Nicholas Johnson

Antiperfectionism

2026-03-15T00:00:00+0000

I’ve recently become more aware of how perfectionist I am, and how it affects my life.

Done is Better Than Perfect

I’ll explain by example. A few months ago, I started tracking my monthly spending so I could understand better where my money was going. I created a budget for myself using this lovely piece of software called GnuCash. Then I created dozens of accounts, put in my fixed assets and liabilities, entered each receipt as a set of transactions, and averaged my spending over time in order to create a realistic budget.

I followed my budget until I reached my financial goal. It sounds like everything went as intended, but recently something occurred to me: I didn’t need to use double-entry bookkeeping and track everything down to the last centavo to reach my financial goal. It was like using a bazooka to kill a fly. I could’ve met my goal by just doing a few rough calculations and changing some habits.

Trust me, there are many more examples I could give of me optimizing things that don’t need to be optimized, but I think I got my point across.

So why did I do it? I think it’s because I feel a compulsion to be highly precise about things, even when the need for such precision isn’t really there. And for me, that’s the essence of perfectionism—doing a huge amount of additional work to achieve a marginally better result.

Sometimes getting the best possible result is worth the additional work, but in most circumstances good enough is good enough. I have enough going on in my life that I can’t afford to waste time and energy perfecting everything anymore. Accepting this limitation has boosted my efficiency and reduced my stress. I’m able to get more done with less, because I’ve stopped hyperfixating on tiny details that don’t matter in the end.

Now whenever I get the urge to perfect my work, I just repeat my new mantra, “Done is better than perfect”, and leave it at that.

Decision-Making

The desire for perfection also extends to my decision-making. While there’s value in considering all my options and making decisions carefully, one eventually arrives at the point of diminishing returns. I’ve literally spent years considering and reconsidering my options without arriving at a decision. Doing that is not only unproductive, it’s stressful.

There are several problems with overcontemplation. The first is that the way you get better at making decisions isn’t by meticulously scrutinizing every possibility ad infinitum. It’s by taking a reasonable amount of time to consider your options, making a reasonably good decision, then seeing its results and iterating on them so you can make better decisions in the future.

The second difficulty with overcontemplation is that the best decision often isn’t even knowable in advance, due to limited information. So you’re expending cognitive resources that you could be using on other things, just to obtain the same result anyway.

The third concern with overcontemplation is that, unless you’re making a huge life decision, the difference between the best decision and a decent decision is marginal. I.e, making a decent decision instead of the best one isn’t going to radically alter the trajectory of your life, so it’s not worth worrying about.

I find that the same mantra I use for tasks can also be applied to decisions: “Done is better than perfect.” So lately, when I’m hesitating for too long, I just make up my mind. Because having a decision, even a bad one, often leads me to better outcomes in the end than having no decision at all. At least I can iterate on a bad decision. If the choice never even gets made, I won’t know if it’s good or bad, and I can’t iterate on it.

The Need to Finish a Task I’ve Started

Another OCD-like tendency of mine I’ve been working on is this need to work all the way from start to finish in everything I do. I tend to hyperfocus on one task until it’s complete, regardless how long it takes me to complete it, and I get very irritable if I’m interrupted and have to go do some other unrelated thing.

What I’ve realized recently is that my unwillingness to stop a task and resume it later is a direct result of having a small working memory and monotropic attention. What happens is this:

I realize I don’t have enough time to complete the task in one sitting.
Since I can’t complete the task in one sitting, I put it off hoping I’ll find that uninterrupted block of time later.
I keep putting off the task indefinitely, never finding that block of time because it doesn’t exist.
Eventually, I get so desperate that I begin the task anyway.
After I’ve begun the task, I have to finish it, so I neglect other things like my job, close relationships, and sleep, until the task is done.

Subdividing Tasks

One solution to the aforementioned chain of events I’ve been exploring is breaking up tasks into subtasks and completing those subtasks all at once.

The “subdivision strategy” lessens the overhead of resurrecting information into my limited working memory because each subtask demands less working memory than the full task, and I can just outsource tracking the full task to a system like GTD.

This strategy also mitigates my monotropic attention problem because there’s fewer interruptions—I’m able to find time to complete subtasks from start to finish more easily than I could find time to perform the entire task from start to finish. And I don’t end up starting the whole task at an inopportune time due to desperation.

Acknowledging My Priorities

Although I have a strategy now, there are still times when I have to interrupt what I’m doing and move on to something else. I’ve noticed that when I get absorbed in a task, I tend to lose sight of my other priorities. When that happens, I try to remember the bigger picture by telling myself:

“$CURRENT_TASK is not a priority.”
“$CURRENT_TASK doesn’t have to be completed right now.”
“I can come back to $CURRENT_TASK later after I do $OTHER_THING.”
“Not doing $CURRENT_TASK now will leave me something to look forward to later.”

This positive self-talk helps my brain not go into full-on panic mode whenever I’m interrupted.

Conclusion

I’m glad I was at least able to gain some self-awareness about my perfectionism and that I’m learning to allow the pendulum to swing back in the opposite direction. As always, thanks for reading and I hope this entry turns out to be useful for others out there who also struggle with perfectionism.

Create Opportunities for Good Things to Happen

2026-03-11T00:00:00+0000

I like the quote from Wayne Douglas Gretzky, which says:

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

It fits nicely with one of my life philosophies, best summarized as “create opportunities for good things to happen”. To me, that means shifting your focus away from outcomes, and towards the actions that make desired outcomes more likely.

For example, I hope to be healthy in the future, but nothing can guarantee that result. All I can do is eat healthy, exercise, practice good personal hygiene, do what the doctors tell me, and hope for the best. That way, even if I have very bad health in the future, I’ll know that I did everything I could on my end to increase my chances of a good outcome.

Many people want to change their lives for the better, but they’re not creating the possibility for those changes to happen. They’re not “taking the shots”. They want a different job, but they’re not even applying. They want a life partner, but they’re not putting themselves out there. They complain about the state of the world, but they’re not doing anything to make it better. They’re just sort of hoping life gives them what they want. And they’ll be waiting until the day they die.

Generally speaking, doing the same things produces more of the same outcomes, so if you want different outcomes in your life, you have to change. Maybe you tried a few times, and failed. Who cares? Nobody is keeping count. Try again. Perhaps pick a different strategy, or a smaller, more achievable goal.

I’m not saying it’s easy. It can take years of trial and error to even figure out what the right goal is. But as I said in Failing Forward:

“Every time you fail, you learn from your mistakes. As time goes on, you grow a thicker skin. The naysayers don’t bother you as much. You stop fearing your own failure. And even if you don’t ultimately achieve all of your goal, you still develop resilience, gain confidence, and you don’t live the rest of your life wondering “What if I had tried?””

My Imperfect Journal

2026-02-21T00:00:00+0000

If you’re like me, you occasionally get the urge to trash your old projects and start over from scratch. The thinking goes “With what I know now, I could do better the next time around.” Sometimes that’s a good idea. Other times you’re just suffering from an unhealthy unattainable desire for perfection like me.

I’ve spent more hours writing and rewriting text messages than I’d ever like to admit, in an effort to make them “perfect”. I know it makes no sense to waste my time that way, but I still do it anyway as if I’m being graded.

