Certain Habits

New word of the day. Turns out a trilemma is a dilemma on steroids. There are two kinds of trilemmas. One is a situation in which there are three options, none of them good, and you have to pick one. (Wikipedia cites Mill’s argument against censorship, which is bad if it’s true, bad if it’s false, and bad if it’s half true.) The other sort of trilemma is a situation in which there are three options, all of them good, and you may only pick two. Like the client’s choice: “cheap, fast, good: pick two.“ I had forgotten the old joke about life under communism (curiously called the “Žižek Trilemma”:

Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive.

Wikipedia has more. Fun fact? “The earliest recorded use of the term was by the British preacher Philip Henry in 1672, and later, apparently independently, by the preacher Isaac Watts in 1725.”