And how good are the best of us at bringing cookies and tea and just putting things on the table before we start disagreeing?
“Tact” is a field you build for the disagreeing to be around the issues that people truly just don’t agree about, not a bullet to be shot at an opponent someone wants to be charitable to.
(I don’t think outsiders are more leery of the community because of its “ask culture” than of its “talk over people culture”. It’s something I have a problem with as a meetup organiser. Rats come fully prepared to sweep the floor, regardless of what happens to lie there.)
There’s a clever trick to this effect. You can say thank you for others’ sake without eating! Wouldn’t that just throw a spanner into their Machiavellian calculations on who owes whom.
One other difference between ‘this thing we have’ and ‘that thing Petrov had’ is that the day was entirely ordinary for him.
We live in our bubble where we have a High Stakes Day on which we are given a very specific choice. We expect it… we anticipate it; we can turn it into a game or even worse than a game. He had expected a normal shift at work (and beyond that we should no more assign thoughts to him than to a man who decided to buy a specific kind of sandwich. Just because we are more drawn to visualizing something beautiful doesn’t make us any less wrong about it.)
I propose to deconstruct the tradition. Make it a random day, send codes to random people, and don’t explain what will happen beyond “the site will go down for 24 hours”.
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.
Our results were: 1) bought and forgot to eat; 2) bought enough for people who came there from home but too little for people who came from work; 3) bought and ate; 4) forgot to buy; 5) got so hungry we had to stop talking (about food) and send a guy out for sandwiches; 6) bought and saw that someone brought their own food, too, so we had to redistribute the leftovers… I mean, we are just great at this planning thing...
...but if you offer me to guess, I’d wager people said it’s really just not worth a bother.
(seems like HC’s post is the most “meta” part of the discussion. Could we maybe talk about it, instead? That thing where in the world with AI, the concepts of a job and job satisfaction will undergo terrible change?)
Sometimes it seems to me that LW is too ready to build for the ages. The best heuristics, the best textbooks, the best meetup practices. Either there should be mandatory time thresholds for re-evaluations, or we should maybe relax about this. (Except for the Boring Advice Repository, perhaps.)
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.
Thank you, that instills hope. I’ve got to send c. 75% of them to CFAR and we’re golden.
(Sorry about carrying on like this, I’m a bit mad right now. I have just lost a very nice and thoughtful introverted person (who is also an LW follower of several years) from our local online discussion group and nobody even noticed. I went to their discussion group last year, it was a dream come true, although not strictly LW-themed. And now she tried us out and withdrew. We didn’t even get to disagree about anything.)
But seriously, a post on Meetup Food sometime before people can meet offline might be a good idea!
(Abramovich, not Abromavich. It’s from the name Abram originally.)
Thank you. I am not blaming myself, I am looking for ways and means) and sometimes finding them. But yes, I would like to have to make fewer choices.
Thank you very much for your generosity. I passed it on to others in our local chat.
An example. When my kid was in his second year of primary school (that’s for 7-8 y.o. here in Ukraine), they played a game: kids were running in circles around chairs, and when they heard a whistle they had to sit down. But they were one chair short, and each time one kid and one chair were sent away. After three rounds my son started to get the general idea, and when they started running he went to the pile of discarded chairs and got himself one because whatever. (They disqualified him, and I stood there grinning like an idiot because heck yeah.)
But I also thought about how I would explain to him the game as a game, quite separate from everything else.
Asked an entomologist about “comparably weird invertebrates”; his version includes parasitic crustaceans, Strepsiptera, echinococci, Myxozoa, and Ascidiidae.
I speak Russian, Ukrainian and English and am slowly learning German. I also have studied and forgot Tatar, Hindi and French (there was some rather twisted education planning involved.)
I feel like the languages occupy their own niches, even the forgotten ones. German feels like really elaborate English with the promise of expressing thoughts more nimbly and precisely. Tatar helped Hindi through some words of the same “Turkish” origin (I mean words like “kitap(b) - a book”), and Hindi was fascinating in its unlikeness to most anything. I still have this “standard of otherness” in my mind. French… is like knitting phonemes, it was taught to us a process more than a language. English is for building from sometimes not-intuitive blocks, and yes, there is that chasm. Russian is my tool for “fencing”, “being witty”, easy to use like a well-balanced knife. And Ukrainian is what I do :)
We were told, when we began studying English, that the more languages you know the more times you’re human. Still, nobody said we’re gonna like the end result, for some reason.
A general counterargument would be that besides the need for X, there’s a need for X containment.
So that can be our second lecture!
I’m ok right now, and thank you a lot for your concern.
I thought about writing something, but I’m thinking much more short-term & not unbiasedly. We’re ~ 15km outside Kyiv, which has been striked, and ~ 10km outside Brovary (also), so we have heard explosions but not seen any yet. Going down to the cellar occasionally (it gets furnished ever cosier), not thinking about work (Because Nerves), checking up with relatives. There’s nothing much to do. Can’t run—the roads are congested & trains are being cancelled, and I don’t feel like I can join a guerilla team because of my family. I know some LW-reading people in Kharkiv who are sure to have it worse.
People are reacting in wildly different ways, of course. We check the news often. In my bubble there is also talk about how this is going to affect sending the next Antarctic research team to the station (to relieve the guys there); street warfare; the situation at the Chernobyl atomic station now that it is taken by the Russians; donations for the Army (blood, money, transport etc.); the position of Nature’s editorial team re:situation in Ukraine (oddly pro-Russian); house pets (many bomb shelters will let you in with one); prayers; mail delivery delays; children’s emotions after watching the news; (often suspended) education; and soon, I expect (edit after autocorrection to “except” :) ), gardening.
The rumor has it this night will be hard, but then again, it’s a rumor.