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There's a slippery slope us STEM people fall into sometimes, where we step-out a level of abstraction and say that all instances of that abstraction were actual

There's a slippery slope us STEM people fall into sometimes, where we step-out a level of abstraction and say that all instances of that abstraction were actually just the abstraction itself. I can step-out of any diet or behavior change and just say that if CaloriesIn < CaloriesOut, you win. But there are context-specific benefits to different implementations. I'm not saying you're wrong; you're right; but you don't want to end up stuck in a loop of depression thinking: Everything is The Same and Nothing Matters because everything possible can just be represented by Objects (or No Objects) with Relations (or No Relations) creating a graph on which everything else is generated (graphs concatenated with graphs).

motohagiography 5y ago
Hah, your depression is my manic.:) This objects and morphisms analogy (the ur-analogy, really) is just a fast path for analysis, but artifacts in-and-of analysis are definitely a thing, sample bias in methods, etc. Depression thinking to me is described by Sapolsky's "aggression turned inward," whereas if you wanted to change your own behaviour (like eating) into something goal oriented like weight loss, having a magic feather isn't a bad thing. Magic feather militancy is its own problem, but I think it's generally true that we're wired to believe whatever preserves the idea of self, and whether our beliefs are real or not has no bearing on our attachment to them. That said, thinking about how to manage eating is alien to my personality, so the OMAD habit is a way to eat for pleasure while cultivating one less comorbidity.