In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position.

1. Semantics
2. Syntax
3. Lexical syntax
4. Lexical syntax of comments

In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position.

1. Semantics
2. Syntax
3. Lexical syntax
4. Lexical syntax of comments

Libido, Sex Drive, Desire… as a society we put so much weight on the pressure to have an abundance of this ethereal thing, that we can feel a real deep loss when it wanes.

Cyan shares with us their story, as she’s takes steps to rediscover, heal, and explore her own changing relationship to sex.

I make this rant in part because I feel a tension in modern society between goal-directed ambition and vibing with the homies. Like you either go to a big city and try to ruthlessly cultivate a peer group that spurs you ever upward, or you hang out in a dead-end town nurturing the same bonds you’ve had since childhood. But I want to do both! I’ve had a friend struggle with alcoholism and depression bad enough that I had to physically prevent him from walking into a fire, and I regret that 0%. And also, I want to achieve all of my dreams. Liu Bei accepts Zhang Fei on an axiomatic level, while also chasing his goals with every fiber of his being.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/linkpost-for-june-752

On the scope of medical authority

When should the characterization of a condition as a medical or clinical problem dominate over other forms of characterization? And how should competing conceptualizations coexist?

My answer is that these are questions that cannot be settled a priori. They are settled, provisionally, imperfectly, revisably, through ongoing negotiation between institutions, informed by empirical evidence, constrained by values, and responsive to the experiences and preferences of the people these institutions serve.

When you can’t handle the idea that you could be a decent person who is occasionally annoying - or gasp, even mean or selfish - you fall over yourself to find a way to make yourself a victim of other people’s observations about your limitations, or worse, their attempts to protect themselves from the parts of yourself you haven’t dealt with. Being annoying is only existentially terrifying to people who think that others should never notice or be affected by their flaws. On the contrary, being annoying is perhaps the only universal human trait. There’s no shame in being annoying occasionally and there’s value in annoying people less and/or only on purpose.

Don’t agree with everything, and I don’t think I overlap with the mental model here perfectly, but something worth considering.

via: https://nottoby.substack.com/p/on-the-pedro-stal-the-pede-scal

For those unfamiliar, emacs-devel is the primary development discussion list for GNU Emacs – where design decisions get made, patches get reviewed, and occasionally where people spend 200 messages arguing about version control software. This is the story of that last one.

Everywhere—from politics to science, from love to law—we are constantly asking: how can we get people to do the right thing? And the answer comes to us so naturally: prod them, push them, shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them! But every time we try to do this, we run into the same paradox that the Roman poet Juvenal pointed out 2,000 years ago: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen?

Peoole need to take the ideas in this piece more seriosusly. Capitalism is cranking out people absent of virtue (including me) by the millions, and we need to stop thinking that we can alleviate the symptoms with rules on rules.

Some exceptions and why they matter

Excellent stuff.

Socializing in the 21st century.

Assuming moral objectivism (or a close approximation), we are probably unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrong-doing (“ongoing moral catastrophe”).

The comment below from the summary’s author is also quite nice.

see: https://philpapers.org/rec/WILTPO-101

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/linkpost-for-may-3ac

Should religion be able to answer the problem at the heart of the second wave?

What feminists have to ask is, are we responding to this threat in the direction of greater meaning and deeper human flourishing for everyone? Or are we shutting down the articulation of meaning out of fear that we might be excluded from it? The right way to respond to this situation is to rediscover our ability to advocate positively for our own complex human nature, our own search for meaning, our own need for purpose in life.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/linkpost-for-may-3ac

Feminism, for example, has been described as “the radical notion that women are people.” If you think that’s accurate, then feminism is, necessarily, intimately intertwined with one of the classic philosophical problems: what does it mean to be human? Notwithstanding the open-endedness of existentialism, it’s essential to The Second Sex that it is normative at its heart. Transcendence, in the form of “accomplish[ing] freedom … by perpetual surpassing towards other freedoms“ is a moral imperative. For transcendence to lapse into immanence is “a moral fall if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil.” Strong language there!

via: https://foldedpapers.substack.com/p/feminism-faith-fulfilment-an-effort

MIT philosopher Sam Berstler provides analyzes the social dynamics accompanying open secrets. In many cases, she proposes, ignoring them is fine — but they may still have corrosive effects.

see: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-11676088

via: https://news.mit.edu/2026/why-bother-plausible-deniability-0417

In an article exploring the concept of plausible deniability, MIT philosopher Sam Berstler argues that our conversations cannot be understood simply by analyzing the words we use. Plausible deniability is bound up with other social practices that incentivize us to not be fully transparent.

BERSTLER: People who buy into the rhetoric of transparency can be setting back their own interests. Maybe speaking transparently is morally virtuous in some respects, but given the reality of our speech practices, transparency is not necessarily going to be the most effective way of handling things.

This is a huge discount against norms like radical honestly.

via: https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzaf016

the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one’s own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else’s.

Yet another reason why hell is other people: we all expect them to act like us, and then they don’t.

via: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8nDfzyimoFcozgGtA/a-less-mysterious-mindfulness-exercise?commentId=FSyDX8ZoAf8agQatT

Must be inspired by Aella’s recent writing.

From an evolutionary psychology perspective, the intense pain of being low-status and the mild pleasure of being high-status both make sense. If you’re high-status, maybe you get somewhat more mating opportunities or somewhat more food; good, but hardly transformative. If you’re low-status, you might literally be kicked out of the group and die.

Being magnanimous feels good. Being significantly richer or more famous or more adherent to demanding local ethical standards than everyone else in the group, on the other hand, can be awkward and uncomfortable. Either you clumsily avoid talking about large parts of your life, or you lie, or you come off as a braggart. You worry that everyone thinks that you think that you’re better than them.

In reality, human status dynamics reflect two competing urges: the urge to be higher-status than everyone else and the urge to be exactly the same status as everyone else.

It’s frustratingly difficult to classify beliefs that contradict themselves

In our case, the intersectional analysis of privilege is comparable to the Catholic veneration of saints: the teaching at the root of a practice in direct contradiction to the teaching itself; the degeneration of ideals into popular superstition. The idea that one could face challenges or prejudice because of different aspects of who they are and how they navigate society degenerated into applying identity descriptors as static privilege buffs or debuffs; the idea that some people had privilege in ways others didn’t, that this had the potential to blind them to the struggle of others, degenerated into a practice of shutting one’s ears to what others had to say. In effect, complex social conditions like “queerness” and “racial marginalization” were too often boiled down into amulets used in ascribing one’s degree of in-group membership.

So fucking true.

I don’t completely embody the author’s POV (proof and correctness are actually quite important to me), but I feel the sentiment deeply.

So many good quotes in this piece.

My current socio-intellectual attitude:

I do not want to be the poor guy who has no idea.

the gap between a transient psychedelic experience and the reality of acute mania or psychosis in the community is also enormous. Psychedelic sessions are planned, time-limited, and voluntarily entered. Manic and psychotic episodes are none of these things. They escalate.

If you strip away psychiatry without replacing it with something, you do not get liberation. You get neglect, incarceration, homelessness, or a burden displaced onto family members. The alternatives to psychiatric hospitalization in our current social world are not freedom and spiritual community. They are the emergency room, the jail, and the street.

the performance of sanity is exactly what I expect sometimes from my manic and psychotic patients. The capacity to perform, the behavioral control needed to lie, is sometimes sufficient for a person to function outside the hospital.