Ian @im@mastodon.sdf.org

Also I suspect that the dishonesty is rarely the true objection, just the easiest one to defend intellectually. If someone just openly said to their until-now monogamous partner “I’m going to go bang some other people now, if you don't like it you can dump me,” most people would still call that cheating and would definitely not think it was okay just because there was no dishonesty.

Example of an argument that fails basic scrutiny: “Cheating is a betrayal because it is dishonest: you are agreeing to follow a limit your partner has set, presenting yourself as following it, and meanwhile doing nothing of the sort, so the relationship is a sham”

This sounds plausible, because yes dishonesty is itself bad in a relationship. But it says nothing about why that -particular- limit would ever be set in the first place.

Example of a circular argument: “Cheating is the ultimate betrayal of your partner because it shows a complete lack of regard or caring, in that you aren’t willing to give up a bit of pleasure even though taking it betrays your partner”

You can substitute ‘eating the last cookie’ for ‘cheating’ and have an equally good argument that that is the ultimate betrayal.

(disclaimer: though the title is a genuine invitation to challenge me on this, I have thought about it a lot and will be genuinely surprised if someone actually changes my view)

(I'm poly and my perspective on this is certainly colored by that, but I have also been in long-term monogamous relationships including eight years of marriage and never cheated, so this is not about excusing myself)

CMV: the conception of “cheating” (infidelity) as a top tier relationship-shattering offense is an arbitrary social construct, and attempts to explain what is so intrinsically bad about it are typically either circular or fall to the most basic analysis. We could just as well collectively agree to think of it as not a big deal, or as a bad habit but not an unforgivable one, or in any number of other ways, and our thinking would make it so.

I think the most annoying-to-me semantic shift I've seen in my lifetime has been how the word <trolling>, which used to mean something like "arguing in bad faith, or posting deliberately incendiary content, with the purpose of baiting people into pointless rage-fests," is now used primarily to mean "defending a bad opinion."

Okay so maybe that particular oasis turned out to be a mirage but the fact that I believed it was real speaks volumes about the state of the desert

Shopping is hard, let’s go mathing

Currently accepting membership applications for the Locally Flat Earth Society

I wonder sometimes what the average not-especially-science-minded person thinks they mean when they say that “Isaac Newton discovered gravity.” Like, what previously-unknown fact specifically do they think he discovered?

Also "data Mu f = In (f (Mu f))" which took me forever to figure out what it did

"An ordinal is a downward-closed set of ordinals" thanks, I love it

The strange joy of recursive/inductive definitions that look ill-founded but aren't

I suspect that if Alonzo Church had known that people would one day have to write out the word 'lambda' over and over in their programs, he would have called it the
\-calculus instead

Can someone who knows a bit about constructivism and computational interpretation of logic tell me why call/cc doesn't suffice as a witness for double negation elimination? What’s not constructive about it?

Pro tip: being bad at saying “no” to requests does not make it everyone else’s responsibility to never make a request that you might want to say ”no” to

I think the real answer is "returning #f on error is and always has been a hack, compared to using a proper optional type"

Philosophical coding question. In #Racket (as with other #Scheme-based languages) it's common for procedures to return #f (false) to indicate failure. So the following one-liner is occasionally useful for simplifying code that deals with the output of such procedures:

(define (opt-map proc arg [default #f])
(if arg (proc arg) default))

But as written, this still returns #f, rather than the given default, if arg is not #f but (proc arg) is. The question is, is this a good or a bad thing?

Supposedly there are some who prefer rejection-sampling a d4, but those people don't deserve a voice in this poll