content of one of them seems a fitting conclusion to my lines and an introduction to your starting voyage among the nether regions:

You will find on the right in Hades' halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives. Do not even draw nigh this spring. Further on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of Memory: over this stand guardians. They will ask you with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades. They will ask you for what reason you have come. Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: 'I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves. I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.' Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory. After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.

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e canterò di quel secondo regno / dove l'umano spirito si purga / e di salire al ciel diventa degno

Dear Caroline:

This little snippet is from Adam Yedidia, one of the first witnesses at the FTX trial. In just a few brushstrokes, he manages to capture some of your most admirable virtues beyond the selflessness mentioned in your relative’s letters: your hard work, intelligence, kindness, creativity, joyfulness, and fun-loving spirit. I smiled at his oxymoronic mention of your “spare time”—a rarity, I imagine, given the intensity of your commitments. Yet from your blog, I already knew a bit about your LARP talents (like your notes from the Hong Kong game) and a touch of your culinary skills. These gems were tucked away on worldoptimization - life advice posts with tips about vinegars, shrub syrups, and scone recipes. I’m tempted to try those scones myself, if the links are still active.

Mr. Yedidia’s letter concludes with a suggestion that you might channel your empathy and skill with words into future careers in writing and education. I wholeheartedly agree. But I would add that the range of your abilities and interests is so broad that whatever you choose to focus on, I’m certain you’ll excel—not only for your own fulfillment but for the world around you as well.

Thinking about your future and the high likelihood of a positive outcome brough to mind the book I am currently reading: Everything is Predictable, by Tom Chivers. It is a light primer in Bayesianism (the subtitle is 'How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World). It would be light reading for you, but I think you would enjoy it - you reviewed one of Chivers's other books in your blog and goodreads before.

Dear Caroline:

Your relative's words were very insightful, and probably represent what must have been a rather common befuddlement, I imagine, amongst those who didn't know so much about your EA engagement and your pull towards optimizing good-doery. Then again, he had access to other facets of your life and personality. I can easily imagine you experiencing joy in mathematics and puzzle solving -it would be hard to explain otherwise your involvement and success in maths team and other competitions. I find it more difficult to see you going into the realms of pure math, given your background and other inclinations. Cryptography and/or professorship do seem like reasonable professions for the Carolines in the nearby multiverses.

Dear Caroline:

The expanding moral circle is a well-beloved metaphor in EA circles. At the moment, and due to the unfortunate events of the last years, your own actantial circle has diminished considerably, in what is undoubtedly a cruel, ironical twist of fate. Trust is a very delicate flower - perhaps one of the reasons why signaling and living up to strong deontological constraints proves to be so useful in getting it to flourish, and right now, the degree of social confidence in you amongst the wide public is in deep, negative numbers. They are wrong, of course. If I were to couch this in economic terms, there's a great arbitrage that can be done in investing in your essentially virtuous character and in the practical good that will come of it in days to come.

I am sure it must pain you to think not only of the bad you've done, but of the limited good that you are currently able to do. Even that little seems to get snatched away from you, as the passage from the letter above seems to imply. And even the very little that still is accessible to you will be diminished soon, sifting through your fingers like stars or grains of sand, after you've had given yourself into custody.

And yet: never despair, dear Caroline! Once's capacity for good can ben diminished, but never destroyed; delayed, but never stopped; hidden behinds mists and darkness, but never fully concealed. In the shores of the stygian realm to which you go there will be people you can help, and in helping them, help yourself. For I am certain you will be a light in the darkness, and that everything your humbled self will attempt will bear good fruit. As for those actions beyond the prison walls, some will still be there and kept alive, even is somewhat slowed down and at a distance; others will have to wait until your return, and wait they will, as the degree of evil, pain and suffering in the world is a quantity that seems almost constant to the intuition, even if it prove not so with the data: “The poor you will always have with you” (Mk 14:7).

