Six Mainstream Concepts Related to LOGAF¶

LOGAF ("level of give a fuck") is a single, narrow tool: declare how much you care about this specific opinion, right now, to this person. The six terms below aren't substitutes for it — none of them do exactly what LOGAF does — but each captures a piece of the same territory: managing opinions, conflict, and finite personal capacity. Grouped by which half of LOGAF they map to.

Part 1: Signaling how much you care about an opinion¶

1. Strong Opinions, Weakly Held¶

What it is: A decision-making mantra: form a confident, fully-committed opinion fast, based on the best available (incomplete) information — but hold it loosely enough to abandon the instant better evidence shows up.

Origin: Coined by futurist and forecaster Paul Saffo, sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s/2000s (sources differ on exact date — his own writing references "since the mid-1980s"). It's frequently misattributed to Jeff Bezos, but Bezos didn't originate it. Saffo developed it specifically as a forecasting technique: rather than waiting for complete data (which never arrives), you make a tentative, "lousy" forecast early, then deliberately try to tear it apart — using what breaks to refine your search for better information. Iterate a few times and you converge on something useful faster than if you'd waited for certainty.

The mechanism, in two halves: - Strong opinion — commit to an actual position. Don't hedge into vagueness. A firm stance is what invites real scrutiny and pressure-testing; a wishy-washy one doesn't. - Weakly held — actively look for the evidence that would prove you wrong. Treat your own opinion as a target to shoot at, not a flag to defend.

How it's used today: Popular in tech/startup culture and leadership circles as an antidote to analysis paralysis. It's meant to solve two failure modes at once: people who won't commit to anything until they're 100% certain (paralysis), and people who commit to a position and then defend it past the point of evidence (ego entrenchment).

Where it breaks down (worth knowing before you deploy it): - Power dynamics ruin it. If a senior person states a "strong opinion, weakly held," juniors often can't tell it's meant to be provisional — it lands as a decree, not an invitation to argue. The strength is heard; the "weakly held" part is invisible. - Confidence ≠ correctness. A strongly stated wrong opinion can still dominate a room simply because it was said with conviction, especially in fast-moving or status-conscious environments. - It requires the listener to also buy in. If only the speaker treats it as revisable but everyone else treats it as final, you get the opposite of what LOGAF achieves: false certainty instead of clear signaling. - Software engineer Kyle Simpson has pushed back on the phrase directly, arguing that if you've done the work to form an opinion, it's rightly strongly held — "loosely holding" it undersells the effort that went into it.

How it relates to LOGAF: Strong-opinions-weakly-held is about your own internal posture toward an idea (how attached are you, privately, to being right). LOGAF is about communicating that posture to someone else in the moment. You could hold every opinion "weakly" and still fail to tell your coworker that — LOGAF is the missing communication layer.

2. Code Review Severity Labels (nit / blocking / non-blocking)¶

What it is: Not a single named "theory" like the others — it's a widespread, informal convention in software engineering for prefixing review comments with a severity tag, so the recipient instantly knows whether to act on it before merging or just consider it.

Common vocabulary (varies by team/company, no single standard): - nit: (nitpick) — trivial, stylistic, or personal-preference feedback. Take it or leave it. Functionally identical to a low-LOGAF comment. - blocking: or must-fix: — this needs to be resolved before merge. Functionally a high-LOGAF comment. - non-blocking: or suggestion: — worth considering, not required. A mid-LOGAF comment. - question: — genuinely asking, not necessarily advocating for a change. - Some larger orgs (Google's internal review culture is the most cited example) formalize this further with explicit "LGTM with nits" conventions, where approval is granted contingent on trivial fixes.

Why teams converge on this independently: Code review is exactly the setting Dan Lew's original LOGAF post was written about — a PR comment thread where tone is invisible and the reviewer's actual stakes in a suggestion are ambiguous. Severity tags solve the identical problem LOGAF solves, but they're scoped narrowly to code review rather than general conversation, and they're two-tier or three-tier rather than a free-form scale.