The same drive that causes me to obsess over my texts has caused me to consider remaking this journal from scratch as well. There are things I’d do differently if I started over. But I’m not going to start over, because a few thoughts have convinced me that it’s better to just make peace with its imperfections.

One of those thoughts is that, in 2031, future me may look back on recent entries the same way current me sees the entries I wrote back in 2021—I’ll want to delete them and start over from scratch. I’d be restarting every few years, and it would still never be good enough. I’d be very put off by any other online content creator doing that, so it makes no sense to do it myself.

A big mistake I made with this journal thanks to my perfectionism was changing its domain name numerous times. It went from 0gitnick.xyz to nicksphere.com to nicksphere.ch to nicholasjohnson.ch. That’s too much rebranding. It’s best to just pick a decent domain and stick with it than to change it every few years because you found a better one. To have an audience, people need to know how to find you online easily. Your links can’t be changing all the time.

Another thought that keeps me from giving into perfectionism is that my writing reflects my evolution over time as a person, thinker, and writer. That in and of itself is valuable, and it’s one reason I prefer writing new entries rather than deleting and rewriting the old ones. It’s nice to be able to see how far I’ve come, even if some of my old entries make me cringe.

And finally, I’m comforted by the fact that there are still plenty of improvements I can make to this journal without tearing it all down and starting over. New entries can be made better by improving my writing and including more images and videos to make the content more dynamic. I can focus more on topics readers are likely to find interesting. This journal can be made available in other languages so it reaches a wider audience. I’ve already begun using a grammar checker to avoid spelling errors. And none of these improvements require undoing any work I’ve already done.

To conclude, I’m content with this imperfect journal, and I’m going to keep working on it as is. Being five years into this project, I acknowledge that deleting everything and starting from scratch isn’t a good use of my time. There will always be things I can do to improve my projects. The challenge isn’t removing every imperfection. Rather, it’s letting go of perfectionism so that something that is pretty good can be allowed to exist.

Thanks to all of you who read my journal, and I’m looking forward to writing many more entries this year.

My Political Philosophy

2025-12-20T00:00:01+0000

I recently realized that although I’ve discussed certain of my political opinions in detail on this journal, I’ve never stated my overall political philosophy. Thus I’ve received feedback from people who have read probably one or two of my journal entries that leaned toward a particular political philosophy, and wrongly concluded that my political philosophy was something that it wasn’t. In order to have something to point towards in the future, I will state my political philosophy in this entry. Here I go…

The state is necessary to enforce laws, protect individual rights, safeguard personal property, enforce environmentally sustainable resource management, solve large-scale coordination problems, and many other critical tasks. The state should protect individual rights like freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of (and from!) religion, and personal privacy. The state should provide people infrastructure, education, healthcare, and due process of law. Everybody must be equal under the law. There should not be privileged individuals who don’t have to follow it.

The legitimacy of the government and its laws comes from the consent of the governed. To ensure continual consent of the governed, the government must be democratic. Democracy can take many different forms, but that basic requirement—that the people get the final word on how they’re governed—must be satisfied. If the government no longer serves the people who it rules, then that government is illegitimate and should be replaced.

The state should be secular—not endorsing any particular religion (or lack thereof). This way, everyone feels comfortable practicing whichever religion they choose. Since public education is an extension of the state, no religious doctrine can be taught as truth in any public school. It’s fine to learn about different religious beliefs and critically analyze them in public schools though.

It is a good thing to have people of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, age groups, languages, genders, opinions, and experiences all living together, enabled by their assent to the same basic rules and tolerance of each others’ differences. That form of diversity makes society stronger and more interesting. Bad diversity is when people can’t agree on the basic operating principles of society such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equality under the law, pluralism, etc. Bad diversity erodes the core tenants on which the society functions. Immigration law should be written with this framework in mind.

Fascism and authoritarianism must be avoided, because they deprive individuals of important freedoms. They also don’t get the consent of the governed, which results in a government that serves a small elite class over its citizens. As an aside, this is exactly what’s happening in the US right now. People have been duped into throwing away the core tenants of democracy to support a narcissistic authoritarian moron who they think can solve all their problems. (Spoiler: he won’t, and he’s make everything worse)

The state should maintain a criminal justice system predicated on the understanding that free will is incoherent, and thus even the worst people are just malfunctioning robots not ultimately responsible for their actions. It should rehabilitate them rather than making them worse, emulating the Norwegian prison model.

Liberals and progressives would agree with most of what I’ve said so far, but that’s because I haven’t mentioned the economy yet. Since work is necessary for society to function and the legitimacy of power comes from the consent of those whom it’s exercised over, the state must enforce workplace democracy to ensure work is the least coercive it can be.

Exceptions may be allowed for small businesses, the military, etc, but the general expectation should be that workplaces are democratic entities. For workplace democracy to mean anything, the means of production have to be collectively owned and controlled. Markets are fine, but some industries such as healthcare and utilities should not be left to market forces. They should be managed by the government.

The government must provide a welfare state adequate for taking care of those who don’t work. As more jobs become automated, the welfare state must scale to cover the needs of the increasing number of people who are not working. It could scale through a progressive tax or collective ownership of the robots, for example. The point is that nobody should need to rely on charity or work bullshit jobs to survive.

So there you have it. That’s my political philosophy. If I had to assign myself labels, I’d say “progressive” and “democratic socialist” are the most fitting. Since this is a broad overview, I avoided going into much detail on specific topics, but this should suffice to give people who know nothing about me a general idea of where I stand politically.

Should You Cut Ties With People Over Politics?

2025-12-20T00:00:00+0000

My Personal Approach

The idea that two people can disagree about politics, but still be friends and have a beer together, is true to an extent. But as many have found out the hard way, there comes a point where “live and let live” doesn’t work anymore, and one either has to find common ground or cut ties. Whether to cut ties is a difficult question to navigate and I don’t have a single definitive answer. I will talk about how I deal with it personally though.

In my case, it’s less about the opinions themselves, whether they be “political” or otherwise, and more about what they say about the person’s value structure and intelligence.

Value Structure Incompatibility

For example, supporting policies which benefit oneself at the expense of others, even when one is aware of the outcome of said policy, is revealing of one’s value structure. “I got mine. To hell with everybody else.” In this case, there’s nothing I can say to convince them to change their mind, because it’s a difference of the heart.

I assume that when someone does something to another person, they’d also do it to me. So what’s to say they wouldn’t screw me over too when it benefited them? Even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be out of a stable and enduring concern for my well being, but from the brittle framework of their own self-interest. Everybody is selfish in their personal lives sometimes, but being in favor of selfishness at the policy level is to be in favor of systematic oppression. That reveals something so disturbing about one’s values that I’m uncomfortable associating with that person.

Intelligence Gap

The other issue for me is intelligence. People can be highly intelligent in several domains, yet still hold stupid beliefs about other things. What I’ve found is that there are certain kinds of intelligence that are indispensable for me to feel good around someone. There’s also a baseline level of general intelligence that someone needs to possess for me to be able to have a meaningful relationship with them.