Dear Caroline:

I believe it to be your birthday today, and as I've done before, allow me to congratulate you and desire it is (is being? has been? Differing timezones make this confusing) a most happy celebration in the company of those whom you love and love you in return. I cannot but feel, though, that any mirth will necessarily be dimmed by the shadow of your approaching prison entry, in barely a week's time.

Given our extremities and cultural tradition, base-ten numbers feel intuitively satisfying for discrete demarcations in our continuous flow. 30 is as good as any in this regard. While I was thinking about what to write you today, my eyes drifted over a bookshelf and fixated on a fancy edition I have of the Lord of the Rings, and I couldn't help envisaging your live as also structured in a tripartite way (even if Tolkien's threefold division was strictly due to size and publishing issues, and not thematic). The first tome of your fellowship with Alameda and FTX is now concluded, a second, grim and short volume, among the prison towers, is about to begin. But the longest and best is yet to come. I have all the confidence in the world that it will be a true return of the queen, one in which your inner virtue, goodness and capacities will come to universal light again. The sword that is broken shall be reforged, and it will shine with the light of the stars.

Dearest Ms. Ellison: I trust your strength to overcome the difficulties of the next two years, and your ability to 'offer it up', an expression you used to be fond of. While you may not need reassurance, let me state, as I have done many times before, that you won't face this alone, that you will not be on your own in the prison days that loom ahead, but always in the thoughts, feelings and prayers of those of us who appreciate you. whether silent or spoken, near or far, will be like an army of patronus charms keeping vigil over your prison grounds. You are not destined for Azkaban. May your strength, and the love and care of all who support you, guide you through the darkness back to the light where you rightly, truly belong.

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And she cried out most exceedingly, saying, ‘O Light of lights, in whom I have had faith from the beginning, for I am in distress on account of the rulers of this Aeon… Save me, for I am in affliction

Dear Caroline:

This is one of those moments where I feel that even some of your flaws cast you in a positive light. I’m convinced that this anecdote reveals a fundamental truth about you, which also makes perfect sense considering your background. In my experience, young idealists from relatively privileged upbringings are often prone to placing too much trust in others. While naivety typically implies a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment, it also suggests a natural, unaffected way of seeing the world—an innocent outlook that makes one sigh and wonder, if only it were truly so. There’s a performative power in this, too: showing a surplus of trust, even when you may not fully expect it to be reciprocated or lived up to, can have transformative effects on the receiver (the fictional reference that comes to mind is the beginning of Les Misérables and Jean Valjean's conversion). if we combine this trait with high agreeableness, it’s easy to see how they could have been turned against you.

Of course, some may argue—and have—that it’s unhelpful or even patronizing and misogynistic to portray you as a somewhat immature, agentically limited figure, and that using arguments around youth and inexperience with someone in their 20s or 30s might border on the preposterous. While there may be some truth in this, I’d counter that we’re all complex creatures. I myself would cringe at many of the thoughts and actions I entertained in my early twenties. At some point, a line must be drawn in the sand, but it’s always going to be somewhat arbitrary, and the waves in the beach of time are going to wash it way, along with those sandcastles of rational thought and a mastering of the emotions and 'irrationalities' of life which I am sure you were a master builder of.

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It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Dear Caroline:

I have a nagging sense that I may have already borrowed the title of Terence’s play, The Self-Tormentor, for a letter to you before. Perhaps a better fit, though, would be The Self-Denier—or ἀυτοἀρνητής. That rational, self-sacrificing part of you, which seems to have ultimately caused you so much harm, interweaves with other sides of your personality. There’s another Caroline, hinted at in the passage above and scattered throughout your blog, whom I find just as compelling as the altruistic and selfless version. Altruism and self-sacrifice inspire respect, certainly, but your wit and spirited sense of humor evoke something deeper—a feeling of wanting to engage with you, to have you around. These qualities combine beautifully with your generosity, especially in how you strive to make interactions enjoyable for others. I have no doubt that this kindness, like a gentle morning dew, blesses everyone fortunate enough to know you.

