Autism community(and those who think they might be), I am working on a new questionnaire and would love your input. If this comes across your feed, interact with this post and indicate your interest.

RT @psijonasa: As terapias da moda são herdeiras do iluminismo mais ingênuo. Acham que se você entender o seu problema cognitivamente, você…

Welcome to the internet. It’s a silly place where people talk about a topic they know nothing about, get everything about that topic wrong from every angle, and engage in a Dunning-Kruger circle jerk to firmly cement their delusion.

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving. Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these." "They just come with the table, man." They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner. This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat. I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared. "Did we…?" "Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless." Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude." Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy. Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived. I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most. Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Neat study that aligns with old data from the 90’s and early 2000’s. NPD would appear to be highly heritable.

Wash your face: How Jesus' Critique of public piety challenges moral masochism and performative virtue in the helping professions. Jesus had a lot to say about religious professionals who turned piety into performance. In the Sermon on the Mount he said: “When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6:16-18) The problem wasn’t the fasting. It was the public performance of suffering. The disfigured face serves as the visible self denial for the purpose of admiration and status. A similar criticism appears in Matthew 23, where Jesus accuses the scribes and Pharisees of straining out gnats(loads of effort for pushing out a tiny bit of poop) while swallowing camels. They obsessed over small displays of ritual purity and tithing while neglecting the more important matters of faithfulness, justice, and mercy. Much of today’s therapy has fallen into a similar pattern. There is growing pressure to indicate constant availability, limitless empathy, and visible, ongoing deconstruction of one’s own biases, internalized racism, misogyny, privilege, and other forms of complicity. Professional discourse, continuing education, and supervision often reward visible moral exhaustion as proof of ethical gravity. The more a therapist appears to sacrifice personal boundaries, rest, and private life, the more committed and trustworthy they are presumed to be. And where therapists should absolutely look at themselves regularly and deeply, this particular form of peacocking is, at best, ego stroking. This is moral masochism at its finest. It confuses personal depletion with moral depth, endurance with ethics, and public performance with genuine care. Therapists strain at gnats, high visibility statements of allyship, dramatic disclaimers of availability, and performative self interrogation. All this while swallowing the camel of widespread burnout, quiet resentment, and diminished capacity to actually help patients. But at what cost? When therapists operate from this place, patients encounter a subtle grandiosity, underlying fatigue, or pressure to perform gratitude for the therapist’s sacrifice. Helping someone with trauma, for example, is already demanding. It does not require therapists to become martyrs or to broadcast their inner work for professional applause. Honest self examination remains essential, including care and attention to biases and blind spots. This work is most ethical when it stays largely private, conducted in personal therapy, consultation, or quiet reflection, rather than turned into public theater. The quiet integrity Jesus described (the reward from the “Father who sees in secret”) sustains long-term practice far better than visible self flagellation. A healthier ethic for therapists would include: •Giving skilled, compassionate care within clear, sustainable boundaries •Treating rest and personal life as ethical necessities, not selfish luxuries •Pursuing genuine internal work without the need for public validation •Focusing on what actually serves the patient rather than what signals virtue to colleagues Patients do not need exhausted heroes who wear their depletion as a badge of honor. They need grounded, present, well resourced clinicians who can bear witness without being consumed by their own performance of goodness. In a profession increasingly drawn toward displays of moral superiority, the ancient call to wash your facemay be one of the most radical and necessary practices available.

My latest substack. open.substack.com/pub/davidp…

A high emu.

A phenomenon I’d love to study is the good communication then ghosting that occurs on Facebook marketplace. Seller: item for sale Me: I want item Seller: great. I still have it. Me: could I come get it today? Seller: sounds great Me: let me know what time and your address and I’ll be there Seller: *never responds again* I’ve also seen this the other direction with buyers. Kind of interesting.

Such a popular paraphrase that isn’t remotely accurate. Jung did speak of midlife, and did mention 35. But the quote(I believe) is: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death.” He never said one wouldn’t improve. He merely remarked further that since we basically have more years behind than ahead of us, at that point, clinging to the common first half of life strategies risks rigidity, neurosis, projection, and a shallow later life. He even saw the second half of life full of opportunity for deeper self-realization. Interpret him how you like(I suppose, you’d probably still be wrong), but at least quote him correctly.

The key pillars of the philosophy of science are: 1. Epistemology- the nature and limits of scientific knowledge 2. Metaphysics/Ontology- the fundamental nature of reality science investigates 3. Axiology- the role of values and ethics in science It’s sad how few know this.

Possibility ≠ Probability Possibility(what are my choices in a given moment) is very different than probability(likelihood that an event will occur, defined as a value between 0(impossible) and 1(certain). It’s the long run relative frequency of an event happening across repeated trials under identical conditions.

There's no reason for elephants to exist other than God's whimsy

To be clear, before anyone thinks this means a whole lot, these are specific experimental effects on preferences/ratings. These aren’t necessarily real world mate choices. Effect sizes aren’t huge. Replication and context matter (as with most psych studies).