This is a link post.

Today, I want to introduce an experimental PhD student training philosophy. Let's start with some reddit memes.

Every gaming subreddit has its own distinct meme culture. On r/chess, there's a demon who is summoned by an unsuspecting beginner asking “Why isn’t this checkmate?”

These posts are gleefully deluged by responses saying “Google En Passant” in some form or other. Here's my favorite variant:

Battle Brothers is an indie game of the turn-based strategy variety about keeping alive a company of muggles - farmhands and fishermen, disowned nobles and hedge knights, jugglers and pimps - in a low-magic fantasy world filled with goblins, zombies, and dubious haircuts.

Let me narrow down the kind of game that Battle Brothers is. It is sometimes said that all games are menus or parkour.

Battle Brothers is squarely a game of menus, a game of managing spreadsheets which happens to have graphics.

This is the skill tree for just one out of twenty brothers in a company.

The Battle Brothers subreddit has its own dominant meme, which is a little more mysterious than “Google En Passant.” Introducing … the Fat Newt.

Fat newt is a loving bastardization [...]

---

First published:
November 25th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PnDNTknGnoxThSNm5/training-phd-students-to-be-fat-newts-part-1

Linkpost URL:
https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2025/11/24/training-phds-to-be-fat-newts-part-1/

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---