How it differs from LOGAF: - Severity tags are usually binary or ternary (nit vs. blocking, sometimes plus one middle tier). LOGAF is framed as a continuous low→high scale. - Severity tags are institutionalized — often written into a team's PR template or contributing guide. LOGAF, per Dan Lew's own post, is explicitly informal and meant to be invoked only occasionally, not as a fixed protocol. - Severity tags are almost entirely confined to code review / technical writing. LOGAF (in Dan Lew's usage) extends to design debates and general team disagreements, not just line-by-line comments.

Practical note: If you want something with more traction than LOGAF, nit: / blocking: prefixes are the path of least resistance — reviewers on GitHub/GitLab already half-recognize the convention even without a team agreement, whereas "my logaf is low" would need to be introduced and explained.

3. Bikeshedding (Parkinson's Law of Triviality)¶

What it is: The inverse failure mode LOGAF is designed to prevent — not a scale for expressing care, but a name for what happens when a group's expressed level of care doesn't match the actual stakes.

Origin: Coined by C. Northcote Parkinson in his 1957 book Parkinson's Law, illustrated with a fictional committee approving a nuclear power plant. The committee rubber-stamps the multi-million-pound reactor in minutes (nobody feels qualified or willing to argue), then spends an hour arguing about the materials for the staff bicycle shed — because everyone understands bike sheds and feels entitled to an opinion.

The core dynamic: People's engagement with a topic scales with how comprehensible and low-stakes-to-argue-about it feels, not with how important it actually is. Complex, high-stakes decisions get rubber-stamped because contesting them requires expertise or effort; trivial, easy-to-have-an-opinion-about decisions get relitigated endlessly because anyone can jump in.

Where you've likely seen it: Software engineering borrowed the term heavily — "bikeshedding" is now common shorthand for a PR thread with 40 comments about variable naming and zero comments about the actual architecture change three files down.

How it relates to LOGAF: Bikeshedding is the disease; LOGAF is one candidate treatment. If everyone in a bikeshedding thread had to prefix comments with their actual logaf, most of the naming-convention squabbling would reveal itself as low-logaf noise and could be resolved by the PR author's judgment call instead of prolonged debate — while the comment about the actual architecture risk would surface as the high-logaf item deserving real attention.

Part 2: Naming the finite capacity to care ("fucks deficit")¶

4. Compassion Fatigue & Decision Fatigue¶

What they are: Two related, clinically-recognized concepts describing depletion of a finite personal resource — empathy in one case, decision-making capacity in the other.

Compassion fatigue: - Originally described in nursing and trauma-care literature (the term is often traced to researcher Charles Figley in the 1990s) to describe the emotional exhaustion that caregivers, therapists, and first responders experience from repeated, sustained exposure to others' suffering. - Distinct from burnout: burnout stems from chronic workplace stress generally; compassion fatigue specifically stems from the empathic engagement itself wearing down — you literally have less emotional bandwidth left to feel for the next person. - Since gaining mainstream traction, the term has broadened informally beyond clinical caregiving to describe the exhaustion people feel from constant exposure to news of tragedy, social causes, or crises — "I care about this issue, but I have nothing left to give it."

Decision fatigue: - A concept popularized largely through the psychological research of Roy Baumeister on ego depletion, and later mainstreamed by journalist John Tierney's reporting on the topic (notably a widely-cited 2011 New York Times Magazine piece). - The core claim: the quality of your decisions deteriorates as you make more of them in a day, because willpower/decision-making capacity behaves like a depletable resource. It's the reason judges have been found to grant parole more often early in the day or right after a break, and why some high-profile figures (famously Steve Jobs) wear the same outfit daily — to remove trivial decisions from the day's total budget. - Worth noting: ego-depletion research has faced significant replication challenges in the 2010s, and psychologists now debate how literal "depletion" really is. The everyday experience it describes (feeling worse at deciding by end of day) is widely reported regardless of the underlying mechanism's scientific status.

