That is even more true about being a messiah or a famous rock star.
But not about being a specific messiah or a specific famous rock star. If everyone treats me as a messiah then I am, I suppose, a messiah in some sense. But that doesn't make me Jesus.
a definition that fails to cut reality at the joints (or at least is worse at it than the traditional definition)
Would you like to justify that?
you're asserting a definition [...] and then insisting that everyone else adopt it.
It appears to me that I am doing the exact opposite. I am describing a definition and saying I don't think it's crazy on a par with believing oneself to be the son of God. I do, as I mentioned, think it's a reasonable definition, but I also said, in so many words, that I'm not at present trying to argue that anyone else should adopt it. Only that it's not completely crazy.
So I guess when you say "you" you either don't actually mean me, or aren't troubling to distinguish between me and the people I'm describing. So let's talk about those people; people who (let's suppose) really are asking everyone to use their definition which (let's suppose) doesn't cut reality at its joints as well as some other definition (what? you haven't said; but let's say something to do with chromosomes and anatomy and hormones).
I repeat: Are you seriously saying that that is on a par with thinking you are simultaneously Jesus Christ and John Lennon? Really? Adopting one definition of gender rather than another is as crazy as believing yourself to be two long-dead famous people, one of them actually a demigod?[1]
[1] "Demigod" is of course not an accurate description of what Christians think the founder of their religion to have been, but it's near enough for our purposes.
I could just as easily steelman the Jesus and John Lennon guy [...]
Except that what I said isn't (so far as I am aware) steelmanning; it is what the people in question actually say. Whereas I betcha Mr Jesus Lennon would react pretty angrily to being told all he meant was that he wanted to think of himself, and be thought of by others, as a son of God and famous rock star.
empirically playing along with their delusions doesn't actually reduce their chances of killing themselves.
That's not what I've heard. Would you be interested in telling me where your information comes from?
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.