Strong views go naked.
But if they need to be dressed up and armor-plated—what a devastating argument against the speaker’s audience!

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Ben Sixsmith:

But laziness is not simply a failure to accomplish things. It is also a failure to try. We can accept that X and Y might be valid obstacles in front of doing Z. The point is that we should try to do it anyway.

This isn’t always possible — at least for everyone. It would make no sense to tell someone with clinical depression, say, that they should be more active. But our state of mind can make things more difficult without making them impossible. If my femur has been broken, I can’t walk. It’s as simple as that. If I have a twisted ankle, I can walk. It might be painful and tiring. I might need a rest sometimes. But light my chair on fire and I’ll walk away from it.

I’m fairly sure that Sixsmith wouldn’t use AI to write a post. I’ve known of him since the earlier blogosphere. That’s why it’s funny to me to see this sort of rhetorical padding in his post, which is a characteristic I associate with LLMs. We’re talking about some ridiculous, boutique condition called “high-IQ ADHD” here. What does clinical depression have to do with it? Of course some conditions are truly debilitating, but we’re focusing on the majority that aren’t. Does this even need to be said?

Well, maybe. “Mental health” is a sacred cause, particularly for those who have made their diagnoses into an identity in pursuit of status. The times call for anticipatory exoneration: “Before I say this perfectly ordinary thing, please understand that I am not also saying this monstrous and stupid thing which no charitable reader would have thought I meant.” But excessive defensiveness gives hecklers editorial control. Once you start revising every sentence around the possibility that somebody might maliciously paraphrase it, the malicious reader is effectively in the room helping write the post. If you want an intelligent readership, maybe you shouldn’t write as if addressing a crowd of slow children. Send your views forth, strong and naked.

In person, most of us will generally try to be tactful and understanding, but a blog is the perfect format for such full-frontal nudity. I’m free to say what I think is obvious: “mental health awareness” has the unintended consequence of stimulating mental hypochondria; much of what sends us to the therapist is just the innate human condition and requires perspective more than medication; and most of us are indeed lazy and don’t try very hard to overcome our flaws and shortcomings, especially if we can use a diagnosis as an excuse. You’re free to think this jackass is full of shit and angrily close the tab. But later on, as you lie awake staring at the ceiling, you might allow yourself to think: Am I trying as hard as I can to overcome my shortcomings, or am I just making excuses? I can’t peer into your soul and know the answer. Only you can know that, and, given your human nature, you might be lying to yourself anyway. But I can at least put it out there for you to consider.