How about requesting her to pre-commit to not breaking up with you in response to a text or e-mail, and to not delay her response because she is considering breaking up with you.
jdinkum
Karma: 65
I think it’d be helpful to have a small textbox to add a short comment to a poster where I can put “I agree!” or “Fallacious reasoning” or “inappropriate discussion” that only shows up in the poster’s view so there is some feedback besides Up/Down, yet doesn’t clog up the thread.
I’ve never seen that function in a forum though, so perhaps the programming is simple.
I just don’t understand the downvote/upvote thing, especially if the norm is/should be for broken thoughts.
When I get downvoted (or upvoted), I often don’t get a comment explaining why. So it’s unclear where I’m broken (or what I’m doing right). That’s frustrating and doesn’t help me increase my value to the community.
It’d be nice to have downvoters supply a reason why, in order to improve the original.
I believe the real issue that B. raised of LW being cold won’t be effectively improved by posting “I agree!” replies, but requires some emotional involvement. A response that offers something to the OP, that gives something back.
Like, why do you agree? What are the implications of you agreeing? Or, what thoughts or emotions does the content of the post bring up for you? The response doesn’t have to be long, but it should be personal and thoughtful.
A little bit more of that may go a long way towards developing community.
It feels like people are ten thousand times more likely to point out my flaws than to appreciate something I said. Also, there’s >next to no emotional relating to one another.
I’m sorry, that sucks. I think you’re right and hope this changes. I don’t post very often, but when I do in the future, I’ll be more aware of this.
You could start off by overtly letting the kids know that “guessing the password” is how their success in school is measured and you’re not going to be able to change that reality, but you could introduce “alternative” ways of thinking.
How about a game where each student writes down their answer to a passwordy type question and scores a point for every other student with the same answer. Lowest score wins. But they have to justify their answer.
If a teacher asks the question: “Who discovered America?” The password is: “Christopher Columbus”
But there are many more answers that are also valid responses. ( Native Americans, Rodrigo de Triana, the Norse, Vespucci, a US Founding Father, etc) that are mostly based on what the words “discover” or “America” means.
Sometimes I still marvel about how in most time-travel stories nobody thinks of this
Characters in the novel Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card wrestle with this issue.
While reading the original post I thought of Kahneman’s Ted Talk on happiness.
No, but I might exchange the lives of someone elses friends for a billion tons of paperclips.
That’s one element in what started my line of thought..I was imagining situations where I would consider the exchange of human lives for non-human objects. How many people’s lives would be a fair exchange for a pod of bottlenose dolphins? A West Virginia mountaintop? An entire species of snail?
I think what I’m getting towards is there’s a difference between human preferences and human preference for other humans. And by human preferences, I mean my own.
I’ve been trying to work through Torture versus Dustspecks and The Intuitions Behind Utilitarianism and getting stuck...
It seems Values are arational, but there can be an irrational difference between what we believe our values are and what they really are.
I see I’ve mistaken the word “inherent” to mean “many people share a term for the existence of humans”. Thanks.
If your goal in pursuing writing advice is to increase your audience then my advice: View yourself as an editor not a writer. Your weakness as a writer (IMHO) is verbosity and generality (the two are often related).
Write your next post and when you feel it’s ready, then run a word count on it. Rewrite the post to reduce the count by 50%. Post both versions and see what happens.
I think a fair question to ask is, “If you don’t use a car, how will you get to places safely?”
There seems to be an unsupported assumption that the alternatives to driving (cycling, walking, public transportation) are SAFER than driving.
On a per-mile travelled basis, what are the risks associated with various forms of transportation (driving, walking, cycling, public bus, public train, etc)? My suspicion is that the danger is (in descending order): cycling, walking, driving, public bus, public train, but I don’t know where to go to find evidence.
My point still holds. Most people, myself included, don’t have a belief that an egg will spontaneously reform according any laws of physics. To use it as an example of the difference between certainty and likelihood is ineffective.
“The rule that says that the egg won’t spontaneously reform and leap back into your hand is merely probabilistic.”
This example requires a level of education that doesn’t match my belief of the expected audience of this post.
The low importance in the distinction between mathematical certainty and realistic likelihood is valid, but involving quantum probability kills the post for me.
I agree it could be worse as well. But it would have to be much worse, enough to account for the “badness” of WWII itself to be undesirable.
Sorry, I should have been clearer.
I do mean automated trucking. I think that development is less than 30 years away. Self-driving cars are a functioning technology now, the main hurdles (not insignificant ones) being social and legal.
Like most human-replacing technology, where the industry still exists, but is now automated ( modern car factories compared to buggy whip manufacturers), I don’t expect trucking to be 100% automated, but the human factor will be reduced significantly the next 30 years.
Vehicles will still need humans to gas, service, deal with theft and breakdowns, etc. It will likely start with truckers being able to sleep during trips, still one trucker per vehicle which decreases the down time of cargo by 30%. Then there will likely be one trucker per several vehicles travelling in a convoy. Potentially there could be “truckers” based in areas that handle vehicles as they pass through, rather than travelling with them.
Of course, as the costs of trucking goes down, the attractiveness goes up, so while it may take 1⁄4 of the manpower to handle the same cargo, the amount of cargo will increase.
I’m estimating a 50% decrease in trucking employment in the next 30 years, even as the amount of cargo doubles.
The US government has listed some trends here: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_203.htm
Manufacturing is clearly out. Services that involve interacting with other humans (health care, teaching) are in.
Personally, I think we’ve plucked a lot of low hanging fruit. I predict the maturation of some technologies that will make a few fields move towards obsolescence. I expect at major ( >%50) decline in employment for long haul truckers and tax preparers under that maturation. Retail sales will decline in favor of ship-to-home, and obviously some jobs are clearly disappearing altogether ( running a newspaper printing press,camera loader on a movie set, working at a video rental store, telephone line repairman).
It’s easier to predict what will decline rather than what will thrive. Engineering is generally a safe bet though.
I wasn’t saying to commit to not breaking over the content of a text message, but to commit to not breaking up over the medium of texting.
Even in a two week old relationship, I think it’s reasonable to say something like, “Hey, I enjoy hanging out with you, and it seems you feel the same. If you change your mind though, please don’t tell me over text or e-mail, just give me a call.”