I’m Georgia. I crosspost some of my writings from eukaryotewritesblog.com.
eukaryote
Karma: 3,180
Didn’t like the post then, still don’t like it in 2024. I think there are defensible points interwoven with assumptions and stereotypes.
First: generalizes from personal experiences that are not universal. I think a lot of people don’t have this or don’t struggle with this or find it worth it, and the piece assumes everyone feels the way the author feels.
Second: the thing it describes is a bias, and I don’t think the essay realizes this.
Okay, part of the thing is that this doesn’t make a case or acknowledge this romantic factor as being different from, like, friendship. Like, in the people-at-work case, you might also do someone a favor at work because you like them as a buddy, which is not necessarily the same as whether they’re a good worker or it’s a strategic thing for you to do, or whatever—you’re inclined to give your friends special treatment. Even in straight same-gender groups, people will end up being friends and having outgroups.
Anyway, you have to be careful reasoning out of “what your in-built stereotypes say”. This is sometimes relevant information, totally. But A) your in-built stereotypes are not everyone else’s in-built stereotypes, even within your culture, and B) this is reasoning from the territory, not the map. Are they true? In some of the cases given in this piece, it matters if they’re true.
Like, the thing being described here is a bias, a flaw in the lens. “Having to navigate around possible sexual dynamics with other people makes it harder to do regular communication with them” is a thing that’ll make you less able to reason and less effective. (Especially if it still fires strongly in cases like “this woman is at this event about an unrelated topic, with a partner, and so is probably not available for dating.”) I don’t begrudge the author for having it. I think it’s really common. God knows my own best judgment has failed me before in the face of very pretty people.
But I like this community for usually not giving up on matters of self-improvement and epistemics. Even if you don’t prioritize it, you’re at least recognizing it and not throwing it out. It’s very disconcerting to read “I notice my brain does extra work when I talk with women… wouldn’t it be easier if society were radically altered so that I didn’t have to talk with women?” Like, what? And there’s no way you or anyone else can become more rational about this? This barrier to ideal communication with 50% of people is insurmountable? It’s worth giving up on this one? Hello?
I get that the author views this as sort of a series of tenuous hypotheticals and doesn’t necessarily stand by these stances and was just putting it out there, which is respectable. I think it’s wrong and so tenuous as to be unhelpful.Overall: bad takes, did have a solid 20 seconds of mixed fun and horror imagining this totally-unsexist society where straight men and women are kept in polite segregated groups, and 10% of people are in fringe situations—stable lesbian gay-male duos who must rely on each other, the bisexuals and the nonbinary people wandering the earth alone, the asexuals reigning supreme; incorruptible, masters of all domains.
This was just a really good post. It starts off imaginative and on something I’d never really thought about—hey, spring shoes are a great idea, or at least the dream of them is. It looks at different ways this has sort have been implemented, checks assumptions, and goes down to the basic physics of it, and then explores some related ideas. I like someone who’s just interested in a very specific thing exploring the idea critically from different angles and from the underlying principles. I want to read more posts like this. I also, now, want shoes with springs on them.
Mostly saying the same thing twice, a rhetorical flourish. I guess just really doubling down on how this is not good, in case the reader was like “well this sucks incredibly but maybe there’s a good upside” and then got to the second part and was like “ah no I see now it is genuinely bad”, or vice versa.
Good point!
I really like this post. Thanks for explaining a complicated thing well!
I think this dynamic in relationships, especially in a more minor form, sometimes emerges from a thing where, like … Especially if you’re used to talking with your partner about brains and preferences and philosophy and rationality and etc—like, a close partner who you hang out day-to-day with is interesting! You get access to someone else making different decisions than you’d make, with different heuristics!When you want to do something hedonic with potential downsides, you know you’ve thought about the tradeoffs. You’re making a rational decision (of course). But this other person? Well, what’s going on in their head? And you ask them and they can’t immediately explain their process in a way that makes sense to you? Well, let’s get into that! You care about them! What if they’re making a mistake?
This isn’t always bad. Sometimes this can be an interesting and helpful exploration to do together. The thing is that from the other side, this can be indistinguishable from “my partner demands I justify things that make me happy and then criticizes whatever I say”, which sucks incredibly and is bad.
If you think you might be the offending partner in this particular situation, some surface-level ideas for not getting to that point:
Get a sense of the other person, and how into this kind of thing, as applied to them, they actually are. You can ask them outright but probably also want a vibe of like “do they participate enthusiastically and non-defensively”.
People also often have boundaries or topics they’re sensitive about. For instance, a lot of women have been policed obnoxiously and repeatedly about their weight and staying attractive—for the ice cream example in particular this could be a painful thing to stray into. Everyone’s are different, you probably have your own, keep this in mind.
Interrogate your own preferences vocally and curiously as often as you do theirs.
Are you coming at it from a place of curiosity and observation? Like, you’re going to support them in doing whatever they want and just go like “huh, people are so interesting, I love you in all your manifold complexity” even if you don’t ultimately understand, right?
If you think you might be doing this in the moment, pause and ask your interlocutor if they’re okay with this and if they’re feeling judged. Perhaps reaffirm that you’re not doing this as a criticism. (If you are doing it as a criticism, that’s kind of beyond the scope of this comment, but refer to the original post + ask them and yourself if this is the time and place, and if it’s any of your business.)
