I see. The fact you are experiencing this despite knowing / using all the technics listed shows I was wrong in my assumptions.
Am I right in assuming that you do not own a special tool for opening jars + have a low grip strength for a woman?
Valdes
Karma: 191
Thank you for the datapoint and sorry my reaction was annoying.
Do you have troubles in the sense that you sometimes struggle but end up victorious (happens to me) or in the sense that you literally give up on accessing the jam in the jar?
Also since this is a problem of grip strength rather than “turning strength” a solution might be to improve the grip on the lid by making it slightly less round. Soda bottles often do this with little indentations around the cap.
I am not sure what you are implying / implying I am implying? I will try to answer in a direction that feels useful.
I expect that something would be lost by making screw on containers easier to open (without altering the design). The containers leaking or opening on their own seem the most obvious candidates to me. Also I want to clarify that the pressure difference that makes it hard to open jam jars is not necessarily done on purpose and is also present with homemade jam. I found a source that says it is caused by the jam cooling down in the jar: https://www.scienceofgadgets.com/post/why-is-the-jam-jar-lid-hard-to-open .
Lastly if by “vacuum seals” you were thinking of the kind we often see on industrial bottles (like this https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRAuOjEA3Plec4QY5s-hlLlUb-IL4Gw2PP8oQ&s) then I don’t think they typically make it hard to open the bottles.
I however think the main point of the post on non-jar containers stands. But looking at the graph of difference of grip strength between men and women maybe a lot of things couldn’t be changed to sit safely in the “easy to open for women” range without also being too likely to open on their own or leak? The difference is definitely stronger than I expected.
My guess is that there are things targeted at men that are pointlessly too tight for women because no one cared. But I expect “how easy is this to open for the typical consumer” to be somewhat important when designing containers, which would mean women are taken into account when they are an important part of the target audience.
I do not have a good explanation for the gatorade example.
Part of this is will be redundant with other comments.
If we are strictly speaking about jam jars with screw on tops (like this https://vendingsuperstore.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/111357_1.jpg) then I think the answer is “women are able to open them if they have the necessary knowledge”.
There are 3 mains technics I know to help open a jar, some of them I also sometimes need to use as a man.
Use a dry piece of cloth to turn the lid, such as a towel
Run the jar under hot water first
Use either the tip of a knife or the back of a spoon to let some air pass under the lid, which helps reduce the pressure difference. As other comments have noted if you use a spoon then you must use is as a lever to push the lid upward and if you use a knife you must push at an angle to turn the lid a bit as you let the air in. I think the knife method is more effective but it is a bit dangerous (you might cut yourself if careless) and it can damage the knife.
I am french and in my entire adult life I don’t think I ever saw anyone fail to use one of these technics when necessary or need to give up on opening a jar. I just asked my girlfriend and she confirmed that she never has issues opening a jar on her own. The vibe I get from this post and some of these comments is “the knowledge of jar opening is not being properly transmitted in some places”. Perhaps there should be a disclaimer on the jar?
This sounds really cool and I intend to play around with it when I have time in a few days. First piece of feedback: I think it would be good to have easy to click examples on the welcome page, so we can get a feel for it without having to pick a post to test.
Also, a connected force graph (like in connected paper) would be appreciated.
Do you intend to make the corpus available / to make the code open source? If you put it on a public github I predict you might get some interesting contributions.
For now, this is the equilibrium. Your options for media feeds are:
corporate-aligned ML-recommended cocaine personalized to you for the purpose of optimizing attention
voting systems (reddit, Hacker News, LessWrong) which aren’t personalized to you
non-algorithmic manual curation (personal blogs, newspaper websites like ArsTechnica) which isn’t personalized to you
I think you missed the best one available right now: non-algorithmic manual curation which you personalize to you by yourself.