Dear Caroline,

I have no doubt, like the author of the quote above, that you are deeply guided by utilitarian ethics—a system that seems to be a quintessential expression of our WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. I’ve written before about my conflicted relationship with Peter Singer, whose work I find challenging (moral philosophers rarely inspire joy). His book, The Life You Can Save, left me feeling intellectually mugged, even though it nudged me to consider the logic of caring for strangers in a more profound way.I haven’t yet had the chance to delve into longtermist thought, though both What We Owe the Future and The Precipice are waiting patiently on my bookshelf. This summer, I participated in an introductory Effective Altruism program where we briefly touched on longtermist ideas. In general, my cohort seemed skeptical—they were more drawn to the 'classic' concerns, like bed nets and animal welfare.

Dear Caroline:

This passage really resonated with me. While not as virtue-driven as your young self, I have always thirsted for 'a comprehensive moral and metaphysical worldview' ever since I lost faith, in my early teens. I think I've written about his before. My drifting desire was quickly captured by the Marxist memeplex, and it took me almost a decade and a half to shrug it off. I suspect my overreaction to it is what has made me so dentologically inclined, and so instinctly averse to utilitarianism: even though it might not look like it, Marxism (and specially Marxism-Leninism) is strongly utilitarian, albeit of the naive variety. Many pages of Bukharin, Lukacz and Brecht wax lyrically on the need to be tough and accept expedient means in the birth pangs of utopia:

But at the same time we know: Even hatred of lowliness Distorts one’s features. Even anger against injustice Makes the voice hoarse. Alas, we Who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness Could not ourselves be kind.

I was sold to this. Like, I cannot claim that I ignored the crimes that had been committed under the hammer and sickle: on the contrary, I used to read extensively about them. But in some sense, it really didn't matter; There's a lesson in (my) moral deficiency to be gleaned from this, and it is also facilitated by distance and abstraction (Stalin: 'One death is a tragedy, millions is just statistics').

Dear Caroline,

I found this letter particularly interesting, as it took great care to explore your departure from your Alameda years and your reconnection with a younger, perhaps truer version of yourself. Recently, in class, we’ve been discussing the nature of personality and to what extent one can speak of a continuous, semi-permanent self. Given my earlier writings and reflections, you might guess that I lean toward essentialism—that is, the belief that personality consists of a stable matrix of traits and characteristics, albeit flexible enough to be shaped by extreme events and circumstances. This is why, once I’ve conceptualized you as fundamentally ‘good,’ it would take extraordinary evidence to convince me otherwise.

I’m not entirely dismissive of other views that emphasize the fluidity of the self. However, this debate often feels somewhat needless to me, as both perspectives tend to converge at some point. Almost everyone exhibits some degree of continuity and stability in their personality, even if significant environmental pressures can lead to radical change. Some periods of life may allow for greater plasticity, and certain people are more adaptable to change than others.

Lately, I’ve also been reading about the history of statistics and the Frequentist vs. Bayesian debate. My essentialist inclinations make me instinctively wary of the Bayesian approach, which sometimes feels too susceptible to subjectivity or rationalized justifications. However, much like the self, I believe both schools of thought eventually reach the same conclusions. A frequentist perspective on you would assume that your fundamental truth is your goodness, and that a large enough sample of your actions would reveal this, even if unfortunate associations with Sam and Alameda produced statistical anomalies. From a Bayesian standpoint, your goodness should be taken as a strong prior, tempered slightly by your Alameda years, but still confirmed by the broader evidence.

As Whitman said, "we are large, we contain multitudes." Our personalities aren’t isolated fragments, but overlapping facets of a complex whole—like a finely cut jewel. I agree with the writer of the quote above in feeling closest to selfless young Caroline, and likely, the current, penitent Caroline. While your crypto-bro, edgelord persona sometimes shocked and provoked me, I’m certain there were valuable aspects to it as well. It’s impossible for me not to appreciate every facet of who you are.

