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The "horse tranquilizer" thing goes back to long before the pandemic. I was hearing it in the aughts in relation to recreational use. My guess about the term is that 1) among drug warriors, it's good moral panic fodder, 2) among drug users, it sounds really funny, and 3) I imagine it's easier to divert doses from the veterinary system than from the human pharmacy system, so it may have originated with dealers whose supply literally had the words "horse" and "tranquilizer" on the label.
I know of at least one telehealth service that reportedly has a pretty low bar for writing a ketamine prescription. My understanding is that everyonesmd.com is fully legit and a month's supply of ketamine costs less than one dose from Mindbloom. Now, on the other hand, some people probably shouldn't turn themselves loose with a month's worth of a mind-altering drug to be used ad lib -- but if you have a promising regimen in mind, and the medical system isn't delivering, this could be a big deal.
(everyonesmd.com looks VERY sketchy but based on online reviews and a report from someone I know personally, they do provide a telehealth appointment that can result in a valid prescription. I don't know if I would trust their drug suppliers but if you talk to customer service, instead of going through their checkout process, they are required to transfer your prescription to a reputable compounding pharmacy of your choice).
Another thought on this is that people often talk about smothering social norms or moralities by giving examples of petty, infantilizing rewards for behaving in infantilized ways. What about a libertarian-oriented society that enforces rules primarily intended to prevent people from restricting one another's behavior? What about an economic system that encourages entrepreneurship and invention by doing things like enforcing contracts, or providing a social safety net so that more people can start businesses or create products without worrying that they'll literally starve to death in the street if their first idea doesn't work? Participants in a society like that should still maintain some awareness that this is the work of humanity, not an expression of a fundamentally just universe, but it's hard for me to argue that just participating makes them into slaves.
This description does a good job of providing two kinds of evocative theme but I think it doesn't draw out the connections or distinctions that need to be clarified when people are interacting with is vs ought, or perhaps with cosmos vs. society. When describing everyday life as a physical object in the universe, I think a rock-bottom existentialism is obviously right: The universe does not owe you anything. God isn't going to punish your oppressors or reward you for being good, and God also isn't going to punish you if you get what you want by being arrogant and doing things that are shocking. If that's master morality, then fine.
But when we form a society, we can choose to make a world where people who follow the rules are rewarded. We can describe obligations for people to participate and belong, and actively put energy into the system to buffer those people from random shocks. I can see how that reads as slave morality from the perspective of someone who's an unreflective participant in it, but I think that's also an unsatisfying way to describe an active project to defy the nature of the universe and, through work, create a world more to our liking.
So in sum I think your description here needs to clarify when this kind of be-good-and-you'll-get-a-cookie living is bad simply because it's inaccurate (God is not going to give you a cookie) and when you think it's wrong because, even if people establish an enclave in which rules are enforced and people are taken care of, that diminishes the human spirit or is actively harmful to its participants.
It might also just be a matter of hierarchical perception. To use a smaller scale example:
- On a day-to-day level I do my chores around the house even when I don't feel like it, because if I do what I promised then my housemates will also do what they promised, and I'll get the benefits of a functional place to live. That's a quid-pro-quo with an external system but I wouldn't call that slave morality.
- If my housemates arbitrarily stopped doing their chores, I'd go and remind them them we'd all agreed to do our chores. That's expecting others to fulfill their obligations, but I wouldn't call that slave morality.
- If they simply refused to do their chores and nothing I did could move them, and my response to that was to rend my garments and cry out to God that this was cosmically wrong and I refused to go on living, that would be slave morality. But if my reaction was to leave and find another place to live where people do their damn chores, I'd call that being a master.
I didn't know much about this subject when I made the original post, because I was interested in handicapped parking as a design pattern rather than a specific topic, but it turns out that the ADA has a very clear answer: 2-4% of all spaces, with a minimum of 1 space.
I don't know how they came up with that percentage or if there's any mechanism for updating it based on the prevalence of mobility limitations. Requirements are considerably higher for hospitals and rehab facilities, which does seem sensible.
This is a topic I'd like to learn more about sometime. I imagine it causes some tension for urbanist types because they tend to love accessibility but hate parking space mandates.
That makes sense, thanks. I should think more about cases where design for accessibility just generally makes something worse. You could shoehorn that into the handicapped parking paradigm but it's not really the best fit -- the challenge there isn't allocating a limited resource, though there probably is an underlying limitation in terms of budget or attention. Those are frustrating because usually you can imagine a thoughtful solution that would make everyone happy, but you can't count on it actually working out that way.