How they relate to "fucks deficit": Both are more clinical, better-evidenced (if contested) cousins of the "conservation of fucks" idea you asked about last — the notion that caring, like willpower, draws from a limited daily pool rather than being infinitely available. Compassion fatigue is the caring-specifically version; decision fatigue is the choosing-specifically version.

5. Spoon Theory¶

What it is: A metaphor for finite daily energy, using spoons as a countable unit.

Origin: Written by Christine Miserandino in a 2003 essay, "The Spoon Theory," published on her blog But You Don't Look Sick — the site's name itself referencing the core problem she was trying to solve: describing the amount of physical or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited when the limitation isn't visible to others.

The scene that created it: In the essay, Miserandino describes her experience with chronic illness, using a handful of spoons as a metaphor for units of energy available to perform everyday actions. Sitting in a diner with a friend who'd asked what living with lupus actually felt like, she grabbed every spoon on the table — and off neighboring tables — handed them over, and said "here you go, you have Lupus." Each spoon represented one unit of energy; her friend then had to "spend" spoons narrating her typical day (showering, dressing, commuting), discovering along the way how fast a fixed, small number of spoons runs out — and that unlike a healthy person, you don't get to borrow against tomorrow's supply.

Why it caught on: People with chronic illness have to plan their actions in order to conserve their energy, in contrast to most people, who begin each day with an "unlimited amount of possibilities." The essay gave the chronic-illness and disability community concrete, shareable vocabulary for something that's otherwise very hard to convey to people who've never experienced it — invisible, non-negotiable resource scarcity. It spread widely enough that people who identify with the metaphor started calling themselves "spoonies," and the term is still in wide use in patient-advocacy communities today, though some younger disabled people have moved away from "spoonie" as a self-descriptor even while the underlying theory remains influential.

Extensions: Related informal add-ons have emerged from the same community — e.g., "borrowing spoons" (running an energy deficit you'll pay for tomorrow), and other resource-metaphor variants for specific situations (executive function, social energy, etc.).

How it relates to "fucks deficit": Spoon theory is the most widely recognized mainstream version of exactly the metaphor you asked about — a literal countable-resource model for finite personal capacity. The "fucks deficit" framing you saw is almost certainly a jokier, sweary descendant of the same underlying idea, minus the specific disability-advocacy origin and community that spoon theory carries.

6. Emotional Bandwidth¶

What it is: The loosest, most workplace-casual of the six — not a formally coined theory with a named originator, but a widely-used metaphor borrowed from computing/networking (bandwidth = a channel's finite data-carrying capacity) and applied to emotional/attentional capacity.

How it's used: "I don't have the emotional bandwidth for this today" — meaning: not a permanent limit, not tied to illness or disability, just a here-and-now statement that your current capacity to engage, empathize, or absorb more input is low. It's become common in therapy-adjacent and corporate-wellness language.

How it differs from spoon theory and compassion fatigue: - No specific origin or community — it emerged gradually through general use of "bandwidth" as a metaphor for capacity (itself borrowed from tech/telecom terminology), rather than being introduced in one canonical essay the way spoon theory was. - Lower stakes, more casual — spoon theory carries real weight in disability communities as a serious explanatory tool; "emotional bandwidth" is now common enough in office small talk ("no bandwidth this week") that it's lost most of its metaphorical vividness and function almost as corporate jargon. - Not disability-specific — anyone can claim low emotional bandwidth on a given day without implying chronic illness; it's the most "universal, temporary" version of the finite-capacity idea, whereas spoon theory specifically encodes the experience of a fixed, unusually low daily allotment.

How it relates to LOGAF: Ironically, "I don't have the bandwidth to argue about this" functions almost exactly like declaring a low LOGAF — it tells the other person not to expect a defended position, just without Dan Lew's explicit vocabulary.

Quick reference: which term for which situation¶

None of these six is a true drop-in replacement for LOGAF — it remains a fairly unique, narrow tool for one specific job: telling someone, in the moment, exactly how much weight to put on your stated opinion.