Remember whatever you learned from last time and don’t keep having the same conversation. Also, don’t do it all the time.
I got dysentery so you don’t have to
I respect your oatmeal respect and expertise but I think parts of your post are close-minded about certain things. “True roots” is nothing—if you’re thinking really old tradition, why is a different new world fruit (blueberries) in there at all? Even if you’re not restricting yourself to that, why should coconut in oatmeal be fine but not guava? That makes me think it’s just about what tastes good and not really about tradition.
(I haven’t tried guava in oatmeal either, but guavas are great, a really unique flavor, I recommend trying it if you ever get the chance!)
I think it’s odd and overgeneralizing to assert that people don’t like oatmeal because of rationalizations about their diet. In my experience, people often innately dislike widely-popular sensations or experiences for no particular reason—sensory sensitivities or just unusual preferences or etc.
On that front I also dislike the texture of normally-cooked oatmeal—I think I never especially liked it but then I did long trail crews as a teenager where oatmeal was the only breakfast for weeks straight, and I really haven’t wanted to eat it since—but overnight oats (oats mixed with liquid and sat in the fridge overnight, not cooked—you could warm it up til it’s hot but not to the boiling point) or those packets of instant oats mixed with boiling water (but not otherwise cooked/microwaved after that) both have a soft but much-less-glorpy consistency, so I’ll happily eat them for breakfast sometimes. Recommend them to anyone looking for an oatmeal experience but wishing the texture were a little different.
As opposed to other species of bear, which are safe for children to engage with?
Source?
I happened to get to play Optimal Weave today and really liked it. I don’t normally go for… well, board games at all, let alone strategy-type ones, but I had a lot of fun. The variable degree to which cooperation was a helpful strategy between goalsets (only sometimes) was neat. Good work!
I’m glad your symptoms went away! Sudden onset seizures sound terrifying.
What made you think in the first place that the problem might be worms? Do you have any risk / exposure factors like the paper mentions?
Ah! I forget about a compass, honestly. He definitely came in with maps (and once he was out there for, like, over eight hours, he would have had cues from the sun.) A lot of the mystery / thing to explain is indeed “why despite being a reasonably competent hiker and map user, Ewasko would have traveled so far in the opposite direction from his car”; defs recommend Adam’s videos because he lays out what seems like a very plausible story there.
(EDIT: was rewatching Adam’s video, yes Bill absolutely had a compass and had probably used it not long before passing, they found one with his backpack near the top. Forgot that.)
Helicopters were used as part of the initial S&R efforts! Also tracking dogs. They just also didn’t find him. There’s a little about it in Tom’s stuff. I don’t know if Tom got the flight path / was able to map where it searched, I think there’s some more info buried in this FOIA’d doc about the initial search that Tom Mahood got ahold of.
(One thing I saw—can’t remember who mentioned this, if it was Mahood or Adam Marsland—is that the FOIA’D doc mentions S&R requesting a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment to come search too, but that doesn’t seem to have actually ever happened. Which is a shame, because at that point Ewasko was alive and presumably closer to/within the main search areas, so that could have actually found him.)
Oh whoa, thanks for commenting! I really appreciate your videos and your work on the search.
Check out Marsland’s post-coroner’s-report video for all the details, but tentatively it looks like Ewasko:
Hiked alone
Didn’t tell someone the exact trailhead/route he’d be hiking (later costing time, while he was still alive, while rescuers searched other parts of the park)
Didn’t have a GPS unit / PLB, just a regular (non-smart) cellphone (I don’t actually know to what degree a regular smartphone works as a dedicated GPS unit—like, when you’re at the edges of regular coverage, is it doing location stuff from phone + data coverage, or does it have a GPS chip? - but either way, he didn’t have a smartphone)
Had an unclear number of the ten essentials—it seems like a fair number? But (as someone in the youtube comments pointed out) if he had lit a fire, rescuers could have found him from the smoke, so either he didn’t think of that or he just didn’t have a firestarter.
Though I want to point out that doing all of these things—well, it’s not an insane amount of preparation, but it’s above bare minimum common sense / “anyone going out into the woods who thinks at all about safety is already doing this.” I’ve had training in wilderness/outdoor safety type stuff and I’ve definitely done day hikes while less prepared than Ewasko was.
Yeah, if anyone reading this liked this, I also really recommend Mahood’s search for the Death Valley Germans. It’s another kind of brilliant investigation.
Thanks for the link, I hadn’t read that before! Hah, so that guy, KarmaFrog, is the same guy as Adam who posted the videos I recommended. He makes fun of himself in the video about the U-haul thing, which he has now, er, moved away from as a hypothesis.
Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
Wait, just checking, when you say you got these examples from ChatGPT, do you know enough to verify that these are true?
Also, what’s the deal with the linked sources? They don’t mention browser differences. Does Firefox not run this 2023 version of Javascript or something? I’m not a webdev expert.
Huh, clicked on a few of these. I haven’t experienced this level of problems—like I said, I have a backup browser, but I don’t need to break it out often (once or twice a week?) I mean, I believe these people, but I don’t think I’m having some kind of consistently janky web experience that makes it not worth using, so as far as I’m concerned people should still give it a go.
(I also haven’t run into problems using Claude on Firefox. Goes fine for me.)
Fair enough. You did write
and
which made it sound like you thought this would be a good idea.