Survey done!
scotherns
It is the sterotypical thing to talk about, but the point is not the actual weather. It is signal that they would rather be talking to you than be silent. It’s an invitation to start a conversation, since people don’t routinely come up to you and say ‘I would like to being a conversation with you—please suggest a topic’. They say ‘Raining again!’ instead.
If you were hit by a car tomorrow, would you be lying there thinking, ‘well, I’ve had a good life, and being dead’s not so bad, so I’ll call the funeral service’ or would you be calling an ambulance?
Ambulances are expensive, and doctors are not guaranteed to be able to fix you, and there is chance you might be in for some suffering, and you may be out of society for a while until you recover—but you call them anyway. You do this because you know that being alive is better than being dead.
Cryonics is just taking this one step further., and booking your ambulance ahead of time.
Donated $50. Happy Saturnalia!
My oldest child is six. She has always been taught to distinguish ‘real’ from ‘pretend’, and encouraged to decide which is which herself.
She seems to have no problem discovering that something she previously believed is false—at this age there is still so much to learn, and her world view is updating pretty constantly.
What does seem to be distressing for her is finding out that some adults believe things which she has placed solidly in the ‘pretend’ category. Her teacher’s belief in god is particularly perplexing for her.
But are “Women who would be annoyed by the statement ‘Women are alluring’” a large potential audience?
I would think that the audience for this specific sentence would break down into (roughly):
a) Those it directly applies to (hetro males, bi females, etc.), who immediately agree ‘Yes, women sure are alluring!’ b) Those it does not apply to , but who regard it as complimentary (e.g. hetro females), ‘Yes, I sure am alluring!’ c) Those it does not apply to, but who understand its intention without feeling that it marginalises them. ‘I don’t get what the big deal about women is, but I know LOTS of people who find women alluring’ d) Those it does not apply to, who feel actively excluded. ’I don’t find women alluring, the author is trying to exclude me—he really should change the text to something that I like.”
I would have thought that category d) is tiny.
Note to Emily: I am really not trying to exclude you or pick on you! I just find it really surprising you would feel excluded by a (positive, and relatively uncontroversial!) comment about women from a male author.
Please don’t destroy the world. I’m still using it.
My eldest daughter is eight, and I haven’t taught her to code yet. I’m such a bad parent :-)
We’ll do “Hello World!” tonight after school!
Yes, but you are one of the LW people.
This certainly works for me. I find I can get a significant increase in performance at the gym when I use the machines that are facing towards the posters of attractive women, compared to the otherwise identical machines facing the windows. I know its a trick, and I know why it works, but that doesn’t stop it from working :-)
I find it rather odd that no one has answered the original question.
I’m signed up, and I’ll be your friend.
I find this type of nitpicking really annoying. Surely everyone (no matter their gender / sex / preferences) understands the sentence ‘Women will be alluring’ to be a generalised example and can easily convert this to include their own specific preferences without the author having to jump through hoops to provide examples that apply to everyone.
“The touch of another person’s skin will still be wonderfully sensuous”—you can’t say that—you are discriminating against those without a sense of touch!
“sunsets”—you can’t say that, what about blind and/or extreme photo-sensitives
and so on.
If he had written ‘Football games will still be exciting’ I would have got the intended meaning and moved on, despite the fact that I have zero interest in football.
Have they checked for rheumatoid arthritis (and not just with a blood test, it doesn’t always show)? It took many doctors vists for them to get the correct diagnosis for my wife (despite a history of it in her family).
‘Chore Wars’ (http://www.chorewars.com/) is designed to motivate you do get chores done by providing XP / Gold / Treasure for completing chores, and tracking it to induce competition amongst your housemates.
It works for me as a more interesting to-do list, and has caused my kids to argue about who gets to clean the toilet and level up.
Excellent! My kids get this version:
Twinkle Twinkle little star,
We all know just what you are,
You’re a sun that’s far away,
Far too faint to see by dayTwinkle Twinkle little star,
We all know just what you are
I haven’t significantly changed my willingness to take risks, but then again I have always been very risk averse.
I would never ride a motorbike or go mountaineering etc. I eat well, don’t smoke, try to avoid stress and exercise regularly.
I did all these things even before I took cryonics seriously . This is because it was obvious that being alive is better than being dead, and these things seemed like obvious ways in which to preserve my life as long as possible.
If I found out tomorrow that cryonics was proven to NOT work, I’d still continue crossing the road very carefully.
I have two kids. If left to their own devices, they would eat the tastiest things on their plate, then stop (then complain about being hungry an hour later). They would never eat anything remotely healthy, and subsist entirely on chocolate if given the choice.
Since we have evolved to value fat and sugar as being the tastiest substances, children do have to be taught/persuaded to eat healthy food.
They also do need to be told when to go to bed. The times at which we have tried to let them set their own bed times have resulted in them trying to stay awake as long as they possibly can, until they fall asleep in the middle of whatever they were doing. They almost never voluntarily go to bed, no matter how obviously tired they are.
You think that there are people who read evolutionary psychology and were pleasantly surprised?
I was VERY pleasantly surprised. Suddenly an enormous set of previously baffling data (i.e. the behaviour of most of humanity) began to make sense :-)
It’s hard to fix the root cause of a problem without understanding it.
Sorry, the rather harsh ‘nitpicking’ should really have been addressed to the top comment in the chain that started this line of discussion. I placed it as a comment after your contribution because I wanted to point out that even your attempts to give a more generic and widely applicable example will be doomed to failure, because you will always end up making some assumptions about the audience.
Donated $50 (on top of my automated monthly donation).