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(joke) We don't mollycoddle our kids, we're testing how to not tolerate preventable failure which we shall need to colonize space.
I think I would prefer 'tact' in most cases, with 'I wave shifgrethor' as a notion / conversational signal (instead of just the 'shifgrethor' as a notion).
(making toys for people is an example that works for me.)
(I don't think all silliness is fun. I have been hearing lame jokes of the same kind for months and they drive me up the wall.)
I know a guy.
The first thing I thought about him was that he had to be a hitman, judging by his freezers. Yet he was helping my family - practically saving my family, at the moment, I was simply scared out of my mind. We are friends.
And one day, a bit later, he said over tea: I paid for a Ukraine soldier to be "made a hero" (sent to the front lines) because he was blackmailing my woman, who used to be his woman.
I said nothing. It could be that the soldier lived, and I have a thing about blackmailing.
And one day, much later, he said over wine: years ago, I killed a homeless man who was refusing to leave. People here know about it. Nobody ever gives me any trouble.
It took some swallowing. But I managed. Now, though, I really dread to hear confidences, for all that I have only two friends.
(this is completely sideways, but recently I found myself thinking that other exams should not be testing intelligence instead of their stated purpose. When an English test requires you to hold in your head facts, ..., it starts to be less about English and more about "something else".)
Joke, take photos, and invent stories.
Once upon a time I bought a camera and started taking pictures. And I compounded it by making up meanings for the objects on the other side of the lense.
I kinda played at science.
People see... some sciencey thing, like a bacterial culture or an ionogram, and they make up meanings for it. It's so much easier to do for an ionogram! You understand at once that it's an abstraction (a number), and so has to be deciphered in a specific way. You may play around with different sets of them, with different software settings, but in the end, the knowledge you derive from it all has to obey a convention of understanding.
A bacterial culture is not an abstraction. It is a physical object, free from conventions. There are many ways to take abstractions out of it, and every one of them requires that a story be invented first (a causal structure). There are also many ways to make it a different physical object; for example, it can be overgrown by a fungus. Dr. Fleming saw it happen. He refused to invent that it had been spoiled (although he could not very well deny it), and that's how we got antibiotics. After Dr. Fleming went with his outrageous new story instead, and got some abstractions out of it, and fitted to them some specific analytical tools.
I mostly can't invent new stories. I like to do... what I like to do, a subset of that which I already know. And those new things aren't here yet, to know them.
But my preferences are. I like to laugh. To not have to defend myself. To get awed. To be proved right. To meet friends as friends.
...Which was how I ended up taking pictures of our geese. But it started with a name.
Or rather, with two. Two very special characters, who had been "them big white birds" a day before. But now, they became photographable, and then, suddenly, visible.
I saw their shapes and colors. Ways they move. Things they do. Foods they love. I heard the sounds they make. All of it had been there before, we had "seen" it, we had to have observed it on some level to even come up with the names... but it had been big white birds'.
Not theirs. Not mine.
And now it was. After I had aimed my camera at them, and my husband aimed his.
Of course, we immediately antropomorphized them to hell and back. They had Views, like Granny Weatherwax. Fears. Mannerisms. Tropes. They started grumbling. Writing songs. Wishing people happy birthdays. Going through their old photo albums!
Other geese wanted in on the fun, which is how they behave anyway. They told stories about the cat, the ducks (including the Lady Duck, a wild bird who brought her babies to swim in our pond), the chickens, the dog, and the goats. We had a young rooster who used to fly over to the neighbors; it did not bode well for his life expectancy, at the hands of my father-in-law. But we named him Columbus, and suddenly, he was opening the New World. Twice a day. (He is now in his prime and a very fine chicken man).
...All of this would not let me discover antibiotics.
But I learned something from it.
To tell a story, you can start with taking a picture
...of something you might have named but not yet seen.
I think of expertise as a network of competent people with some nodes having more weight and some nodes being necessary for the whole thing to be a "-work".
For instance, take nature conservation. It always deals with very specific things (plants, bird migrations, fossil fuels, roads, treaties, whatever.). It's a hodgepodge. You might need many specific experts. But in the center, there is always the need to balance the needs of man and the needs of nature; and this is usually the work of a few.
And it is these few that you most hope to be "real".
