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.
Mary Chernyshenko
Karma: 817
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.
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”.)