For example on Lesswrong you can subscribe to posts by authors, this leads to a feed (in the notification pane) that is currated to you. It’s how I got to this post. On youtube one needs to remove a lot of content views to avoid algorithmic recommendations but when you do so the “subscriptions” page remains, which is almost not algorithmically filtered. I personally use ublock origin with custom filters to block all algorithmic recommendation. For news, I subscribed to a handful of email newsletter and currently just one RSS feed, all in the same software (thunderbird).
I wouldn’t say I perfectly removed algo recommendations from my life (some are too trivial for me to bother finding how to remove them or too hard to remove), but I got 80% of the way there and it makes a huge difference.
The flaw of this approach however is that the curation to me mostly relies on a single criteria “who did it” or on existing curation lists.
First, I think every critique of a paper should at the very least understand the paper well enough to summarize it in a way the authors would agree with. Second, critiques should rarely dwell on typos, formatting errors, or lack of citations, and should ideally explicitly distinguish criticisms that are fatal to the core claim from ones that aren’t. Third, critiques should give the paper the benefit of steelmanning any ambiguous methodological choice before criticizing it.
I my experience, the first two are common in reviews. I went through the publication process quite a little under a dozen times, all in computer science, most in logic / AI conferences (conferences are the primary mean or publication in CS). More often than not the reviewer are explicitly expected to give an overview of the paper. Most reviewers put typos and small remarks in a separate section of their review.
I quite like the idea that reviewers should steelman the choices of the paper they are criticizing, that would certainly improve review quality. But it would make reviewing more time consuming and harder.
I would love another post / additional section on “What you need to know about brewing”.
I would like to ask another question:
As an enlightened person, do you still use the “I” pronoun in your own mind? For example do you think to yourself “I should go get groceries” or “I like this movie”?
I guess it will be fine if you directly describe what you’re doing and you make it easy to only read the prompts / skim the LLM outputs. Because few people share their LLM prompts when posting LLM writing, people are not fed up by the exercise. If anything it sounds like a “small fun experiment”.
It also seems wise to write down the content of the flight recorder as soon as possible after the event is over so the memory does not degrade too much. I suspect the kind of information the flight recorder is there for is also susceptible to being altered quickly over time (typically if you sleep before you write).
I think it is true that most people think very badly from the perspective of what a rationalist considers “good thinking” and are very bad at saying true things. This does not prevent them from understanding things I (or you) do not. But Schopenhauer is wrong about the common man of today in the west, he comes on too strong. Wit and humour are popular in movies and most people have non-sensuous pleasures (companionship and love, for example).
He does have a point though. If you thought most people are roughly equal to you in intellectual capacity then you were probably wrong. In any case it seems healthy to nurture the ability to love and respect those that are deeply inferior to you at what you care about.
I have grappled with similar feelings and issues in the past. I have not fully solved the problem but I do think I can give an answer that helps somewhat: it is usual to love entities that are much dumber than we are. Cats are a good examples, they show their stupidity constantly. And it goes beyond stupidity; if cats were people they would not be good ones. Most cats are violent, selfish, and mentally weak.
This does not stop me from loving my cat.
I am not saying “think of people as cats”, at least not fully. But I think the cat example helps nurture a positive perspective on those who have flaws you would deem abhorrent in yourself.
As others have said, another good approach is to focus on the many ways in which we are often dumb ourselves and the many qualities others have that we do not. We are deeply inferiors to others at many important things, that does not mean we don’t deserve respect. Perhaps we can use this perspective and apply it to others as we apply it to ourselves.
Also I recommend you read this post on the bucket error if you didn’t already. I think it applies.
Thank you. Deeply understanding that the self is just as much an abstraction as a car feels important indeed.
From the perspective of what is meant by “there is no self”, would I be right to say the self “exists” just like any complicated abstraction such as a car, a state, or a landscape; no more and no less?
I know I am late to this party, but maybe you are still taking questions? I have one about “no self”.
A car is made of parts. In a way there is no single part that is the whole car. The parts come together in a way that allows the function of a car to be performed and so we say that the whole is a “car”. In a sense there is no car, only parts that work together. The “car” concept is an abstraction. Likewise we could say “there is no rock, only a collection of atoms”. The rock is an abstraction.
