Published on November 12, 2025 4:43 PM GMT

I’ve decided to post these in weekly batches. This is the first of five. I’m posting these here because Blogspot’s comment apparatus sucks and also because no one will comment otherwise.

1. What Do You Want That Definition For, Anyway?

The thing to internalize is that conceptual engineering requires a sort of boldness, a confidence in your own judgement to point at a definition and call it bad, along with a mirroring arrogance to feel like you’ve been licensed to slap together an operationalization and claim it reflects something important about the world.

2. Your Heart Will Go On

Crucially, the broader context of that idiom is visibility; think “wearing your heart on your sleeve”, or prying your chest open.

With that in mind, I’ll define four attitudes or actions that extend that sense of “heart”: showing your heart, hiding your heart, denying your heart, and trampling on your heart.

3. At Human Scale

So why does this phenomenon arise? One possibility is something like a cognitive bias in modelling: in the same sort of way that we might model other people as being like us, or like others we’re familiar with - wanting similar things, thinking in similar ways, knowing similar facts - we might also be modelling objects and materials as being similar to the objects of ordinary life, and getting surprised when they fail to share properties.

4. Consumption Isn’t a Hobby

Reading is not a hobby, but writing, even be it fanfic or DIY guides, is; eating tasty food is not a hobby, but experimental cooking and wild foraging are; shopping in full generality is not, while making in full generality is.

5. On Removing Fishhooks From Your Heart

As you do this, do two things simultaneously as best you can: both A) concentrate hard on what it is you will not get to have or do at all, or at least any time soon - envision the thing vividly, getting to do the thing or have the thing or achieve the thing, and B) visualize the pain of the grief as a fishhook embedded in (e.g.) your heart, which is attached to a fishing line under tension.

6. Seven-ish Emotions From My Culture

5. A feeling of glory, of competence, of near-invulnerability. A sense of drive and power, that nothing could stop you from taking what you want and doing what you will in the world, of motion and dynamism, of the capacity to crash through obstacles and swat aside the slingstones and arrows of misfortune and disruption.

6. The gut-wrenching sick feeling of being delivered something wonderful that you’d stopped hoping for, that you forgot that you wanted, that you’d started resignedly trimming away your desire for. The feeling of getting everything you ever wanted too late, by a decade or by three months, too late for it to have the same resonance for you, or for you not to have started burning your hope for fuel just to keep warm.

7. Math Isn’t About Working Hard, It’s About Being Cleverly Lazy

Surely you need to work yourself to the bone doing it “the right way” just to keep up?

No! Absolutely not! If you try to pull that garbage you will end up doing a literally infinite amount of work!