It kinda seems to me that we should then also add the duration parameter or the range-of-context parameter. The no-shoes-in-the-temple taboo hardly governs your behaviour when you aren't doing temple-related things. The no-inbreeding taboo seems different?
And I still maintain that people use taboos to focus people's attention to the 'safe' forbidden things.
We Need a Taboo Theory (or I need to get out from under a stone and read about what we already have)
In practice, the word 'taboo' can mean two different things: 'you must not do it' or 'you must not have your own opinion about it, are you even listening'. Could be both at once. (Are there more?)
The second meaning allows to direct attention to things which otherwise, perhaps, would not be considered so interesting, and to force an agreement. It doesn't have to be some agreement about what is the right attitude towards something; it is enough if people agree that they should have some attitude at all. Who knows what they would have thought about otherwise.
Taboos degrade with time, but you can still use them. First, you have a must-not-do taboo. It gradually fails. Now, you can have a great revelation about what it meant for you and your culture. You can demilitarize, for example; you learn about informed consent. You move forward, towards the must-not-have-your-own-opinion-about-exactly-this-thing taboo.
And it never occurs to you that you just don't have to do that.
For jobs which pay in other things, the employees often band together to provide for each other. Take gossip. As a teacher you get an awful lot of interaction with people, but there are limits on its content and form. However, you still get to gossip with other teachers, support and get supported in turn. (And this codependency has implications for the manager's role and capabilities in the team.)
I would say that 'meaning' is a long-term consideration (school-year scale or longer) but 'gossip' is a short-term fix. The fix should be also acknowledged.
Probably you should avoid "washed" food because if it has not been washed right now, fungi and bacteria are developing on it more rapidly profiting from the moisture. (I am thinking, in particular, about packets with micro-greens / leaves /..., which you can "simply put on your plate". I once found bits of wet grit (?) in one. Not buying them anymore.)
I kind of agree. And I probably do like a more confrontational approach than you do. (A tangent. I have deliberately put strangers into situations that were really uncomfortable for everybody, within the boundaries of 1) law and 2) common sense. Nobody was there for honest discourse. I was there for the thrill, they were there for the money. It was interesting, though, how we all still respected some lines in the sand without having to name them, like "give a warning for the first offence" or "go for the camera and not for the eyes".)
What you say doesn't matter as much as what the other person hears. If I were the other person, I would probably wonder why you would add epicycles, and kindness would be just one possible explanation.
It's always funny when you say there's a lion across the river, everyone knows there is a lion across the river, and everyone knows everyone is actually speaking about the social reality, because who cares about the lion, anyway.
(Personally, I would be rather intimidated by such a long list of questions at Step 6. I would be thinking something like, question one: why do I think it wasn't just sheer dumb (lack of) luck? And question two, have I had fun?)
In chemical names it's so hard. At least when one is not a chemist. They say "follow the IUPAC recommendations" which in practice means"find someone who knows how to follow them".
What happens to substances in ergot as it is metabolized (by a nonhuman body)? (I think it strange that humans have this strong reaction to e.g. bread made with the infected flour.)
Perhaps the properties of the original LSD as seen in the human body are just a side effect due to some biological role it plays in nature. Do animals have anything like what the humans do, after eating the infected wheat, behaviourally speaking? Perhaps the "feeling" part of it is not important compared to the "acting" part, from the fungus's point of view.
Maybe the chemists had had an inkling before they tasted things. Do the sweeteners smell of something? Maybe a chemist has a stronger sense of smell.
It's mapping a river system to a drop. Just because something is technically possible and topologically feasible doesn't make it a sensible thing to do.
"Love your neighbour" is also not specific. Very many good things aren't. It's ok. You don't have to play chess at all until you discuss interventions.
There're so many ways to lie without actually saying lies. Especially when it comes to stating your intentions.
(Also, "I don't know when I come home today" communicates your lack of precise knowledge and your unwillingness to commit to an estimate. That you are not willing is a fact. Why should it not be communicated? People do it all the time because they care about these things.)
(Also, at our village's speaking club (of which I am proud), we regularly have people lying their heads off just for the fun of it. To break the image of a Foreign Language Too Holy for Saying Whatever You Want. I don't really understand why it's so much fun; lying without any real gains. But it is.)
