I’ve spent the last year, off-and-on, learning a Lisp language because of esr.
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Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

–Eric S. Raymond

OBloodyHell: IMO logic and mathematics, as we understand them today, aren’t native to the human brain, which runs mostly on association in the service of survival.

Logic and math are cute tricks we’ve learned with our large brain capacity and we are still not very good at them, even if we have advanced degrees.

The latter question is an inherent artifact of the trap of binary logic, when the real world has far more in common with trinary logic.

True, False, Null.

The “Have you stopped beating your wife?” query fails the binary option because it has, inherent in it, a (hopefully) faulty assumption, that you have EVER beaten your wife. It is therefore assigned a null answer, because neither true nor false reflect valid responses.

I often wonder if people got tripped by this as much before Boole “invented”** his binary logic system and it became the norm in our culture. Probably, but I have no frame of reference from which to determine that, it’s just speculation.

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** I say “invented” since it is the structural simplicity of his notational system which was the real improvement. Interestingly enough, C.L.Dodgson, aka, Lewis Carroll, published a very effective “new notational” technique for use in logic description about 10y before Boole did his, but Boole’s was so much more elegant, still, that no one had a chance to adopt Carroll’s, and it’s long since been forgotten… and these days, the idea of any other system seems silly, as though it’s always been around, instead of being only a bit over a century old.

Yes, I’m very aware of that. I was originally pro-Szasz, long ago, but also disabused myself of that notion long ago.

There are no answers, I’m afraid. It’s – complicated.

As a result of Laing and Szasz, in the 80s there was an odd “hands across the water” moment between the Left and the Right which let many thousands of the mentally ill out of the asylums and into the general population to survive with the homeless.

Which doesn’t seem right either.

I don’t have the answer. I came close to having to sign papers for my mother to receive electroshock when she was in a locked ward. I don’t know what I would have done.

I remember reading The Eden Express at the time it came out, and liking it.

I also remember learning about Laing way way back, and thinking “Interesting stuff, but no.”

Mark V. hated the hospital, the confinement and the thorazine. However, that’s where he eventually recovered. Afterward he wrote an article published in “Harper’s” titled “Why I Want to Bite R.D. Laing’s Leg.” I can’t find that now, but later he wrote a book on the whole experience, “The Eden Express.” Here’s a bit from part 4, which was a letter to his relative, Anita, who was concerned she might be schizophrenic:
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I myself was a Laing-Szasz fan and didn’t believe there was really any such thing as schizophrenia. I thought it was just a convenient label for patients whom doctors were confused about. I even worked in a mental hospital for several months without being convinced otherwise.

–Mark Vonnegut, “The Eden Express” p.266
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After that Mark V. was so impressed with Western medicine that he turned his life around, managed to get accepted at Harvard Medical School and has led a laudable life as a pediatrician. He did go crazy again a few decades later, but unlike most, he came though that too.

That part of his story can be found in his second memoir, “Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So.” Both books are crackin’ good reads.

Much stuff like this Kafkatrap is found in “Godel, Escher and Bach” a book by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.