I also don't think it's useful to try and learn much about pronouns qua pronouns social battles over them. Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
I don't think everyone proxies it that way -- I know there are some people who are just old-fashioned, or passionate about prescriptive grammar, or have essentialist beliefs about gender but are libertarian about others' behavior. I think that if everyone had very high confidence that someone not using the pronouns they requested meant that at worst that person mildly disapproves of them but would still actively defend their civil + legal + human rights, there would probably be a lot less of the handwringing you mention, and we'd be able to learn a lot more about the fundamental intrinsic meaning of pronouns.
That's an amazing story, thanks for sharing! I would not have expected that outcome, and I hope the folks in charge take other lessons / hypotheses from it too.
I agree that allocation is hard and in particular that if regulations overboard with trying to ensure that there will always be more handicapped spots than there are people who need them, there's a point at which adding spots becomes net negative. As for the point about injuries, you're right -- I wasn't thinking clearly there and it doesn't apply, at least not in the current US implementation of handicapped parking.
I couldn't bite through a plastic straw if I tried. I'd have to gnaw on it for quite a while. I don't think this is a crux or anything but if you are able to bite through a plastic straw, and the straws you get are the same as the ones I'm used to, then I'm impressed.
From the tone of your text I feel like you're expressing disagreement, but as far as I can tell we're in agreement that not every accommodation is a win-win curb cut effect. I'm a lot more enthusiastic about the good outcomes of many accommodations than you are but I fervently agree that 1) sometimes there are negative tradeoffs and 2) it's harmful and dogmatic, not to mention infuriating, when people insist that this never happens or that negative consequences to non-users are unimportant. Am I missing someplace where my post dismisses the issues you're talking about?
I only know the very basics of design for screen readers so I'll stick to talking about your first example. I agree this isn't a case of the curb cut effect, because the curb cut effect by definition refers to an accommodation creating benefits for a broader set of people than it was originally intended for. Part of my goal was to make it clear that we can't always expect that to happen. If an accommodation makes life worse for non-users then it's at best what I'd call a handicapped parking effect, meaning that designers have to make a hard tradeoff. It's also possible that the people working on your bridge just didn't think about it or didn't try very hard, in which case it's not any kind of cleverly-named effect, it's just bad design. (but I also don't know anything about civil engineering, so I wouldn't jump to that conclusion in any particular case.)
As for financial cost: This post was meant to be about usage patterns around the accommodations themselves, so it doesn't go into decisions about whether to invest in any particular accommodation in the first place (except for the aside about curb cut effects increasing the total benefits). But I agree that financial cost is real and important. If someone believes that accessibility either is a fundamental moral imperative or has diffuse benefits to all of society, that should lead them to argue that it's worth paying high costs to make things more accessible, but it shouldn't let them get away with ignoring cost/benefit thinking entirely.
I've only ever read a little bit about this but my understanding is:
- Much of what you say is right, and braille signage is not a perfect and comprehensive solution to accessibility for all blind people, but
- It's still useful because public spaces are designed with a lot of regularities that make it not-that-hard to predict where signage will be, especially given that
- Many blind people are unbelievably good at exploring unfamiliar spaces, relative to what a sighted person might imagine.
Good point that building for accessibility is often much cheaper than retrofitting for it!
For every plastic straw alternative, I've read a harrowing explanation of why it's awful for some particular kind of person. eg, this article
But paper straws and similar biodegradable options often fall apart too quickly or are easy for people with limited jaw control to bite through. Silicone straws are often not flexible — one of the most important features for people with mobility challenges. Reusable straws need to be washed, which not all people with disabilities can do easily. And metal straws, which conduct heat and cold in addition to being hard and inflexible, can pose a safety risk.
It's worth coming up with piecemeal solutions to each of these problems. But I think for this and many other cases we still need a universal fallback of, "if someone says they need [specific low-cost accommodation] in order to function normally, let them have it and don't give them shit about it."
AFAIK all the major texting programs have far more volunteers than they need. It's such a great opportunity for people who live in areas without major canvassing operations (usually because everyone is disenfranchised by the electoral college), and it's so much less anxiety-inducing than door-knocking or phone calls.
And I agree, by 2028 I'm sure it will be almost 100% bots.
Thanks for sharing this! It sounds to me like the folks in the comments saying this doesn't track for them are thinking about the intellectual challenge aspect of sudoku. If I think of it in terms of mental energy / annoyance / tedium, it definitely matches my experience of depression. The way tasks become more and more fine-grained is especially resonant, and painful to even read about.
Agreed that this always makes any kind of appreciation feel more meaningful to me. For that matter, I also think putting some detail or mechanistic thought into apologies is a good idea. If I've actually done something wrong then I think it's worth the effort to show the other person I understand what it was and have some idea about how to not do it again. And if I haven't done something wrong, then trying to express my reasoning should help me recognize that I'm apologizing for having needs / existing / "making" the other person help me.
