The worlds of manmade gods

<rant>

In fiction, I keep running across the trope of gods created, or at least sustained, by human belief. The creation of these gods often alters reality, including the past. The most recent source is the comic Digger by Ursula Vernon; a few past sources I remember include the comics Gunnerkrigg Court and True Villains and the Discworld book series. This trope significantly violates my suspension of disbelief.

Inevitably, when some character asks, "How does that work?", he is told, "Don't think about it; just accept it." Gunnerkrigg Court lampshades the circular causality: Human belief creates Coyote, who created humans, and Annie is supposed to consider it a divine mystery and not object to it.

As the authors themselves probably admit, circular causality does not work. As the authors apparently refuse to admit, the nature of causality matters. If effects may have no causes--if reality can rewrite itself--if truth is, in fact, relative--then rationalism, possibly accompanied by rationality and definitely by science, goes out the window.

So at best you have a story set in nonsense. Terry Pratchett has proved that you can have a lot of fun with such a story. But he then makes claims of truth, often about morality, from within the story. If you have discarded the internal consistency of your fictional universe, then your universe does not reflect reality, and its morals have no necessary application to reality. How can you imagine that you can draw conclusions from it?

The point of fiction is to teach about reality by reflecting it. If your story's morals cannot even claim objectivity, what good is your story?

Theology is hard. Cultural atheists are not used to it, whereas Christian philosophers have been working on it for millennia. If you want to make a new system, maybe start by learning some of the ways the established one has avoided blowing its own brains out so you don't have to make the same mistakes. At the very least, please do not call Christianity irrational while proposing some theology with significantly more basic problems.

An Outlook bug gives me paranoia that Microsoft may be reading my feedback

If I must be a Shore Pibald, I might as well at least document it for learning.

Using the new Outlook rather against my will, I went to search the help articles for a basic feature it does not support, as one does.

This is suboptimal UX. So of course I left feedback, something like "Text is barely readable in Help search box in dark mode".

Immediately, I saw a change:

This is clearly better, if not particularly professional-looking, but why did it change so handily and abruptly?

I restarted my Outlook and searched Help again. The text field was back to the old appearance. (The first screenshot is from after the restart; I naturally had no reason to take one before.)

Obviously, Microsoft has an AI watching user feedback and making minor UI tweaks to increase customer satisfaction. But I can't even get an AI coding assistant that edits code inline, and if Microsoft had one, they would be selling it, so that explanation is clearly implausible. Or maybe an actual person is reading my feedback and making tweaks in response. [insert joke at Microsoft's expense]

But look what happens if I mouse over a suggestion of a recent search:

So apparently the suggestion mouseover code erroneously activated and coincidentally gave me just what I was asking for.

As David Malki notes, the human mind jumps first to implausible explanations.

I am relieved and vaguely disappointed.