One of the kinds of intelligence I demand of close friends is emotional intelligence. By that I mean awareness of one’s own emotions, awareness of the emotions of others, recognizing one’s effect on others’ emotions, the ability to communicate one’s needs and emotions in an honest adult manner, etc. If someone refers to women as “femoids” or expresses the opinion that crying is a sign of weakness, I’d bet one-hundred to one odds that they lack the qualities I just mentioned.

As far as general intelligence, having a bad memory, sucking at math, or having a learning disability are not disqualifiers in my book. But if I find out that someone voted for Donald Trump and doesn’t regret it, I’m not comfortable having a relationship with them, because their judgement of character is clearly severely compromised. I don’t know whether they’re trapped inside a well-funded misinformation bubble, they think politics is just epic memes, or something else is wrong with them. Either way, I don’t want to deal with it.

I consider myself intelligent and thoughtful, and I want to associate with other intelligent and thoughtful people. Having chauvinists, racists, holocaust deniers, flat-earthers, and Trump supporters as friends doesn’t interest me, because holding those beliefs usually indicates that either their general intelligence is too low for us to easily relate and communicate to each other, or we have very incompatible core values.

Other Approaches

That’s just me though, and my approach is not the only one. For contrast, there’s a black man named Daryl Davis who used to go around befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. I’m not sure if he still does it, but he claims to be responsible for over two hundred people leaving the organization. Hats off to him and his massive pair of balls, but it just goes to show that different people are different, and there isn’t one right answer.

I, as an autistic person, have no interest in befriending ableists to change their way of thinking. I do however think there’s some social benefit to be had in maintaining relationships with those who possess incompatible values or lack certain important kinds of intelligence. I’m just not the right person for that.

Oftentimes, people with differing political ideologies possess similar intrinsic values. They’re just mixed up about their extrinsic values, which they can be reasoned out of. That’s why it’s probably best that dumb people hear from smart people sometimes. Anecdotally, people have turned away from religion and superstitious thinking towards a more rational worldview as a byproduct of being around me for an extended period of time. So don’t think it’s right to turn away everybody who thinks differently.

To conclude, I’ll reiterate what I said in the beginning. It’s complicated. Everybody is different. I don’t have any hard-and-fast rules to offer, just my own perspective. I hope it’s been helpful.

Please Disclose AI Contributions to Your Work

2025-11-30T00:00:00+0000

If you’re working on a creative project that others will see, such as an online journal like mine, please disclose A.I. contributions to your work.

I personally have very little interest in creative works like books, websites, blogs, movies, music, and artwork that was produced by A.I. and I think many people feel similarly. We like getting to know the human(s) behind those works, through their works. We like discovering what motivated them to create it and what experiences they had that went into it.

We know that A.I. could produce it a million times faster and better, but the process by which it was created also matters to us. As I said back in my entry “Automation and the Meaning of Work”, there are certain activities people just don’t want to be automated, even if they can be automated and the end product is better by some objective measure.

So to respect that wish, if you use A.I. tools in the course of your creative work, the least you can do is make the nature of their contribution known to those who might find your work so that they can choose for themselves if they’re interested in it. I’ll lead by example:

I don’t use A.I. tools to write this journal, nor do I plan to. I don’t use A.I. tools to generate ideas for writing either—I prefer to come up with ideas myself. In the past, I used an automated tool, which included an NLP library, to detect and correct grammatical mistakes. I wasn’t restructuring whole paragraphs with it. I write without LLMs because I enjoy writing and because I want to give my readers the chance to get to know me through my writing, as opposed to what some LLM thinks the next word should be.

Store Now Decrypt Later Isn't Taken Seriously Enough

2025-11-23T00:00:00+0000

There is always the possibility that some new mathematical technique breaks existing encryption algorithms. We should not therefore say that all encryption is insecure. Rather, we should change our conception to reflect that encryption has an expiration date. A lock is the most common analogy for encryption, and it’s fine for helping beginners grasp the concept, but a countdown timer is more apt in this context.

The countdown timer represents how long encrypted data will stay secret for. It has no markings on it for us to know how long until its dial reaches zero (representing the data becoming decryptable), so we can only estimate. Following that analogy, using classical encryption instead of hybrid encryption (classical + quantum-resistant) is like winding back the dial halfway when you could wind it back all the way.

There’s software out there whose users’ data is vulnerable to store now, decrypt later attacks in the near term not as a result of the aforementioned inevitable mathematical advances, but rather due to the software developers just not winding back the dial all the way (using quantum-secure libraries).

We don’t know how soon practical Shor-capable quantum computers will hit the scene, but there are good reasons to suspect that they’re not far off. So developers should anticipate that any data sent today using classical encryption algorithms might be intercepted and retroactively decrypted in the near future.

If you’re a developer, it is irresponsible to subject users to this risk when it can be avoided. There are quantum-secure cryptographic libraries available for mitigating it. Too many software projects that don’t need backwards compatibility still lack quantum-resistant encryption and still market their software as private and secure. I think some gatekeeping is in order…

If you’re writing software that transmits sensitive data over the internet in current year and it has no compatibility requirements and isn’t quantum-resistant, then it’s not private or secure and marketing it as such is false advertising.

Journal Update 29: Git Annex, Signed Commits, and Axing Email

2025-11-17T00:00:00+0000

What’s New

Maintenance

Readopted Git Annex for tracking large binary files. I ceased using it in 2022 because I misperceived it as overly complex, but it works pretty well actually. No one was going to leech the torrents anyways and I certainly wasn’t seeding them.
Removed my contact email from the about page. I was only keeping it for Git patches, which can just as easily be sent over SimpleX, my preferred messaging protocol. This change saves me the overhead of running an email server, rotating DKIM keys, etc.
Started signing Git commits directly instead of signing Git tags. I thought I needed to sign the tags due to git-signify, but there’s no need.
Added a README. I didn’t want familiarity with Hugo and Git Annex to be a requirement for reproducing this journal, so I just spelled out the commands there.
Changed entry dates to “day month year” because it’s my personal preference.

Certificate Expiry

The certificate for this journal’s ICANN site mirror expired weeks ago. I didn’t notice it until today. It turned out to be an issue with Certbot’s autorenewal failing.

This could’ve been detected sooner or even prevented by having monitoring and observability. If I had my server configuration documented as code, I may have noticed the issue beforehand, or already implemented monitoring and observability. Yet another reason to automate server configuration, in addition to the reasons I gave in my prior journal update.

Future Plans

Automate server configuration (Gemini capsule, website, SimpleX, CGit, etc)

Coming up with more tags to add to existing journal entries is no longer in my future plans. It’s just not how I want to spend my time.

How to Maximize Your Positive Impact

2025-10-26T00:00:00+0000

Inspired By Aaron Swartz

I’d like to cite Aaron Swartz as a source of inspiration for this entry. I don’t have heroes, but if I did, he’d be mine. He is deceased now, but he was more like myself than any other public figure I’m aware of and he had very similar long-term life goals. Here’s a collection of quotes from him I picked that I believe best exemplify his outlook on life:

“Growing up, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, they weren’t natural at all. They were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change, and once I realized that, there was really no going back.”

“Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.”

“What is “this drive”? It’s the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual.”

How to Maximize Your Positive Impact

One of the important problems Aaron grappled with, that all good activists must grapple with, is how to maximize his own positive impact on the world.