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Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Dear Caroline:

A few days ago I got to finish Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict and the accompanying review I usually write as a follow-up. Besides what I've already said there, it provides an insightful peek into the minds of Rationalists and their interest in avoiding zero-sum games. The book was (for me) rather dull, but valuable. And I get its main idea: that understanding conflict and cooperation requires thinking about incentives, commitments, and the ways in which people and institutions communicate threats or promises.

Possibly one of the ideas that resonated the most with me is that in life you have to deal with irrational players, and that their irrationality can actually give them an edge over you. I also couldn't help thinking about some of my own 'irrationalities'. In many ways, I am your standard WEIRD person, so I got to thinking on the vicarious pleasure of punishing greed and unfairness in ultimatum games. And yet I was also thinking that the rejection is easy because in most of these games, the money won/lost is pretty low. Like, if in a real scenario, one played this game with, say, 1 billion dollars in the pot, and greedy player A proposed a 99/1 split, I'd be really tempted to take it - on the other hand, I would be more tempted to reject it if I knew the loss would be more painful for player A. If he/she were already a billionaire, the harm of losing such a quantity would be very diminished. And this is probably connected with my deontological inclinations: when thinking about crime and justice, my go to-instinct was always of the type 'the criminal must suffer in proportion to the crime', in some sort of cosmic balancing act that restores a state of equilibrium to the Moral Universe. I am not so sure about these things now, but the emotion still very clearly keeps lurking beneath the waters of my self.

It’s one thing to judge these situations in the abstract, but it becomes entirely different when you can appreciate and empathize with the person involved. In your case, while I don’t excuse or condone what happened, I also can’t bring myself to wish for any kind of retribution against you, nor do I believe that would be "fair" in any meaningful sense. You stand out as a unique example of someone essentially good and virtuous, who was unfortunately led astray by a combination of personal vulnerabilities, human fallibility, and sheer bad luck. I don’t think of myself as a bad person, but I do consider you better. And truthfully, I am unsure that, had I been in your shoes and faced with all your circumstances, I would have acted differently.

Dear Caroline,

I can easily believe this to be true, based on the pieces I’ve gathered about who you are. Not only do I believe you are penitent and remorseful now—I sense that your remorse will endure long after it has fulfilled its immediate purpose.

I don’t say this to flatter you. Like the author of the passage above, I know that your mistakes were serious, made even more so by the high expectations placed on someone as intelligent, conscientious, and well-meaning as you. But personally, I don’t see the point in judgment. We are all fallible, and the circumstances that led you astray were difficult to control. Besides, I am certain that no one will judge Caroline Ellison more harshly than Caroline Ellison herself.

More than that, I believe you are better than your worst decisions or actions. You are, at your core, a good and virtuous person, someone who makes the world a better place simply by existing. I have no doubt that you will prove this true in the days to come. There is no safer bet or more meaningful investment I could make than to believe in that.

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Dear Caroline:

While reading this letter, I felt this paragraph was really spot-on. Rationalists may rail again and again against the Straw Vulcan stereotype, but I can't help but feeling that they are being, for the most part, somewhat motte-and-baileyish in this regard. They may quote from Kahneman and defend on paper that system 1 has its positive role and place, and that Rats do not deny their emotions and not completely rational-and-abstract utility functions. And yet in practice, we see that when a certain framing of 'search for truth, restrain the emotions; think of the numbers of people and not about the individual cases' is imposed on reality, and when an optimizing drive is embedded therein, many will fall into an abyss and maelstrom of abstraction that will effectively detach them from practical and useful ethics. I do not think this affected you in the way of 'being insensitive to everyday people', given your ultimate and strong natural kindness and goodness (and this letter also mentions how you were a caring and supporting boss), but it probably did affect you in hushing natural (deontological) instincts of right and wrong, on when to listen to them, on whom to defer to and so on. And would also agree with the writer (even if in my case, I act upon guesses and speculation, whereas he is talking from first-hand knowledge) that it is probably healing and good for you to be befriending real and concrete people from different backgrounds whom you can help in a real and concrete way. As a side note, let me express how envious I am of all those people who can attain the privilege of relating and befriending a person like you.

