I appreciate this timeline! My emergency plan if I unexpectedly have a deaf baby one day is to find someone fluent in sign language to move in with us and do, if necessary, hardcore sign immersion, and 3-5 months is quick enough that I would not need to worry about the baby acquiring brain damage.
Alicorn
I watched one of the videos and it was clearly a great example of the category. And yet. I think ease of learning varies with language and also with learner. ASL in particular seems likely to be very interpersonally variable—I definitely found it harder than making equivalent progress in French, Chinese, or Japanese, and those last two are famously considered difficult for English-natives. It requires manual dexterity! If you get confused in the middle of a sign language sentence you’re going to poke yourself in the ear or tangle your elbows together or something. You have to look at people’s facial expressions, they have grammatical import—you have to look at those and at their hands. There’s no good way to take notes because it has no written form or transliteration; I wound up, in my class, writing down things like “quotey eyes” (I don’t even remember what that word was) and trying to hang muscle memory on the resemblance between “sorry” and “Canada”. I’m glad you find it easy and exciting! But I believe you’re overgeneralizing.
A few years ago most of the people who lived in my house at the time all signed up for an ASL class together. I mostly retain the alphabet, though not very quickly or fluidly, but most of the others don’t, even though I stopped going halfway through because I was too pregnant and nobody else had that problem. I have never encountered an opportunity to use any signs “in the wild” since this occasion, even opportunities that weren’t usable at my level but would have been if I were more conversational. Once, before I’d ever studied ASL, I encountered a deaf customer at my summer job; I printed off some blank receipt tape so we could write to each other and that worked fine. I’m theoretically on board with baby sign as a concept but no one has ever been able to actionably explain to me how you are supposed to sign at a baby: my experience with babies is that they require your arms for other tasks on a basically constant basis and are seldom naturalistically at an angle where they could watch a sign. ASL is difficult to study compared with any language with an alphabet or orthographic transliteration, because you have to absorb information at the speed of conversation, not at the speed of reading; illustrations are lossy and the technical side of managing video or gif playback and visual attention thereto is much more awkward than reading static pinyin or kana or what have you.
I don’t want to totally take the wind out of your sails! ASL is cool and I agree it would be a great offering at schools. Minimum viable sign vocabularies could, given critical mass, be a convenient subcultural toolkit, and learning the language entire is certainly at least as worthwhile a hobby as learning any other language. But I don’t think its value proposition is quite as overwhelming as you describe.
I liked this story enough to still remember it, separately from the original Sort By Controversial story. Trade across moral divide is a useful concept to have handles for.
This one was fun to play with and it was nice to feel like I was helping.
“Anyone who resists? Why, I’ll simply mulch them,” said Tyranicca. Many, many people resisted, and Tyrannica prepared her mulching machine.
Her workers did the rest. 0.15%
I appreciate this post, though mostly secondhand. It’s special to me because it provided me with a way to participate more-or-less directly in an alignment project: one of my glowfic buddies decided to rope me in to write a glowfic thread in this format for the project [here](https://glowfic.com/posts/5726). I’d like to hear more updates about how it’s gone in the last year, though!
I get a lot of headaches, and for a while had the cached belief that ibuprofen was the way to go and acetaminophen (paracetemol) doesn’t work on me at all. But after a c-section I was given the big doses of both, and told to alternate, and I noticed that I could definitely tell the difference between skipping/delaying an acetaminophen and taking it on time. So now I use that for headaches, especially sinus-y headaches where I don’t want to suppress my immune response that’s trying to get my cold to go away.
I will also match this bounty, and encourage others to do the same.
I really like this, I’ve never seen a premise quite like it!
(Wow, I was commenting on LW thirteen years ago...) I didn’t suggest saying this out of the blue! My recommended riposte borrows the story protagonist’s vocabulary and tone. If a woman asks you:
“What you’re saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn’t I react with revulsion precisely as though you’d said the latter?”
then, it may be appropriate to discuss, optionally using the word “fuck”, why she’d react that way if you’d asked that question, which you didn’t, having instead (as in the story) made a much more innocuous suggestion, neither culturally inappropriate nor abrupt and crass.
There’s this though it is imperfect.
My impulse here is to itemize—X hours for this step, Y for that step, Z as safety margin in case of P, Q, or R.
I don’t have a great episodic memory so I can’t be as detailed as one might hope about the trajectory from 2010, but I think it worked fine! I no longer do much active mood maintenance. I’m on an SSRI again as of last year, but that’s about energy levels and “anxiety” (I don’t experience anxiety-the-emotion that often, but I seem to maybe have the underlying correlate of anxiety disorders that just pops out differently). I am sometimes irritated, frustrated, bored, exasperated, etc., but seldom sad and often happy..
This post is very interesting and I’m excited to hear back from anyone who is going to experiment based on it. My experience with sleep deprivation is mostly centered around having children; my functioning is unquestionably impacted by that kind of fragmented and reduced sleep (especially emotionally) but maybe a solid yet shorter period of sleep would actually be fine. The trouble is I’m not sure how I’d check… because I’ve found that if I have an alarm set to go off in the morning, not only is it in itself staggeringly unpleasant, it makes me anxious enough that I sleep very poorly the night before. I’ve gone to a lot of effort to (kids and all) arrange that I can sleep in as late as feels right.
Isn’t lithium in water linked to lower depression rates and not really something you’d want to straightforwardly remove even if it turned out to be making people fat? I guess you might win on net if it turned out you could cure about that much depression with lotsalightboxes and be rid of obesity in the bargain, but it’s at least a little complicated.
Your link to Quillette is broken for me.
I do usually roast it, and would only sauté if I were being miserly with dishes or didn’t want to turn on the oven, but I would expect it to be fine, yeah.
...I’m a pretty good cook and can’t actually think of any reason you shouldn’t sauté asparagus. You shouldn’t sauté… lettuce? I can’t think of a good reason to sauté seaweed? But asparagus seems like it’d be fine.
We had our 6yo walking the two and a half blocks to school by herself. But she wasn’t willing to talk to concerned strangers, and it turns out that this is a de facto legal requirement for small people walking alone in a way it is not for adults walking alone—they couldn’t figure out where she was going or if she was okay so they called the cops. Now we have to accompany her when none of us like this at all. It doesn’t seem like a general factor of independence though… she won’t get ready for bed alone.