I am being unfair, but - if a problem is big enough, the society is in some way "built around it" and not just "unable to solve it". It's not a good thing or a bad thing. In some way, the shortage of available kidneys is built into the current system of "dealing with health issues". And it's not just the official health system; it's the official health system and everything else. Taking away the donors will have more consequences than just having more people die, because not only the artificial kidneys will remain unavailable, they will be unavailable in a society that doesn't accommodate the problem.
No, I have not. For the purpose of generating questions? I rather fear this would be misleading at best. It's not that the problem lies in 'Tom Sawyer', after all.
I have a friend with whom I speak English even though English is neither his mother tongue nor mine. He is worse at it than I am. But I am fascinated by his word choices. Constrained as they are, they kind of wake me up. For example, "... and I will be sitting here, at the same table, with the same people, and we will just speak about other things" (like going into crime). And I would look at "the same table", on which we are having dinner, and feel more alert than a moment before. He would never invite me to "speak about other things"... but he would be sitting in the same chair.
I think there are generally three ways to get intellectually active. The first one is to be a professional. The second one is to be inspired. And the third one is to have a preference for simplicity, strong enough that you would want there to be a more streamlined way of doing something. You would not even need to think about it in words. It's enough to recognise it when you see it, it just flips a switch.
I would like there to be something a thread type like A Journal of Not Understanding. As in, a thread where people could just write what they don't understand about books, movies, children, whatever. It would be different from the Stupid Questions thread in that there wouldn't be questions; not-understanding things doesn't mean that one can ask something about them and they would "make sense" after the specific answer is obtained.
Thus, for example, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer used to be an impenetrable book for me at eleven years old. (Perhaps it's still true.) I didn't have any reference points to "get it". Tom was omnipotent when unobserved; Sid simply existed, for whatever reason; and so on. I would not be able to explain what it was that I couldn't get from the book, but the fact remained.
I agree with some of it. There are definitely too many books. (Disclaimer: I used to sell them).
I have just recently read Inventing Medieval Czechoslovakia 1918-1968: Between Slavs, Germans, and Totalitarian Regimes, a collection of essays. It is not quite targeted at laypeople. Highly recommended.
Perhaps it is more interesting if you already know something about the place and time. I personally was lured in by unspecific positive feelings from reading fiction about Medieval Europe in general; think The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak (of which I have only the vaguest impression left, 20+ years after reading), Notre-Dame des Paris, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Thomas Mallory, Serbian folk songs, that sort of thing. Of Czechoslovakia proper I'd had only some memory of Jan Hus. (Because they burned him at a stake.) Sure, I had read nonfiction about "Medieval" "Europe", but it was way more narrow and random: something about science, something about commerce, etc. Pieces of a puzzle that are not supposed to give you the whole picture. I prefer it that way; for a deeper understanding, there are scientific papers anyway.
(I am sure that I don't have a good idea of where the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began. It is too jumbled together in one myth.)
But back to the book. The thing it describes is how different scholars interpreted the same pieces of culture. Some of them were Germans and wanted to stress "the Germanic influence" or lack of it, or something. Some were Czech, some were Polish, some were Soviet, some were Russians-but-not-Soviet. (The story of Institutum Kondakovianum reads like a black comedy - for me personally, blacker than black, but all the funnier for it.) Everyone wanted something for their own agendas and some were in correspondence. It was like they all had one claw to reconstruct the dinosaur, only it happened to be a political animal. (Kidding. It's way more complex than that.) They wanted to find the meaning of the art... and they were also prepared to read the meaning into the art.
So on the one hand, my expectations were wrong. The book did not have a "let's invent the Middle Ages!" motif. But I am glad I was wrong. Because I used to value my nonfictional "pieces of a puzzle" simply for being nonfictional. I would never have thought in any depth about the history of historiography. I just kinda thought that yes, some people lied, but surely everyone knew what was propaganda and what was honest science. It was an expectation I had never questioned.
I still have my fictional Europe. I would be glad to rid myself of an old myth, but it seems easier, in terms of time and money, to add a new one as a counterbalance.
So - what I mean to say: read everything and digest what you can. It's too late to get picky.
