Title: Placeholder, February 2020 Date: 2021-01-01 Category: other Tags: meta, cathartic, Emacs Status: draft Writing is hard. [Again, you'd think](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/) it wouldn't be—it's easy to think, easy to spend all day pacing and thinking, and if the thinking seems to take place in words, and seems to be connected to hands (the pacing would at least seem to suggest its connection to legs), then you should be able to connect the hands to a keyboard and the keyboard to a machine running Emacs, and just do all the thinking in Emacs. It's not that simple, somehow. Something is blocked, somewhere. Maybe the sense that thinking takes place in words is an illusion. The process by which the brain _generates_ words can't itself be made of words, because words aren't ontologically fundamental. Whatever it is, the inefficiency under which _n_ hours of pacing can only be converted to 300n words _tops_ is even under the best of conditions—when all you have to say is [something perfectly innocent about math and dolphins](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) that wouldn't have seemed remotely controversial in 2009, and therefore, by [Noether's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem#Time_invariance), can't be remotely controversial in 2019, as long as energy is conserved.