I agree that there are many cases where the two go very well together! It would have been good for me to go into that. Also agreed that there are a lot of ways you can add detail and specificity.
I'm finding it funny to think about "my mistake" in this context -- in some subcultures (including rationalists, but also others) I think of saying "my mistake" as actually coming across as a self-confident, high status thing to do! At least, when you've obviously made a mistake and it's only a matter of acknowledging it.
Hunger might cause cognitive and emotional regulation problems through the same general process as any other aversive experience, but for many people there's also a very specific physiological pathway going through low blood sugar. If this is a frequent problem, it might be worth investing in a continuous glucose monitor, or just trying to eat a very slow-carb diet (avoid most concentrated sources of carbs and eat lots of beans, or just increase protein, or just go full keto). Improving blood sugar regulation is life-changing for some people, even without any weight loss.
I'll preface my comment by acknowledging that I'm not a regular LessWrong user and only marginally a member of the larger community (I followed your link here from Facebook). So, depending on your intended audience for this, my comments could be distinctively useful or unusually irrelevant.
I'm terribly grateful for the context and nuance you offer here. The guidelines seem self-evidently sensible but what makes them work is the clarity about when it is and isn't worth tolerating extra energy and pain to follow them. A few notes that are almost entirely meta:
1) I suspect that nearly all objections people have to these can be forestalled by continued editing to bake in where and how they properly apply -- in particular, I imagine people emotionally reacting against these because it's so uncomfortable to imagine being hit with criticism for not following these guidelines in cases like:
- A public opinion or social conflict situation that is definitely not a collaborative search for truth
- Sharing painful emotions or calling attention to an observable problem
- Seeking help expressing a nascent idea or self-insight that has to go through a shitty first draft before one is ready to communicate it with nuance and precision.
Your expansions make it perfectly clear that you recognize situations like these and believe people should handle them in effective and/or compassionate ways -- my impression is that they either don't fall into the domain of "rationalist discourse" or that rationalist discourse can create a container allowing not-rationalist-discourse to exist within it (as you described in the comment thread with LoganStrohl about signaling when something is poetry). So I'm mentioning them only to call attention to misreadings that might, with superb editing, be avoided without weighing down the language too much.
2) I'd be interested to know more about how you see this resource being used. If you see it as something that could become a key orientation link for less-experienced members, then perhaps including a little bit of expansion amid the list would be helpful. If you see it as something that experienced members can point one another to when trying to refine their discourse, it might be useful to promote a little bit of the text about not weaponizing the list / not using it as a suicide pact into the main text.
3) I also think the "43 minute read" text runs the risk of turning people away before they've even read the part about how they don't have to read all of it; once you have a stable draft you could consider creating a canonical link with just the short version and a link to the full expansions. (even people who are willing to put in the effort to read a longer piece might suffer because they think they need to save it for later, instead of reading it immediately at a time when it would be helpful to a conversation).
4) Finally, I think some of the comments might reveal some confusion among readers about what parts of this are intended as universal norms for good communication vs. universal norms for clear thinking vs. a style guide for this particular website (your expansinon regarding how guideline 1 applies to idiomatic hyperbole suggests that it's at least a little bit of the latter). If this is to be an enduring, linkable resource then it might be helped by more context on that point as well.
Note to anyone reading that this post is from 2021 -- the SF group is not currently meeting!
Total restriction is tyranny – ruled by a despotic tomato, and forced to work like a robot.
I've heard some people describe the unnaturalness of the pomodoro method as a benefit. The reasoning is that if you take breaks when you feel like it, you're likely to do it 1) after completing a task and before starting the next one, or 2) when the task you're on becomes unusually unpleasant. This timing makes it more difficult / painful to get moving again after the break. If you instead take breaks when you're interrupted by a timer, there's an obvious point at which to resume and a flow to get back into. You might even want to get back to what you were doing. I've found this somewhat true for myself.
The downside to this approach is that you're more likely to lose a lot of state than if you take breaks at times that feel natural. I don't know if there's a good way to combine the two.
In terms of naming / identifying this, do you think it would help to distinguish what makes you want to double down on the current solution? I can think of at least 3 reasons:
- Not being aware that it's making things worse
- Knowing that it made things worse, but feeling like giving up on that tactic would make things get even worse instead of better
- Being committed to the tactic more than to the outcome (what pjeby described as "The Principle of the Thing") -- which could itself have multiple reasons, including emotionally-driven responses, duty-based reasoning, or explicitly believing that doubling down somehow leads to better outcomes in the long run.
Do these all fall within the phenomenon you're trying to describe?
Weather reminder: It will be around 55F on Monday evening, so please dress warmly! And if you have an extra sweater or jacket on hand, consider bringing it to lend to a fellow attendee who finds themselves underdressed.