Is this what is meant by “there is no self”? If not, what is the difference? If yes, why is this so important?
I think what I like the most is when there is a good summary story with the option to read more details on the parts that interest me, ideally with these complements forming their own coherent article. The structure this suggests is to have two posts:
One that gives a high level picture focused on the general story, what I need to understand, and what I am expected to understand. With regular (hyperlink) references to parts of the second.
One that gives a lot of details and can still stand on its own if I want a deep dive.
One great advantage of this is that the first also serves as a primer on the second, making it easier to read it.
I can’t think of an example of blogposts doing this, though I think there are some sequences on LW that follow this logic. But some books do this, with detailed chapters following high level summaries. “The mind illuminated” and “Against method” come to mind.
A few others
Death from the Castlevania series is simply evil
Death in Supernatural is debatable. He is made sympathetic at some point but in his first appearance he is about to destroy Chicago then changes his mind with the reason “I like the pizza”.
In the Thorgal series it is a complete asshole inventing new ways to put mortals close to being dead without being fully dead, for fun.
Also I think there are various stories and depictions where death is not a character but makes an appearance in some way, maybe purely symbolic, and seems to be evil or to enjoy humans dying. I am sure I have seen many depictions of laughing death as a metaphor of scenes of carnage (the first that comes to mind is a double page in the Darkmoon Chronicles where the burning of cities is illustrated with a laughing/smiling reaper).
So perhaps we could say that when Death is made a real character in stories it is more often than not a “kind hardworking man with a job to do”; but at the same time most depictions of the reaper are not characters but rather use a simple portrayal as a metaphor for evil and slaughter. Somewhat in the spirit of this famous image
If this is correct I think we can see where the friend in the post was coming from
“It’s nice to see a portrayal of Death that doesn’t paint him as some mindless villain, and actually gives him some characterization.”
I second that getting an AI to agree with your ideas proves very little. Also, it is somewhat intuitive to me that academia would always be suffering from various affective death spiral dynamics. You seem to have a specific one in mind, but I am not sure what it is or how it relates to the post.
I think we can distinguish two main types of apologies.
In the first case we might say “forgive me”. We are then guilty of something or have imposed a cost on the other they can legitimately blame us for. I agree that in most such cases an apology implies we intend to change our behavior in the future.
In the second case we might say “sorry” in the sense of “I am feeling sorry about this”. We are not necessarily guilty of anything but are acknowledging that we are linked to the other’s suffering and feel bad about this. It is the same “sorry” as is used in funerals, the etymology of which comes closer to “I am feeling sorrow” than “I am guilty”. [1] In that case we don’t necessarily intend to change our behavior. A few examples of this second case:
I have two tickets to a concert (so I can take one friend). Two of my friends would like to come. I pick one and say sorry to the other; maybe promising to see eachothers soon.
A friend asks if I can drive him to the airport but I am busy that day. I refuse and say “sorry but I can’t”.
I walk briskly a normal amount and am not more likely to bump in people than average. One day when I am in a rush (but not a big one) I bump into someone and they fall. I say “sorry” and help them get up. If appropriate I buy them a drink when I get the chance. But I won’t become a slow walker over this; accidents happen.
In french the distinction between the two cases is explicit. We have the word “désolé” (which means “I am feeling bad”) and “pardon” (which means “forgive me”). Most people use the two sort of interchangeably but know not to say “pardon” at a funeral.
Also I do think it is common and normal to offer reparations when we impose a cost on the other, even if we are not guilty of anything. It probably helps ensure we don’t exploit others by “stealing” from then and saying sorry each time. The usual ways for me are to offer to help with something, pay for dinner in a nice place, or give a bottle of wine.
For example I was once very late when I needed to pick up a friend, for reasons I could reasonably do nothing about. Next time I saw him I gave him a nice bottle of wine, which showed him I care about the inconvenience I caused.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/sorry