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Compassion, by its very nature, requires that we not become too detached from the concrete particular, from the lives and sufferings of others

Dear Caroline:

These texts from your sisters were comforting, but not unexpected. They add another drop to the many testimonies about how you were such an excellent, conscientious, self-effacing and essentially good person since childhood. They did make me reflect about my own childhood and family. I was an only son, so I never got to experience what it is like to have brothers or sisters. It is conventionally believed that this makes us more narcissistic, less able to deal with the real world, as in the pampered cosmos of our infancy, we are the sole shining star. Conventional wisdom does need to be put to a test, though; I can imagine some randomized ones to see if this is so, and if it has significant consequences in our adulthoods.

Dear Caroline:

While reading these lines, what actually crept into my mind were ethical considerations. I've written to you about his before, but I'll try to make into another take that while biting itself, like the worm Ouroboros, does not repeat.

After reading and pondering your blog and other materials in the last few months, I have become more favorably disposed towards utilitarianism, but I am still strongly convinced that, for all of its good points, there are some blind and dangerous alleys it leads to when followed too intensely and too exclusively.

Myself, I have a strong liking for deontology, but I think I am aware of its limitations. If we are to abide by natural, immutable, unbreakable laws, it is fair to ask where these laws come from. Being of a sceptic persuasion, I cannot attribute them to some God-like being, so they would need to be derived from axioms of reason, of what creatures endowed with such a property would agree upon. Kant tries to do this, and he doesn't do an altogether unsuccessful effort with his Categorical Imperative: I find really engaging both his reformulation of the golden mean, his prohibition on lies and the way he sanctions humans as non-instrumental ends in themselves. Still, it is a proposal that includes many impracticalities in practical implementation, and utilitarianism is one of many examples that one can build systems that sound as plausibly rational in their choice of moral axioms as anything that old Emmanuel can dream of in his philosophy.

There is another level, though, at which I find my inclination to deontology useful: even if you do not believe that some set of norms sanctioned by tradition and the community are to be regarded as sacred an unbreakable, the thing is they are very good guardrails for individuals given the enormous degree of uncertainty that we are forced to live in. Such an uncertainty is easy to minimize or ignore when one is (of feels that he is) really smart and knowledgeable, and that said rules have outlived their usefulness and purpose. As your blog shows, you are not unacquainted with Chesterton's fence. And besides, rule-based utilitarians also resort to some version of this when escaping from the aporias of act utilitarianism.

This guardrail is all the more necessary for two reasons: the first is that maximization is perilous - this is an argument that has been made much of by arguably the most important EA thinkers themselves, both McAskill and Ord. And maximizing is precisely what you were doing, and arguably, have been doing all your life, usually at the expense of your own happiness and well-being. I would add something, perhaps, here: I believe it is not wholesome to be a self-renouncing saint. Yes, meaning, sense and a call can be found in this, but it goes so against the basics of human nature, and also violates a (deontological, and probably virtue-ethicist) imperative for valuing your self not as a tool or instrument of some grand and superior force or principle, but as a person endowed with a need for flourishing and the pursuit of happiness. I would go further than that, and state that this is not just a need, but an obligation, for which the subject must follow up with a demarcation of a personal space that can never be violated by all and any demands placed upon it by society, others and/or any beliefs that oneself might hold. I can see how this could be construed as a certain rationalization of (a degree) of egoism, but that still doesn't make it less true for me.

The second reason why the guardrails of deontology (and virtue ethics) are necessary are because we are a very good rationalizing animal, and all the more so the more intelligent we are. With this I go back to the quoted passage from above: we can delude ourselves, if clever enough, with arguments that justify certain actions as predicated on the reason and axioms we follow; and we can be deluded as well by those even better at reasoning and wordsmithing than ourselves. You yourself are a very sad exemplification of this: it would otherwise beggar belief how an absurdly intelligent, galaxy-brained woman like yourself, and one trained from so young in rationalism and scepticism could have failed so spectacularly here, even when taking into account extraneous considerations to the power of Sam's rationalizations (his prestige within your community, his success, your infatuation with him, your insecurities, and your belief that being close to Sam was high expected value and a fair chance of 'being in the room when it happens' and of possibly maximizing your own participation in World Optimization).