(I think I remember this) towards the end of it, I could read for a long time, my interest never sagging or spiking noticeably. I think. I'm not sure if I was capable of retaining much of what I had read.
Blimey, I thought it was a bug of mine.
(I kinda think it's a bug still. "Not necessarily" means nothing more than "not necessarily", you can't use it as a "no". And usually I want to use it as a "no", to support my own point of view in some discussion. So - handy, but requires caution.)
I don't have the funds to pay for this, but I would like a post about the parasitological component of school-level socialization.
I don't mean covid or something exotic. I mean the general backdrop of worms, lice, chickenpox, etc. (Bonus points for scabies which in Ukraine, for example, is often considered "a disease of the homeless", so the parents sometimes lie about their kids having it. I know of one such case, when a whole kindergarten was quarantined.) I think this part of the socializing process is very important but rarely discussed. (Like psychologists prefer to speak about Skills and Insight and Language.) Moreover, when it is discussed, it is not done from the grisly point of view of the population but from the brave point of view of the individual.
I think it should be more atomized, like A. Within the next 12 months, I will find at least N attractive offers. (Maybe insert predictions about applying, being interviewed, getting the position) B. If I do get a new job, I will (outcome(s)).
The (outcome(s)) should better be atomic as possible, too. Like "I will solve the washer issue", "I will have unresolved problems with my current job", etc. Still hard to quantify, but you don't have to cover all the territory.
In the last story, Mara explicitly does things for herself; in the three stories before, the people lie about what they want. Can BPR happen without lying about what the person wants? It's simply rebellion, after all. If Kite said he wanted recognition, he would still be found guilty.
Thank you (and also I have never really thought about this, so if you have more to say, please do.)
Great, thank you.
No, that other counterexample is fine.
And yes, I am more interested in the separate underlying filter than in what the machines can actually do. The "what people consider as something that actually matters, instead of stuff like high-precision surgery or image manipulation or whatever". But this doesn't seem well-defined, so I'd rather try narrower indirect questions.
Thank you, I stand corrected. What other occupations would you think are "safe" in the public's mind?
I don't mean that this is not happening. I mean that nobody (whom I have read) views this as something to be concerned about.
I think one other implication of this is "if you convince Mom you're ok using photos you very carefully staged, at least don't think you used to be okay when you look at them in the future")
This seems like it's only the beginning of the story. The crazy woman would look for a way to get at the man. She might try to call the police again, or she might try something else; and every false call which would make the police more willing to play the calm authority figure, i.e., less willing to intervene, eats up a public resource.
(Writing this because it might help me with my actual job one day)
- I don't belong to the target audience of such posts. But that's why I qualify as a newcomer, whee) and if I tried to make the abstract more academia-styled, I'd get something like this:
John Wentworth’s Natural Abstraction agenda aims to understand and recover “natural” abstractions in realistic environments. We introduce the conceptual framework around it and review its key claims, relationship to prior work in a number of fields, and results to date. Of particular interest are the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis and Wensworth's specific formulation of natural abstractions (here called "redundant information abstractions"). We re-define and draw mathematical proofs for some of the amassed key results. We then discuss the agenda to date including the gaps in theoretical framework and challenge its methodology and relevance to alignment research.
- What is an agenda? Is it a technical or a common-speech word? (and what are realistic environments, for that matter)
- "Our hope is to make it easier for newcomers to get up to speed on natural abstractions, as well as to spur a discussion about future research priorities." - unnecessary. It's what people more-or-less usually do anyway.
- I'd like to change the "specific formulation of natural abstractions" to something more precise, but I don't now the subject.
- "and explain how those results fit into the agenda" = discuss, but people don't say it because it's just expected of them because math has to be put in context.
- (just a personal wish) the word "alignment" should preferably be spelled "Alignment" if it's a term or followed by "research".
Ah, now it's clear. Thank you. But how then Y would relate his the model of the world to X after X lost (or "lost") Y's research samples and never said a thing until Y tried to find them in the fridge? Using the NVC, I mean. (I myself would not speak to X at all.)
I feel confused. I have been exactly betrayed, and I have betrayed other; it's when someone promises something and then doesn't do it. Were I to complain about being betrayed, I would not speak about anger or hurt; in "normal" speech that would mean that I have stopped demanding the actual promised thing itself and the other person now has a right to "ok, we can talk when you are less upset" or some other grown-up answer. After all, anger is a passing thing, isn't it. It creates no obligations.