Anyone can have a positive impact on the world. You can go straight to the nearest soup kitchen and lend a helping hand right now. But you could also become a policy wonk and try to change economic policy so that charity isn’t necessary, and you’d help many more people that way if you could accomplish it.

You could become a doctor and save lives. But you could also donate money to charities that distribute food and vaccines in third-world countries. You wouldn’t have the respect and prestige of being a doctor, but you’d potentially save more lives than entire hospitals in the developed world.

But if you’re working on A.I. and you manage to contribute an idea to the field that allows us to simulate quintillions of happy humans for trillions of simulated years, and to do this several years earlier than we would’ve been able to without your contribution, that would outweigh the entire collective good of all volunteers, doctors, and everyone else who performed good acts through all of history.

Since we all have our own unique passions and abilities, the answer for how to maximize our positive impact in the world is different for each one of us. For some people, working in a soup kitchen is the best way they can help. For others like Aaron Swartz, their time isn’t best spent in soup kitchens. They can have a much greater positive impact on many more people by doing other things.

For picking a cause, I’d suggest something close to your heart. In my case, that would be autism and digital privacy. This will help you stay motivated to work on it over the long term, and it’ll feel personally meaningful to you.

To decide what to do for your cause to have the greatest possible impact requires careful research. You need to know what’s most needed, and what you’re capable of. When you’re doing the research, it’s important to be aware of the broader context of your cause. For example, what are the major barriers preventing your cause from succeeding, and how does your cause play into other social causes and vice versa? The reason that’s so important is because if you don’t have this bird’s-eye view, you risk tunnel vision, and also wasting time and effort on projects that just end up being nullified by some technological or social paradigm shift later on.

So that’s my basic advice for how to maximize your positive impact. Others have thought about this question as well, and have some ideas worth discussing.

Effective Altruism (EA)

The organization 80,000 Hours, part of the broader Effective Altruism (EA) movement, has put a lot of thought into the question of how to maximize impact. They’ve published a framework for selecting a cause, a document for assessing the impact of a career, and their founders and members also have several books out on the subject that you should consider reading. I suggest reading some of it just to get yourself thinking critically about the topic.

Philosophy Tube

If you do read EA material, you must also watch Philosophy Tube’s video essay compiling criticisms of EA as an organization, and as a philosophy.

One of the criticisms against EA as a movement outlined in the video is that EA has an observability bias. By limiting itself to evidence-based remedies, it’s always working within the system, potentially reinforcing the (difficult to measure) root causes of the problems it purports to solve. In only recommending “evidence-based” ways to do good, it discounts other unquantifiable options that may do far greater good.

For example, EA would recommend getting a job in finance to have more money to give to the poor. This is evidence-based because you can quantify how much you’re helping, but there are several problems with it:

It’s not a solution—you will never fix wealth inequality or poverty this way
It ignores unquantifiable ways that this strategy may worsen the situation (Where is this money coming from? Might charity give people the idea that systemic solutions aren’t needed?)

EA wouldn’t recommend replacing capitalism with something else because that’s not “evidence-based”—any time you’re dealing with messy human group behavior, it’s not so easy to consistently replicate let alone quantify how much good it does compared to alternatives. The problem with discounting these more complete solutions is that very few of them are “evidence-based” in the sense of being quantifiable and measurable as EA demands, the “evidence-based” mitigations ultimately don’t cut it, and many existing systems aren’t really evidence-based anyways. So at some point, we need to take the leap of faith and make our best guess based on everything we know even if there’s no hard data to guarantee success.

In my opinion, EA as a philosophy has some interesting ideas, especially relating to longtermism and existential risk, but what it promotes as an organization and as a movement is too business-friendly. It seems to be a modern version of Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth, which emphasizes that the rich (or the fortunate, in the EA context) have a responsibility to use their money wisely to benefit the rest of society, but avoids challenging the underlying economic system which creates these inequalities in the first place.

My Thoughts

If you’re interested in my “activism journey”, you can read my entry “A Retrospective on My Free Software Absolutism”. In it, I mention a book titled “The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way”. I highly recommend this book and I wish I would’ve read it before I tried to make a positive impact on the world. I also come to the conclusion that “the fight for free software (or most other social causes) is [not] winnable as long as the overriding economic incentives of capitalism are present.” I think many activists eventually come to the same realization as they become more aware of the larger upstream forces affecting their cause.

To be clear, this same logic doesn’t apply to all social causes. There are occasionally large and small unexpected wins despite capital influence. Additionally, there are social causes that aren’t, in principle, in conflict with capitalism. So don’t interpret this as me saying nothing can be done until capitalism is replaced. Keep in mind that capitalism isn’t the only major upstream blocker of social progress. They all play into each other, but if we could perfectly isolate them I’d say it’s the most significant one at the moment that we must overcome in order to actually win the war for major causes, and not just a select few battles.

Like many prominent EA members, I’m pretty utilitarian in my values, and thus a fan of taking that approach to doing good. But I think it’s not hard to start an EA-style initiative, acquire funding from rich folks, and get media attention and clout, while not really moving the needle in the long term. I think there should be more attention directed towards testing new systemic solutions to big problems, and not towards existing workarounds (like charity) that are “evidence-based”, but will never be sufficient.

If you’re thinking about how to maximize your positive impact on the world, I hope you’ll take some time to consider everything I’ve mentioned here and read some other sources that I’ve linked here as well. If you have any questions before starting your own activism journey or you’ve already started it but you’re having doubts, feel free to contact me.

Use Notifications To Check Your Phone Less

2025-10-17T00:00:00+0000

In my entry “Why I Don’t Have a Smartphone”, I wrote:

“… [my smartphone] was in airplane mode unless I was making a call. It was always on silent with no vibration. Unless I deliberately pulled it out, it couldn’t interrupt my day.”

I think my goal of spending less time on distracting technology was worthwhile, but that keeping one’s phone always on silent with no vibration is not a practical way to achieve that for most people. Since writing that entry, I’ve started using a smartphone again and I’ve had to change the way I handle notifications as well since having it always on silent is no longer practical for me either.

I have notifications turned on now because I noticed that when I had them off, I was constantly checking my phone every few minutes to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. With notifications turned on, I don’t need to poll my phone, because I’ll hear a ding if something important happens. If I haven’t heard a ding, I know I don’t need to check it. So if I only use my phone either when I receive a notification or when there’s something important I need to do on it, I know that I’m making good use of it. Otherwise, I know I’m probably wasting my time.

If you’re interested in replicating my notification strategy, you must curate your notification settings first on a per-app basis as I do. If you stick with the default notification settings for every app you have installed, you’ll get pinged for many unimportant things and it won’t help as much with checking your phone less. This isn’t hard to remedy, and you don’t have to fix it all at once. Each time you receive an unwanted notification, just go into settings and disable it. Eventually, all unwanted notifications will be gone. Repeat the process as you download new apps. The goal is to disable as many notifications as you can without falling back to constantly checking your phone.

To close, I want to comment that I think that in popular media, there’s too much focus on reducing total time spent on one’s smartphone, and too little focus on making sure the time is well-spent. The common recommendations to check one’s screen time or look at which apps you’re using the most don’t necessarily give much insight into whether you’re making good use of the time. For instance, if you spend four hours per day on your smartphone, that might seem like a lot, but if you’re using it to read a book or practice a foreign language, that time isn’t wasted. If you’re just autoplaying YouTube videos or mindlessly scrolling through infinite feeds during breakfast, that’s a different story.

