Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Donald Knuth on the difference between theory and practice.

Needs a TL;DR:

1. Politicians probably conform to the median voter's views.
2. Most voters are not the median, so most people usually dislike the winning politicians.
3. But people dislike the politicians for different reasons.
4. Nerds should avoid giving advice that boils down to "behave optimally". Instead, analyze the reasons for the current failure to behave optimally and give more targeted advice.

I don't find that surprising at all. We don't have full conscious access to all our preferences: we can just make guesses based on previous data. Realizing that there are men of the same sex that you might be attracted to doesn't seem any different from realizing that although you generally dislike science fiction, there are some sci-fi stories that you enjoy.

Straight/bi/gay is a classfication scheme that often works, but by collapsing a sliding scale into just three categories it necessarily loses information. A person who is only attracted to people of the opposite sex, and a person who is attracted to people of the opposite sex and to 0.1% of people of the same sex are usually both lumped in the category of "straight".

I have occasional fantasies of men and enjoy some varieties of shounen-ai/yaoi, but I'm almost never attracted to men in real life, though there have been a couple of exceptions. I can never figure out if I should call myself straight or bi, though straight is probably closer to the mark.

Also, sexual orientation is not a static thing, but something fluid that may change throughout life. This is particularly the case for women, though possibly also for men:

Starting in the mid-1990s, Diamond, a professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, conducted a longitudinal study that tracked sexual attitudes among a cohort of non-heterosexual identified women from their late teens into their early thirties. From this work Diamond concluded that while a model of sexual orientation in which a person is unswervingly straight or gay may be appropriate for men, it is too rigid for women. Over the course of a few years, a typical woman in Diamond's study might move from being attracted to other women to being attracted to men, or vice versa, with the nature of the attraction dependent on an individual's circumstances and partner in ways that often rendered simple straight/lesiban/bisexual categorizations too coarse to be informative. This fluidity is not a matter of dilettantish sexual experimentation or repressed lesbianism in the face of homophobia. (Nor, contrary to the wishes of religious traditionalists, does it mean that sexuality is a conscious lifestyle choice that can be reset by bullying therapy.) Instead, Diamond contends, it is a natural course of many women's development which has been overlooked by both the general public and researchers into human sexuality.

No, it's quite the same thing.

Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around. For instance, when computers at MIT started to have "security" (that is, restrictions on what users could do), some hackers found clever ways to bypass the security, partly so they could use the computers freely, and partly just for the sake of cleverness (hacking does not need to be useful). However, only some hackers did this—many were occupied with other kinds of cleverness.... [snip several examples]

-- rms, "On Hacking"

Does not the bolded section describe cryonics? Isn't death a "silly rule"? I think your sense of the word "hacking" is too strict.

That's not really a grammatical error though. If you were giving off a description as you got it, you wouldn't be expected to restart -- you could say, "I saw a brown ... big ... spider" rather than "I saw a brown ... no, big brown spider."

It's not the same level of error as if he said "I seed a big brown spider" or "I saw a big brown spiders." True, you may not know why we have a preference for placing certain adjectives first, but then, it's not as important to learn, either.

Now, if you had to explain why French only conjugates verbs in written rather than spoken form ...

Upvoting this did not seem adequate.

I would also like to tentatively suggest an optimized keyboard layout such as Dvorak or Colemak, since the inconvenience is minimal if you're starting from scratch, and there seems to be anecdotal evidence that they improve comfort and lessen RSIs in the long run, but if fretting about what layout to use causes you to procrastinate for even one day on learning to type already then you should forget I said anything.

I live in the US. If I want to mail someone an item bigger than can be fit in a simple envelope, what is the procedure for determining the proper packaging, postage, etc? Will I have to actually bring the package to the post office to have them determine that? What is the protocol for doing so?

I think I have lots of gaps to report, but I'm having lots of trouble trying to write a coherent comment about them... so I'm going to just report this trouble as a gap, for now.

Oh, and I also have lots of trouble even noticing these gaps. I have a habit of avoiding doing things that I haven't already established as "safe". Unfortunately, this often results in gaps continuing to be not detected or corrected.

Anyway, the first gap that comes to mind is... I don't dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I'm afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning. Maybe if I tried, I would be able to do it with little or no problem, but I don't dare to try.

That "free will", at least as commonly defined, is largely illusory.