I’m not very good at it either! :)
Emily
Karma: 943
I think the anti-abortion movement fits this description quite well in many ways (though obviously this is an even more politically-charged view).
PS. Not in the mood for an abortion debate here/now; sorry in advance for not replying to any comments along debating lines.
If you cleaned really frequently in small bursts (say, for 20 minutes a day, almost every day?), starting from your “satisfactory” point, would that be enough to maintain the satisfactory point more or less continuously? Then each 20-minute burst of work would come with the “satisfactory state” reward.
Yeah, of course I also had no idea about the next layer down of explanation. But just having one layer seemed so much preferable to having none! It was the awareness that chemistry was dealing with a system, rather than a collection of boring facts, that made the difference to me.
Yeah, you’re never going to get fully to the bottom of things in a high school class. But it really does help when the curriculum at least tries to point you in the right direction!
Basic chemistry. I hated chemistry the first 2-3 of years of high school (UK; I don’t know if it’s taught differently elsewhere). It was all about laundry lists of chemicals, their apparently random properties, and mixing them according to haphazard instructions with results that very occasionally corresponded approximately with what we were informed they should be. We were sort of shown the periodic table, of course, but not really enlightened as to what it all meant. I found it boring and pointless. I hated memorising the properties and relationships of the chemicals we were supposed to know about.
Then, all of a sudden (I think right at the start of year 10), they told us about electron shells. There was rhyme! There was reason! There were underlying, and actually rather enthralling and beautiful, explanations! The periodic table made SO MUCH SENSE. It was too late for me… I had already pretty much solidified in my dislike of chemistry, and had decided not to take an excessive amount of science at GCSE because similar (though less obvious) things had happened in biology and physics, too. But at least I did get that small set of revelations. Why on earth they didn’t explain it to us like that right from the start, I have no idea. I would have loved it.
Maybe this would be a coherent position:
You trust GiveWell’s judgement on which charities are the best choices
You think they’ve done enough work to establish this, at least for the time being
You don’t plan to give more money in the immediate future
Therefore, you want your money go to to the charities, not to a decision-making process that you now see as having diminishing returns
I’m not sure I’d buy it myself… it seems like it really only makes sense if you don’t think anybody else is going to be giving money to GiveWell in the immediate future either (or perhaps ever?).
Academic linguists. (I am one—or, a psycholinguist, anyway.)
Yes, this is true. Consensus is largely that language can certainly influence thought in language-specific domains, and that it can influence aspects of cognition in other domains, but only to the extent of shifting probabilities and defaults around—not to the extent of controlling how speakers think or preventing some types of thought according to languages spoken.
Most “grammar nerds” I know are linguists, who think this is neat because they’re more interested in how language works on a more fundamental level than individual grammars (though of course those are interesting too). I guess it’s possible that conlang types have the opposite view! I was just amused by the distinction between what we think of when thinking “grammar nerd”.
Here’s a differently categorised concept that you might like: the colour blue. English has just one basic colour term than encompasses everything from dark blue to light blue (obviously, we can distinguish them by adding descriptors like dark and light, but still fall under blue). Russian has the separate basic colour terms sinii (dark blue) and goluboi (light blue). There’s a neat paper in which the analogous distinction in Greek is shown to affect Greek speakers’ perception of colours in comparison to English speakers on a pre-conscious level (measured using EEG), so your language-map really can affect your perception of the territory, even when language isn’t directly involved.
No, of course it doesn’t follow automatically, but a lot of the time people point out an average difference between men and women, this is the case. I happen to think it’s quite likely that there are good explanations for the phenomena you cite that don’t include “women are intrinsically more biased against cryonics than men”; there are certainly possible explanations, so it would be a bit daft to assume that that one possibility explains all the variance.
Sure, I don’t think that contradicts what I said?
Any difference between men and women on average is just that: on average. Think almost-but-not-quite-completely overlapping Gaussian curves. You have a lot more information about your parents than James_Miller, so he’s making a complete guess based on the slight difference in prior for men and women, whereas you’re able to update on much more complete and relevant information about your actual parents, not just the barely relevant fact that one is a man and one is a woman. Conclusion: discuss it with your mother, if that seems better to you.
Certain personality traits are correlated with enjoying or being perceived to be good at “us”-type (adopting the same use of “us” as you) activities and analysis, and anti-correlated with enjoying or being perceived to be good at politics-type activities and analysis? (This may just be a more general and less useful formulation of some of Jiro’s suggestions.)
I think the newer buzzword that means roughly the same thing might be “proactivity”?
I chose “consciously check relations”, but I’m nearly as bad at doing it that way as at attempting to visualise the rotation. I find these problems almost impossible. (I thiiiink the answers for the examples are a: same and b: different, but I’m a long way from completely sure: I think I’d have to build them with those little cubes they give primary school children in maths classes to be sure.) I guess it makes sense that people who are weaker at mental rotation (or, as other commenters suggest, want to be really sure of getting the right answer) resort to conscious checking, so if women on average do worse at mental rotation, you’d expect to find more conscious checkers among them.
If you’re interested in some actual research on that hypothesis, try Ferreira for a starting point. Any of the papers on her page with the phrase “good enough” in the title will be relevant.
Sure, you’re correct about asking. The reason for the discrepancy in the two ways I phrased the issue is that I think the former is what the doctor will “hear”—perhaps I’m completely wrong about that! But given that I don’t have an objective point of comparison, it seems quite plausible to me that in fact I am no more tired than your average busy-ish, active person. The only reason I’m even wondering if I should be less tired is because it seems like I used to be able to get by on less sleep—a subjective impression that I’m not very confident in.
I do sometimes feel like I have a bit of a blood sugar issue, though I’d be extremely surprised if I was pre-diabetic. I’m young and fit, no risk factors remotely present. Maybe that would be worth getting checked out some time in any case.
Thanks for the input, incidentally. :)
Eh. This problem is nowhere near bad enough that I want to end up on medication or something. In general, I’m very healthy and do a lot of sports and stuff. The less medicine that gets near me the better; if it’s something simple like iron deficiency, I can fix that easily through diet. More likely, there’s not even an actual problem, I just need to sleep a bit more.
I’m in the UK. I know a handful of people who’ve taken 8 tries or more to pass the practical test. They’re not the norm, but I’d say passing it on your first go is regarded as mildly surprising! I’d guess two attempts is possibly the mode? It’s an expensive undertaking, too, so most people aren’t just throwing themselves at the test well before they’re ready in the hope of getting lucky.