As I’ve said before and I want to emphasize again here, I don’t think telling every individual person to just be more disciplined and find new strategies each time a distracting technology comes out is a substitute for real, systemic solutions that address the challenges created by these technologies. If we’re going to have smartphones, they need to be non-distracting and non-addictive by default by design. In the meantime though, hopefully the notification strategy I’ve outlined here can help some people.

Autism is a Spectrum

2025-09-20T00:00:00+0000

What does it mean exactly that autism is a “spectrum”? To me, it means that there are constellations of autistic traits, which different autistic people exhibit to varying degrees. For example:

I am hypersensitive to noise and light. Some autistic people aren’t hypersensitive to noise and light, but are hypersensitive to other things.
I am very high in masking. Some autistic people don’t mask at all.
I have a high systematizing quotient—I think in terms of systems. Some autistic people don’t.
I have poor short-term memory. Some autistic people have excellent short-term memory.
I had no speech delay in my developmental years. Some autistic people never learn to speak.

Imagine how many possible combinations of autistic traits there are. This is why you can’t effectively represent autism by thinking of something akin to a number line. Unfortunately, autism is often misperceived as a linear condition, ranging from barely autistic on one end to very autistic on the other end. I think this way of thinking about and talking about autism causes confusion because it obscures the multidimensionality of it. That’s why I’m a fan of the term “autism spectrum” instead.

And I think we should talk about the autism spectrum like we do pregnancy. You’re either pregnant, or you’re not. You’re either somewhere on the autism spectrum, or you’re not. There’s not much middle ground there. Just because there are many types of pregnancy doesn’t imply that “Everybody is a little bit pregnant.” Similarly, that there are different combinations of autistic traits doesn’t mean we should say “Everybody is a little autistic.” Most people aren’t autistic.

Obviously we still need a way to differentiate the kind of autism that expresses itself as social awkwardness with genius-level intellect versus the kind that expresses itself in non-verbal people who can’t tie their shoes. For that, I prefer to consider the level of extra support someone requires to meet their day-to-day needs. While different supports may be required for different autistic people, the overall level of extra support needed is a useful way to differentiate “levels” or “types” of autism without losing sight of the true multidimensionality of the broader autism spectrum.

As a final note, just because someone doesn’t use my verbiage for autism doesn’t make them ableist. My terminology is not without its own pitfalls. What matters most is that people understand autism, not that they use all the right words all the time. I’m not the final word on which words people should use to refer to this condition. I think there’s plenty of room for disagreement here. I just wanted to talk about why I prefer “the autism spectrum” over other popular terminology that has been used.

Charlie Kirk Was a Hateful Piece of Shit

2025-09-16T00:00:00+0000

With mainstream MAGA figures calling for revenge for their side, some outright calling for civil war, and morally grandstanding over the violence enacted against Charlie Kirk whilst all major left-wing media universally condemn the violence, I think the least the left should do is not whitewash Charlie Kirk’s toxic legacy out of indiscriminate reverence for the dead. Let’s be honest about who Charlie Kirk was.

Charlie Kirk preached hatred and division. He peddled racist conspiracy theories, dangerous misinformation about Covid among other things, and religious intolerance. He was unashamedly anti-gay, anti-trans, racist, and sexist. He used the freedoms apportioned to him by liberal democracy to erode liberal democracy. He did not model open healthy debate. He picked on weaker debate opponents and even then employed bad-faith tactics when he was losing the argument. Charlie Kirk not only fanned the flames of political division, he profited off of it. He, along with other MAGA grifters, ultimately fomented the political environment that got him killed.

However many people show up to his candlelight vigils, however many prayers and moments of silence take place for him, however many American flags fly at half-mast, none of that will change the fact that Charlie Kirk was a hateful piece of shit who deserves none of that. While I do not condone his assassination, the US and the world almost certainly would’ve been made a better place if he’d died by a fatal stroke that day instead, or had simply never been born in the first place.

To those who would respond, “Have some humanity. He was a father and a husband. Just because he didn’t say the right words about politics doesn’t make him a bad guy.” actually, it does. Any good he did in his personal life is overshadowed by all the damage he caused in his public life. This idea that you can say whatever you want about politics, and at the end of the day we should still be able to shake hands and have mutual respect for each other is delusional. Politics has real effects on real people’s lives. Believing and spreading hateful political ideology isn’t magically separate from your goodness as a person.

Neurotypicals Lack Empathy Towards Autistic People

2025-08-24T00:00:01+0000

Poor Treatment of Autistics by Neurotypicals

Have you had neurotypicals repeat nonsense to you about autism? Have you tried to educate them about your condition, but they just won’t listen?

Do they pick apart every little quirk you have, then simultaneously insist that you can’t possibly be autistic and everybody is a little autistic? Do they outright deny easily verifiable facts about autism? Do they refuse to educate themselves about it, or even obligate you to educate them, only to argue with everything you say?

Or maybe they agree to look at the information, but cherry pick the parts that seem to support their conclusion that you’re either not autistic, you’re not that autistic, or the behavior you do that they don’t like can’t be attributed to autism. Like with many other neurological conditions, you present a constellation of traits, not all the traits all the time. However, they read on Facebook that “autistic people are organized”, so that time when you forgot something is irrefutable evidence that you can’t be autistic.

Do they use euphemisms like “weird”, “different”, “strange”, or “stubborn” when referring to autistic behavior? When you try to explain your behavior in terms of autism, do they act like you’re justifying it and accuse you of making excuses? Do they supposedly know another autistic person who doesn’t exhibit the behavior you do, and use that as proof that your behavior isn’t autism-related, as if all autistic people were the same?

If they concede you’re autistic, do they maintain a strict distinction, criticizing the behaviors they dislike by insisting that’s “you”, not “the autism”? Does it feel like “all roads lead to Rome” with them in the sense that they somehow always find a way to shift the entire burden of change back to you, the autistic person?

Can their mindset be summarized as follows: “You’re the one who is different, so you should adapt to society, not the other way around. I don’t have these problems with anybody else, so you must be the problem. All these people have problems with you, you’re the common factor. If you’re struggling, it’s your fault. If others are struggling with you, it’s because you just don’t know how to communicate or you’re being difficult.”

If they offer any sympathy towards your general direction, is it exclusively for your parents, coworkers, or anyone who has to be around you? If you solicit any sympathy at all, is it met with an immediate negative reaction where you’re reminded how difficult you are to deal with and that you should be more grateful? If you live with them, are there minor adjustments they could make to greatly improve your quality of life, but they refuse to even try?

If you relate to the above, the most important thing for you to know first and foremost is that this isn’t your fault. You’re just dealing with people who don’t give a fuck about autistic people. Now let me dissect some of their behaviors to shed some light on what’s going on.

Neurotypical Justifications for Poor Treatment of Autistics

Let’s start with the way they think. If you try to understand it in terms of evaluating the evidence, then using logic to come to a conclusion based on that evidence, you’re not going to understand because that’s not what they’re doing. They’re doing the exact opposite. They start with their conclusion, then retroactively perceive the facts as confirming what they’ve already concluded and ignore any evidence that contradicts their conclusion. This is why giving them more information only seems to solidify their conclusion.