(But I also don't understand why "betrayed" and "manipulated" are not allowed, and "hurt" and "used" are.)
Yeah, we don't know if the people who sent the Boy Who Had Cried Wolf to guard the sheep were stupid or evil. But we do know they committed murder.
Yes, in my experience abstracts are results-oriented, not problem-oriented. I do like introductions, too) they are often written so generally that I fail to identify the problem. But what a nice feeling of understanding) The break between the intro and the specific problem they attacked can be really jarring.
Overall, we read it for what it is, not for what it promised to be.
Editor's assistant here. Came in to grumble when I saw familiar worlds)
I don't find papers by browsing. My bosses decide what we publish, so I simply read the manuscripts they do send my way. Geophysics... microbiology... I try to at least get some idea of what it's about. It doesn't have to be good or important! I just have to keep at it until the last doi. So, with this in mind:
Citations are often stuck in awkward places where I can't really understand what they refer to. Several citations at the end of a long passage might all support the same thought. But which one?.. If I only read it because I have googled it up, I would cheerfully follow the links or not. But I would hardly stop to ask why they are grouped so. (True, I never learn the answer. But sometimes, when I point it out, the authors redistribute the citations differently.)
Tables and figures require thought, much more thought than one would think from reading an interesting article. It is surprisingly hard to marry the text and the "illustrations". Some "illustrations" might be lacking. Some might be reprinted from other works, in which case putting them in context might require incorporating some of the context they used to have. This is very hard and often omitted.
Conclusions should not be results. Or a list of things people managed to do. But somehow, I am usually satisfied with conclusions in the wonderful articles which I have found on the internet!
All of it makes me think that the same must be true for the wonderful articles as well, I just read them in a different mode. Much less aggressive.
"Games we play": civilians helping troops from different sides of conflict. As in, Army I entered the village; N sold his neighbors, the neighbors died horribly. Then Army II chased away Army I. Would N be reported as a collaborationist? Commonly, no. But everybody knows that everybody knows. And everybody knows who knows what everybody knows, which means N is probably going to sell a lot of people if another opportunity arises.
I'd say it depends on the situation as well as on the idea.
If you are unable to test it for a while but feel reasonably sure you will be able to do it well, given the chance;
If at the moment, you are, demographically, someone who is likely to stop pursuing ideas regardless of what they amount to, properly tested;
If you have obligations (or expectations, yours or not) which you can meet more easily following your idea whether it works or not;
If you do have other ideas, and they are cool and everything but would require more work and - worse - are much less well-defined than your Big Idea;
If you wouldn't have to depend on others (much) to follow exactly this one idea and you don't feel like those others are really interested in working with you after all;
If your field of study (or whatever) is just built around... well, data... and there have been a few people you admire who went with their ideas instead of simply collecting observations...
then yeah, idea scarcity bites hard.
Followed the Twitter link. I actually liked it, but... is it just me, or is the word "superpowers" sensu lato (including someone suddenly dropping dead and stopping being an inconvenience) more frequent in the list than the word "money" and things like that?
I get that a lot of the questions are about interpersonal exchanges (maybe most of them). But in some ways, "money" hits harder.
My son's eleven, and I read him Hugo's "Ninety-three". I had known it was too difficult for him, perhaps boring, too. It did bore him at times. (But "hey, there will be a civil war, invaders, fire, a court martial, kids in danger and a beheading" worked just fine.)
I omitted some passages, too, like the description of the Convent's building or whatever it was. OTOH, I deliberately read to him the description of Paris itself. Not because he could understand it, with all those strangers and situations mentioned only once. Because it was exactly incomprehensible, and yet conveyed some image; because I wanted to show him a myth, without having to label it so. (I want to read to him "Coriolanus" for a myth that appears to me strongly related.)
Also, Hugo says things like "an error of minds in which logic occupies the place of reason" in a glaringly obvious, offhanded way. It's awesome. (And I had forgotten it was there.) My son actually noticed it and tried to get me to tell him what it actually means. I guess the book did illustrate this particular sazen. Hugo is great at this.