I am no moral philosopher, and definitely no saint, but I'd dare say that even with a 100% belief in utilitarianism, moral uncertainty would probably dictate that in practice, one should be at most, 60% utilitarian, and divide the other 40% in whatever proportions between deontology and virtue ethics. And probably, the allocation should not be random, but rather, the stronger a utilitarian postulate seems to violate any of the other two, the stronger one should probably not follow along with it. Call it a triangle of ethical inequality, if you will.

But I fear this post is too long, and that I might have jumped my own guardrails of support, brevity and consistency. I would add one last thing, though: the good work you currently are doing -the food pantries, the tutoring, the soup kitchens, the tax help work- might seem, from your perspective of yore, the 'purchase of fuzzies', in rationalist speak. It is not so. Not only does it do good to you (which is necessary for your healing and flourishing, for your connection with real people, and not just abstract ideas), it helps real people, even if less than you would have hoped in previous dreams of the widest possible circle of effective helping. Such a circle has perforce had its circumference dramatically reduced for you, but I trust you'll be able to expand it in the future.

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-And how do you apply that education to what you do?

-It has made me distrustful of language.

Dear Caroline,

I’ve been incredibly busy these past few days, but please never think that being out of sight means you’re out of mind. I often find myself reflecting on your situation, and I make a point to revisit your letters of support, reading them with great care and attention in hopes of uncovering new facets of your remarkable self.

In one of your those letters, a reference was made to the long, monotonous hours you spent alone, staring at a screen, tracking crypto operations through the night. It pains me to think of you in that setting, surrounded only by the cold glow of the monitor. Not that your efforts would have been in vain (then) from a strictly utilitarian or financial perspective, but it feels cruel to imagine your wit and warmth confined to a solitary space, deprived of the enriching company of others. I know you took on those burdensome tasks—the ones that no one else wanted—out of a sense of duty and sacrifice, which speaks volumes about your character, even if it showed a bit less concern for your own well-being.

This other letter touches on a subject I was aware of from reading your blog, but seeing it laid out so plainly here brought a renewed sense of empathy and sorrow. Love, in all its randomness, absurdity, and injustice, has treated you so unkindly, and I find that deeply unfair, especially for someone as deserving as you. Life has this indifferent way of disregarding our deepest wishes, but please know that I do not share in that indifference. Still, I hadn’t realized the full extent of how much this isolation weighed on you or how it might have contributed to your eventual departure from Jane Street.

You are, in every sense, someone who gives far more than they take, and the world is lesser for not valuing that gift.

May your journey ahead lead you to the company of those who see you for the rare and precious soul you truly are, and may you find yourself surrounded by a warmth that finally matches your own.

With unwavering support, as usual,

Dear Caroline:

I was contemplating which of your book recommendations to pick up this month, but, under the influence of some of Schelling’s arguments (I think I’ve mentioned that I’ve been reading The Strategy of Conflict), I’ve had a change of heart. Instead of reading a book you’ve recommended with 100% certainty—one you rated and endorsed in your now-defunct Goodreads—I’m thinking of exploring a couple of titles that, while not listed there, I believe you’ve both read and thoroughly enjoyed.

Schelling’s work is an obvious candidate. It feels like a foundational Rationalist text, with its nuanced application of Game Theory to social interactions and trade-offs. In fact, I can now see how much of his thinking influenced Yudkowsky's work in HPMOR.

The other title is Ada Palmer’s final book in the Terra Ignota series. I’m still puzzled as to why it didn’t appear among your virtual book appreciations. You clearly enjoyed the first three installments, and I can’t help but believe you’ve read and appreciated this one as well. Its absence remains a mystery to me.