So the next most natural question is “Where does the motivation for this motivated reasoning come from?” Well, basically everything they say about autism is a big hint to answer that question.

When they insist that you should adapt to “society” rather than the other way around, they are presenting a false dilemma where the only two options are either you fully adapt to society or society fully adapts to you. A middle ground is not considered. And the conclusion is that since you are the one who is different, it’s unfair to ask everybody else to change, so you should adapt.

This reasoning is very faulty though. For one, autistic people fully adapting to neurotypical society on our own is not possible. For two, we’re usually with only a few other people at a time, and they are the ones refusing to make any effort to accommodate us, not society as a whole. For three, there’s a hidden assumption that accommodating our needs is zero-sum. But in fact, it’s often positive-sum.

They don’t consider any of that though because they don’t care if it makes logical sense. They’re just looking for a sequence of words they can string together that justifies them treating you unfairly, without admitting what they’re doing outright. When they talk about “society”, that’s really code for “them”. What they really want to say is “I am not willing to meet you even ten percent of the way, but I expect you to go one-hundred percent of the way for me.” They’ll never come out and say that, because that’s obviously unfair. That’s why it gets dressed up as a half-baked logical-sounding argument instead.

It’s for the same reason that they criticize your behavior using euphemisms for autism, but they’ll never admit autism has anything to do with it. They don’t want to think of themselves as discriminating, therefore if your behavior bothers them, it can’t be related to autism. And if they ever admit it is related, they’ll immediately put the burden of change right back on you by insisting it’s your responsibility to overcome your autism somehow.

The crux of it is that they want to avoid the responsibility for meeting you in the middle. They want you to make all the compromises and then blame you if you don’t, without being seen as an asshole. That’s where all their mental gymnastics and justifications come from. That’s why they complain endlessly about your autistic traits and then deny you have autism, say you’re not that autistic, they know an autistic person who doesn’t do that, your behavior isn’t caused by the autism, etc. In effect, you’re dealing with a bigot who doesn’t want to admit to themselves that they’re a bigot.

In my own experience, the most common reason for this bigotry is that neurotypicals lack empathy towards autistic people, and more generally anyone who is too different from them.

What exactly do I mean that they lack empathy? For example, you may have noticed neurotypicals can be very empathetic towards others going through challenges they can relate to, such as break ups with a romantic partner. But when it comes to challenges autistic people face, such as feeling deeply misunderstood by everyone or sensory sensitivity, suddenly they show complete disregard. Suddenly, that’s your problem, you need to deal with it on your own, and you shouldn’t expect support from anybody else, especially not them.

Just to be crystal clear, the reason I say neurotypicals lack empathy toward those of us who are different is not because it’s hard for them to understand us, or that they don’t adapt to us. It’s the utter disregard, and the double standard. They don’t even try to understand us or adapt to us, yet they demand that we autistics change our entire beings to make them more comfortable, and it’s still not good enough.

How can we fix this failure of empathy?

Ending the Poor Treatment of Autistic People

In your personal life, I wouldn’t hold out hope. For your own sanity, it’s probably best to just give up and cut the person off. If you still want to try though, you should engage with them on an emotional level. Talk to them about how they feel about it. Giving them more information will never work, because their emotions will drive motivated reasoning which will only convince them that they’re right even more.

On a societal level, I think there needs to be more research focus on figuring out what improves autism acceptance and implementing those findings. More education about autism at a young age would be good. Having more representation in films, TV shows, etc that isn’t just stereotypes would also be good.

The problem now is that the focus is in the wrong place. As always, all the responsibility is put on the autistic person, trying to force us to be like everybody else while most neurotypicals refuse, on principle, to even try to accommodate us. So we have to shift the focus. Instead of asking “How can we make this autistic person seem more normal?” let’s instead ask “How can we make society more inclusive of those who are different?”

Against the Stigma of Living With Your Parents as an Adult

2025-08-24T00:00:00+0000

In American culture, there’s still a lot of stigma around living with your parents as an adult, even if you’re contributing to the family unit financially. I think this stigma is slowly going away due to an increasing recognition of economic hardship, but its presence can certainly still be felt, especially with older people who might be out of touch. They assume that if you live with your parents beyond a certain age, you’re not independent, you’re not worthy of equal respect, you’re not a grown up, you can’t stand on your own two feet, that you’re a loser basically.

This stigma should not exist. It is beyond stupid that, to be treated as a respectable adult by some, you have to spend an outrageous portion of your paycheck on shelter while possibly trying to pay off expensive student loans as well. Consider who benefits from this extreme overemphasis on individualism…

Americans may be surprised to learn that this stigma isn’t present in many other parts of the world such as Asia, Africa, South America, and the rest of Latin America. I live in Mexico, where it’s common for adults to live at home until they find a partner. No one thinks less of you for it, and it makes a lot of sense:

It’s easier to take care of your aging parents
It’s easier to recruit help in the event of a medical emergency
You have an emotional support system nearby
You save money not paying rent / mortgage payments
Resources can be pooled together (money, vehicles, appliances, skills, etc)
Household chores can be divided so each person has less to do

I understand not everyone gets all these benefits from living with their parents. Everyone’s family situation is unique, it’s a trade-off in the end, and everyone makes their own individual calculation on whether to stay or go. I’m just pointing out that there are good reasons to live with your parents as an adult, this fact is obvious to much of the world, and it needs to be recognized more in the US.

Praise Be to GTD

2025-08-15T00:00:00+0000

I’m the sort of person who always has a hundred things going on at once.

I have pending tasks for myself, tasks I’m waiting on somebody else to do, appointments, meetings, hobbies, projects, side projects, potential future projects, short-term and long-term goals, scheduled activities which require following detailed up-to-date instructions, miscellaneous stuff I want to do someday, and things that I may never get around to but want to keep note of.

There’s no possible way I could keep all of it in my head.

I used to not have a cohesive system for organizing it all. I relied either on my own faulty biological memory, notes in random places, lists I seldom checked, or tricks so that I wouldn’t need to remember it. For instance, in university I used to study the material on the same day we were introduced to it so I wouldn’t have to remember when the test date was. I used to do homework the same day as well so that I didn’t need to remember when it was due. That strategy can work, but it’s not very robust. You still have to remember what you need to do until you complete it, which I didn’t always manage. I sometimes forgot homework and even class itself.

Even after university, I used to get very overwhelmed when I had a lot to do at once. I’d get upset when someone started talking to me, fearing that I might forget something important. Sometimes I’d be like that for days at a time where nobody could talk to me. The word that comes to mind to describe it is… dysfunctional.

That all changed a few years ago when I found out about the GTD system from someone who reads my journal. I felt an initial resistance to adopting it because it seemed complex, but decided to give it a shot anyways, and now I swear by it. It has significantly improved my ability to manage multiple things simultaneously without stressing, and I don’t forget important tasks nearly as much as I used to. I think the most important thing GTD has done for me is free up my brainpower for the current task by allowing me to drop everything else.

