I wonder if being a “professional” environmentalist would not level this effect (in this particular setting), because once you start identifying something as A Job, it stops being quite so much a part of You. Or, rather, it becomes a different part.
Similarly, do people who routinely help at soup kitchens get desensitized to helping-poor-people-derived warm fuzzies?
(hard to measure the length of a disagreement that you cannot voice, or you cannot voice anymore; which persists for years or decades and never gets anywhere except “I’m younger, I’ll get to dance on his grave”.)
I hope you received my reply. No, not yet, and not next week (I will be out of Kyiv). But you can ask Artem, he might like to.
Could be. But it is still only shoes… and sending them to two different customers might drown any difference in cost.
Still seems kind of inefficient, though :(
Kind of stupid question, actually. I Googled up clothes for one-armed children (tried knitting, didn’t go as planned, thought I’d donate it), and there were much fewer search results than I’d expected. Is it because one-armed people just have their clothes re-sewn from ordinary stuff, or what? Or are there different key words for it?
But what about the case when you suddenly find yourself in a position where you exactly have to change your self-image to be with your spouse and children? Like “I should not care about X, because it takes too much time, even though it has defined me for years”? I mean, this is not insurmountable, it just seems the logical next question.
Which Europe?
I… find that I have worked within a rather narrow range of “things’ complexity”, and don’t know what occurs outside of it.
The people I were thinking about were: a professor of genetics; a professor of zoology; an inspector of environment protection service; a museum guide; the manager of my bookshop; a leader of NGO for nature conservation (the man specializes in GIS); a highschool biology teacher; an ornithologist (specializes in waterfowl colonies).
I also excluded a family of zookeepers which specializes in wild fowl rehab (mostly) because they work outside “the system” and so don’t have to conform so much. I excluded my former Head of Department because, frankly, he excels in research but is not too great at not scaring other people (＝ doesn’t conform within “the system”). I excluded a great chemistry teacher who works with advanced students because he joined our current education reform (writes documents for it) and in this way tries to change “the system”. Because I think these people fail at some meta-level. I don’t mean that they should change or “just stop”, but I would call them martyrs before I call them competent.
I have met wonderfully competent people. They usually work for averagely incompetent organisations, and what they do is, I think, satisfy the requirements of their managers and bring value to the world—they are just very good at compartmentilizing.
Where I live, adults traditionally worry their almost-grown children will be too curious if left unattended. It’s not that people lose curiosity by when highschool ends (although they might), it’s more like they have learned enough about the general structure of reality and choose what they want. I think.
There’s got to be a name for a “stag hunt,which if successful requires reminding people that a stag has been gained”. Seems like the average rabbit doesn’t have this problem.
I don’t quite understand. Perhaps “reasoning” got it worse than “tradition” did. Then people learned what was wrong. And now they still insist on doing it not according to “tradition”? How is it different at all from setting up a new tradition and not bothering anymore?
Pseudo-”inventiveness”?
“Ticks” is a diverse group, but I agree they are strange. Like the occasional males in parthenogenetic species? I mean, why do it?..
And my own favorite, if we are permitted to name large groups (can’t say “taxa” here) will be, of course, Fungi Imperfecti. I know it’s a cop out, though, in many senses relative to the OP.
Asked an entomologist about “comparably weird invertebrates”; his version includes parasitic crustaceans, Strepsiptera, echinococci, Myxozoa, and Ascidiidae.
Given how little we know about even such a small subset as… insects… I would say that “weirdness” of some invertebrates is not yet a thing. We might come to appreciate it in the future, but not soon.
In tiny spheres of melted snow Around the tips of mosses, Where creatures dream, and freeze, and thaw, And never count their losses;
In deepest oceans’ private wells, Where life still crawls about, Defying water’s crushing spells Within just as without, -
Wherever people have cared to look, They saw, and cheered, and cursed The fighting claw, the winning hook, The glorious eggshell burst.
Perhaps information hygiene. There are a lot of information sources which might be called parasitic. Suppose we have some “process” that allows us to somehow find ourselves where we had steered, truth-wise among other things. Biology says “it will be eaten, possibly gradually”.
I mean, in the natural way ofthings, the first outsiders to acknowledge rationality as a thing will be those who will swallow the practitioners. Until it happens, we may consider it to be nascent.
(Kind of brought to mind The Godfather, which happens to be the book my husband had me read to explain the familial dynamics in the household. What can I say, it works. At least until people start going senile.)