Hm. I'm shouldn't have said that symbol doesn't fit well into the post. I actually don't understand it well enough to say that.

I would be ok calling "boo" and "yay" beliefs in the context of this post. In some sort of strict sense I'd want to say that beliefs can only have the type of number (between 0 and 100 exclusive), but in a looser sense I think it's probably fine to call things like "boo", "yay", true, false, null, etc all beliefs as well.

Edit: Perhaps these "boo" and "yay" beliefs you reference are the type of thing described in Professing and Cheering.

You have a typo where the second instance of let belief = null; should presumably be let belief = undefined;.

I somehow lost sight of the fact that undeclared variables aren't seen as undefined. I'll try to update the post.

(Also, I think "It'd print an error saying that foobar is not defined" is false?  Confirmed by going to the browser console and running that two-liner; it just prints undefined to the console.)

Hm. I get Uncaught ReferenceError: foobar is not defined.

Interesting mapping, otherwise!

Thanks!

Yeah, I lost sight of that somehow. Whoops.

It's a little tough because in terms of how beliefs map to JavaScript types I think the mapping to undeclared makes more sense, but describing the nuance of how an undeclared variable differs from an undefined one in JavaScript feels a little excessive for this post.

But I also don't like having something in the post that is so blatantly wrong. I'll try to come up with something and edit the post.

Related: this video shows an example of a bike lane that just randomly ends. It's main point is that the city should put up signs to warn you that it will end so you don't head down it if you don't want to, but I think that it also kinda illustrates the idea that as an "unfinished bridge", it doesn't really provide much value (it probably provides negative value).

Ah, good points the benefit of not spilling and not having to be upright. Those both seem helpful.

I'm traveling right now and have been drinking out of my water bottle whereas when I'm at home I drink out of cups. The water bottle is insulated and the water in it stays cold for an impressively long time. It's awesome.

It's making me think that back at home I should use the water bottle or maybe a tumbler or something, instead of cups. At least for water that I'm drinking throughout the day. The cost of buying a tumbler, if I even wanted to use that instead of the water bottle, is only $30 or so. For something that I'm going to use every day for many years, I consider that negligible.

I'm not sure what the other downsides would be of a tumbler vs a cup. That it's heavier? Nah.

The one other downside that comes to my mind is that cups can stack which means they take up less space in my cabinets. That's pretty important to me. To use a tumbler consistently for drinks other than water I'd probably need a few tumblers and that'd take up more cabinet space than I'm ok with (I live in a small apartment and am a little neurotic about things being too crowded). So I think I will start by using my water bottle to drink water out of and go from there.

Anyway, I get the sense that most people just drink out of un-insulated cups without thinking about the alternative of something insulated -- I certainly was in that boat -- so I figure it could be helpful to post this.

Great point. Somehow that got lost on me. I agree that the "baby" part seems short enough where it often won't actually be a deal breaker. I also think it'd probably make sense to try to get some experience with the other stages as well.

That makes sense. So I guess it'd probably be good to read a book or two on childcare and maybe get some experience doing something lower stakes like babysitting for a night at a time first.

From there it seems to me like a) you'd be able to find someone to let you babysit for a week and b) you'd have enough knowledge and experience such that the experiment would provide useful information. What do you think?

Yeah that makes sense about other people's kids vs your own kids. My thoughts on this are similar to my thoughts about Justis' point about how having kids is likely to transform you: it's probably true that there's a difference but it's also probably true that the difference isn't large enough such that babysitting is unlikely to be helpful.

Yeah, the fact that it is so difficult to acknowledge such regret definitely makes hard to get good data. Personally, for people I know, I'm aware of a handful of examples of true regret, and then there's another handful where I don't know for sure but suspect it.