GTD is technology-agnostic, so I chose to implement it on my phone using a calendar app and a notes app. The calendar holds everything I need to do at a specific time. It allows me to schedule events, set event reminders, insert related information such as event location or what to bring, track my progress by marking tasks as complete, color code different types of tasks or events, and filter them by type.

Anything without a fixed time goes into my notes app. It has directories laid out according to the categories in the GTD system. The most important directories I have are “next actions” to keep track of what I need to do next, “waiting for” for things that I’m waiting on someone else to do, “projects” for plans that require several “next actions” to be performed, “inbox” for anything I need to note down but don’t have time to categorize right then and there, and “documentation” to document how to perform certain actions that require multiple steps.

I also have a “horizons” file with my medium- and long-term goals written out in lists. It contains near-term areas of focus too, which are designed to put me on the trajectory to accomplishing those longer-term goals. And all the day-to-day stuff I keep in the “projects”, “next actions”, and “waiting for” directories is designed to help me satisfy these near-term areas of focus. To summarize, it’s a hierarchy of goals organized by time horizon. This helps me track progress, find areas for improvement, and see the big picture.

As you might have gathered by now, GTD has been a very positive paradigm shift in my life. But should everybody adopt it?

I don’t think everybody needs GTD per se—it’s detailed, only one of many productivity systems out there, and probably better suited for people with a high systematizing quotient like myself—but I do believe that everybody should have something to stay organized though, even if it’s just a simple calendar that you check once per week. Unless you live an unusually simple life, not using anything to keep track of the demands of modern life seems like a recipe for disorder.

Do you agree? Disagree? Have you adopted an existing productivity system yourself or created your own? Let me know and thanks for reading.

Society Should Be More Accessible to Autistic People

2025-08-06T00:00:00+0000

Silencing My Chairs

I recently bought a few chairs to furnish my apartment. When I scooted one across the floor, it made this awful noise. I couldn’t stand it.

So I went for an easy DIY solution I found online to correct it. I just used box cutters to cut a small cross in tennis balls, like so:

Then I used my index and middle fingers of both hands to peel back the four flaps of the tennis ball and slide it onto the chair legs. The final result was… silence.

Much better.

Note #1: Tennis balls are not very aesthetic. They may ruin the decor of your space. If that matters to you, you may want to purchase more discreet chair silencers instead.

Note #2: After further testing, I noticed that there’s still some noise produced by my chair legs with this method. It’s still much better than before and, most importantly, no longer overwhelming. But again, you may want to purchase actual chair silencers if eliminating all noise is a requirement.

For a More Autism-Friendly Society

Why write about this if there are already tutorials online on how to do it? Because I’m going to use it to make a larger point.

These chairs are yet another example of products not being made with the autistic population in mind, which leads to environments that are inaccessible to us. Without any changes, this noise would’ve happened every single time I or somebody else pulled my chair out to sit down for a meal. Also potentially when they got out of the chair to get something or use the restroom. Even if you’re not sensitive to noise, if you’re in the same room watching a movie, you could miss important dialogue. If someone is trying to talk to you, you could miss what they have to say.

My point is that when you make products friendly to autistic people, you not only make spaces more accessible to us, but you improve them for everybody. Many of the things that are unbearable to us autistics also annoy non-autistic people. This noise is essentially a design bug in chairs that we collectively tolerate, but we don’t have to.

Making society fully autism-friendly, if that’s even possible, would require a massive redesign of public spaces, transportation systems, businesses, products, and many other things, at a minimum. I don’t know if anyone advocates for that, but I do know there are a lot of simple and inexpensive changes that would make it easier for us to exist in society, such as making chairs less noisy, and those things aren’t being done.

We have wheelchair ramps because we recognize that it’s important for society not to exclude people in wheelchairs. So what is the excuse for not improving accessibility for autistic people as well?

How to Maintain a Healthy Self-Image With Autism

2025-07-28T00:00:00+0000

In my previous entry “Labels”, I talked about how living as an undiagnosed autistic person in this neurotypical world caused me to accrue a bunch of hurtful, inaccurate labels assigned to me by people who were ignorant about what autism is. Being assigned these labels damaged my self-esteem and left me with a confused self-image.

I should not have listened to those people, but at the same time, one doesn’t want to rely entirely on oneself to gauge who one is. Each of us has biases and blind spots in our individual perception. Also, the input of others can be useful because others have diverse perspectives and experiences we don’t have, and can show us things about ourselves that we alone can’t see.

So how can you, as an autistic person, filter out the inaccurate input given to you by ignorant neurotypicals who don’t know what autism is so that you can gain useful insights about yourself from others, without being left with a twisted self-image and destroying your self-esteem in the process? Do you just put less stock in what anybody else says about you? What is the solution?

I think the key lies in redirecting your attention from whether other people perceive you accurately to why they perceive you the way they do. Take an attitude of curiosity, of wanting to understand their perspective, rather than immediately agreeing or disagreeing.

For instance, if someone says you’re emotionally immature, try to find out why they say that. You could say “That’s interesting. Can you help me understand what makes you say that?” Based on their response, it’ll be easier to decide whether it’s coming from a place of ignorance and you don’t need to take them seriously, or maybe they have a point that you need to consider.

For example, if they respond “You throw temper tantrums where you go into the corner, rock back and forth with your eyes shut, and then ignore me when I’m talking to you.” then it’s likely that they just don’t understand autistic shutdowns. On the other hand, if they respond “All your close friends are a decade younger than you.” that’s probably something worth reflecting on.

You have to bring the conversation there though. If you just immediately get defensive and say “I’m autistic, I can’t help it.” or “So are you.” or something like that, you’ll never understand why they think that way. With some people, it may not be necessary to ask follow-up questions if it’s obvious that they’re just bigoted. For example, if they say “I don’t think you’re autistic.” or “You’re not that autistic.” and then accuse you of exaggerating because you cower when facing loud noises, that person is just an ignoramus and there’s no need to engage.

But it’s also important to remember that you can get useful feedback even from people who are dead wrong. For instance, in my case, people often tell me that I seem so normal, that I’m not that different. If I were to immediately judge their statement, I would dismiss it and say they’re wrong because they don’t understand masking. But instead, thinking about why so many different people perceive me as normal tells me that perhaps I mask too much. Maybe my masking causes their misconception, and letting my mask slip more earlier in our relationship would prevent those misunderstandings.

To conclude, the point I really want to drive home is that it’s not only about whether someone has a correct assessment of you. From a social awareness perspective, it’s extraordinarily helpful in life to understand why other people see you the way they do, regardless of whether you agree with their assessment. Once you understand why, then you can decide whether it warrants you adjusting how you see yourself or how you behave.

Loop Earplugs Review

2025-06-04T00:00:01+0000

Note: This review is not sponsored. I’m writing it because I liked the product.

About a year or so ago, I ordered Loop earplugs for my noise sensitivity. I was happy that I could finally stop using the bulky noise-cancelling headphones I was using that stood out like a sore thumb in public, easily fell off when I bent over, took up a lot of space when transporting them, and made my ears ache and sweat.

The first model I ordered was the original Loop Switch, which permitted three different volume options by rotating a sliding plastic piece in the earplugs. It was a neat feature. I didn’t even have to take them out to change the volume setting. Sadly it came at the cost of being able to wear them for more than a few hours and thoroughly clean them. Due to discomfort from the hard plastic, they couldn’t be left in for long. And only the tips were able to be washed, not the plastic part.

So I changed them for the Loop Quiet 2 Plus earplugs, which only have a single fixed noise setting, but are easy to clean and don’t make my ears ache even after wearing them for hours. If you’re considering buying a pair of Loop earplugs, get the pure silicon models, not the Loop switch.

In both models, the package itself came with all different sizes of silicone ear tips. It took some trial and error to figure out which size best fit me. I had an issue where they kept falling out because I was using a size that was too large. Also, I initially didn’t know how to properly insert them, so I wasn’t getting a seal and the insertion was creating uncomfortable pressure inside my ear canal. So if you buy a pair, take the time to test out which size is right for you, and practice inserting them properly so you avoid these issues.

The Loop case was compact and easy to carry around in my pocket and put on a keychain. The interior of the case was shaped to secure the earplugs, so they didn’t fall out when I opened it, which was a nice detail.

I can’t comment on the Loop Link accessory since I didn’t get one. It’s a device that you wear like a necklace, and it holds your Loop earplugs. Perhaps I will someday get one since it allows for quick and easy removal and insertion of the earplugs, but I find the carrying case quite convenient already anyways.

I’m happy with the volume option I chose (Quiet, 24 dB). I live in Mexico, a noisy country, and a higher volume option would’ve been insufficient. At this volume, I’m able to navigate around in the city without becoming overwhelmed by the ambient noise, while also hearing enough to be able to hold conversations. Sometimes I miss what people say, but asking them to repeat themselves louder is better than suffering from the surrounding noise.

For acute loud noise, such as a neighbor’s dog barking as I walk past or a trailer truck passing by, the earplugs work great. But there are certain situations I face where they don’t help, like with continuous moderate noise. Here in Mexico, it’s not unusual to hear music being blasted outside for hours at a time. It’s not very loud if you’re indoors, so the volume isn’t the issue. It just makes it hard for me to focus since I can’t tune out noise. For that, I may invest in the Loop Dream, which has more noise reduction than the Quiet model.

The price of the Loop earplugs seems reasonable for what you’re given. I base this on the quality of the product and cost comparisons I’ve done with other noise-cancelling earplug brands.

Overall, I’m a satisfied customer. The Loop earplugs have significantly improved my quality of life here in noisy Mexico. They’ve enabled me to go out and do things I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. For instance, sometimes the movie theater sound is overwhelmingly loud without earplugs, and wearing headphones the whole time is too uncomfortable. They’ve also made regular tasks easier, such as going out to buy groceries. I’ve been able to use them in situations where using big, bulky headphones just wasn’t feasible.

In conclusion, I would recommend Loop earplugs to anybody else who has noise sensitivity and has been managing using headphones like I was. My only regret is not having discovered these earplugs years earlier.

Stop Platforming Jordan Peterson

2025-06-04T00:00:00+0000

I’ve already said everything I can say about Jordan Peterson’s rhetoric in my entry “Re: Dr. Pordan Jeterson: Answering the Toughest Question of All”. I think his most recent debate featuring himself versus 20 atheists did a good job of demonstrating exactly the problem with his rhetoric that I mentioned before. I watched probably ninety percent of it. It was exasperating, as expected, and felt like a waste of time. Clearly his nonsense hasn’t evolved any since my last entry, so I’d say my prior assessment of him still stands.

The only thing I would change about it is the following part:

“…I don’t believe he creates word salads on purpose. He seems to genuinely think he’s making sense when he just isn’t.”

Given all the conservative loonies he platforms on his own YouTube channel, I’m not so confident anymore that he isn’t just a grifter. I’d be surprised if his non-answering of direct questions and tactics of muddying the waters aren’t at least partially motivated by his goal to maintain his conservative audience.

Regardless, I think this recent debate should serve as a reminder for why nobody should ever again waste their time debating or boosting the reach of this obfuscation artist. There’s simply nothing left to be gained from giving him more attention. As such, I probably won’t dedicate any more journal entries exclusively to him unless something changes.

Finally, if you’re looking for a laugh, take a look at DarkMatter2525’s new relevant animation “Jordan Peterson Goes to Hell”.

Presumptuous Neurotypicals

2025-05-13T00:00:00+0000

When I was younger, people scolded me probably hundreds of times for “not paying enough attention”. No matter how hard I tried to pay attention though, it didn’t help. When I told them it wasn’t helping, they still kept insisting that I wasn’t paying enough attention anyways.

Eventually, I got to the bottom of my “attention” problem. Surprise surprise, it had nothing to do with a lack of attention. I found out that I’m autistic, and other factors were at play.

One of which was an overwhelming environment. I was unable to keep my attention narrowly focused on what I needed to focus on because my brain can’t filter out distractions as easily as neurotypical brains can. What I needed was a calmer, quieter environment with fewer people. No one ever suggested that a change in environment was part of the solution though.

Another was people communicating too quickly. There are certain situations where I don’t process new information as quickly as most people, so I need to ask them to repeat things more slowly, or write them down for me. No one ever suggested that was the answer either.

And being told to pay more attention is but a single example of people who didn’t even have a solid grasp of the problem blaming me when their solution didn’t work. I’ve been assigned so many harmful, innacurate labels by cocksure neurotypicals who thought they knew what my problem was.

For example, they told me I was dramatic when reacting to loud noises. Considering they couldn’t climb inside my head and see what noise is like for me, the only basis I see for them to have concluded that I was being dramatic is the fallacious assumption that I am like them. It’s incredibly frustrating when someone who doesn’t have autistic noise sensitivity and hasn’t done any research on the topic prescribes an overly simplistic solution for it, and then blames you when it inevitably fails.

And I think this is a common problem us neurodivergents face. Tourette syndrome? “You’re just undisciplined. Try harder to control it.” Autism? “You’re just antisocial.” OCD? “Just don’t think about it.” A lot of it just comes down to ignorance about mental health. People either don’t recognize you’re different than them, they explain it away because they’re in denial, or they watch one documentary and think they know it all. My wife has known me for over ten years and she still learns new things about my autism.

So neurotypicals, please have some humility. Some of us have autism, alexithymia, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, sociopathy, or some other deviation from the neurological average. You may think you know what we’re going through, but you don’t. And you definitely won’t fix our unique problems with a soundbite.

In my own life, the effective strategies I’ve learned for coping with autism (more like coping with non-autistic society) have either come from experience, my own research, or another autistic person like myself. Perhaps my memory fails me, but I don’t recall a single time when a neurotypical suggested how to deal with an autism-related challenge I was having, and it worked for me.

I’m not trying to say that you neurotypicals should never give neurodivergents advice. More like you should recognize that you don’t have all the answers. Remember that others face challenges that you don’t. They may require unusual or uncommon strategies for overcoming even common challenges. Recognize that not everyone is like you, things are not always what they seem on the surface, and it’s not others’ fault if some generic piece of advice doesn’t work for them, even if they don’t have a diagnosable condition.

Finally, if you found this entry insightful, you may also enjoy my other entry “How to Help an Autistic Person”. I know the title says it’s for autistic people, but I think the advice generalizes to neurodivergents and people with disabilities as well.