Gave 200 $ this time.
Gastogh
Karma: 428
I started reading too late to catch most notes of this sort by EY (and I often skip Author’s Notes anyway), but from personal real-time observation of other fanfics it seems to be a tremendous help for authors to beg for reviews, in any and all senses of “begging”. Asking for stuff is good, and holding updates hostage for the price of reviews is even better (assuming there actually are any readers). Giving public thanks to reviewers also works.
Kudos to the one who formulated the questions. I found them unusually easy to answer, at large.
I’m only puzzled at the lack of an umbrella option for the humanities in the question on profession. Were they meant to fall into the category of social sciences?
Not being that well-versed in the MLP-verse I didn’t read the fic, but here’s my two cents anyway:
If “I’m afraid of dying” didn’t manage the intended emotional appeal, it may be because of those allegations of selfishness you already noted. One solution is to steer attention away from what death implies for her, and towards what it means for someone else. Altruism, if not overdone, should work better than self-interest (however enlightened). Here’s an excerpt from one Damien’s fanfic Ascension, which I felt worked quite well:
This Saria was just too young to understand. Paige didn’t believe she had to explain herself to a child and her biases toward the Kokiri began to surface. “Well, Link is Hylian and he needs a Hylian to raise him and meet his needs. You’re just a child, yourself, cursed to be young forever! What could you possibly know about children?”
Almost as soon as the words left her mouth, with a great suddenness the sky opened up and the rain began to pour down on the strange couple. Though her face remained angered, the fear that she was in a very magical place and that she may have over stepped her bounds, was creeping into Paige’s bones. Looking at the face of Saria and the tears she was sure that were racing down the child’s face lost in the rainwater, Paige knew the skies were mimicking the mood of the Kokiri.
“Is that so wrong?” Saria asked in a quiet voice that despite the roar of the rain seemed to echo through out the woods. “Blacky” the white wolfos, sensing the mood of her friend, nuzzled closer to Saria. “Is it wrong to be a child forever? What is so great about being an adult?” a bite of anger was starting to enter into Saria’s normally angelic voice and a peal of lightening boomed from the sky. “Working all day… Worrying about this or that… growing gray, weak, old… Watching yourself and everything and everyone you know slowly decaying. What is so great about dying? I don’t want those things to happen to him.”
Can anyone with a better historical perspective on these things tell me if there’s a single recorded occurrence of the year 2045 being mentioned as the magic deadline for some cool futuristic thing before Permutation City was published? It just seems like I’m seeing that date a whole lot in these contexts.
Thanks for posting this here. I hadn’t been keeping tabs on the SIAI site itself and hadn’t noticed the whole matching drive until this post.
Upvoting for capturing the remark for those of us who didn’t catch it before it was edited out. Yvain has the best puns.
I agree that there’s some merit to treating alcohol’s effects on you and others separately, but if we do that, shouldn’t we then also work to exclude some of its benefits as “social externalities”? Like the whole “alcohol → socializing → mental well-being”-pattern?
Yeah, I guess the equation was misapplied there. The point was that the statistics won’t (or might not) chalk the death up to alcohol like they should, which I’d say is a harmfully misleading omission; even if it’s not a longevity problem for the drunk driver, it is for the other person.
Color me unconvinced. These “benefits” may come from any number of things, and taking alcohol as a general remedy may not be an advisable course of action because the problem is likely to be specific. Consider the following (I’ll be using “longevity” as shorthand for “improvement WRT total mortality”):
Alcohol → lowered social anxiety → more socialization → mental well-being → longevity
Alcohol → distraction from (seemingly) insurmountable problems → mental well-being → longevity
Alcohol → [insert chemical that triggers some elusive beneficial biological process that causes your cells to degenerate slower or whatever] → longevity
The last one seems least likely to me, and if you can get the social benefits through some other avenue, you may want to consider those first. I do recall reading up on some other classic studies that showed that red wine has some genuine antioxidant properties and such, but a significant impact of general longevity? I ’unno. You may still be better off using your beer bucks to buy supplements or exercise opportunities.
And that’s all assuming the researchers were conscientious enough to control for the other stuff in the first place. Apologies in advance if they actually did, but I’ve been generally unimpressed with the rigor of studies that claim to show correlations between Purportedly-But-Not-Really-Simple Thing X and Complicated Gestalt Such As Total Mortality, and so I deliberately skimped on the conscientiousness myself. Corrections are welcome in case you guys did read the whole article. But in the meantime, try these on for size:
Alcohol → indication that your income level is comfortable enough that you can afford to buy alcohol → selection bias → longevity
Alcohol → drink and drive → don’t die yourself, but WHOOPS, you just killed a pedestrian → the statistics give the cause of death as “car accident” rather than “alcohol” → longevity
Life sucks → alcohol → get wasted regularly rather than commit suicide → getting wasted gets in the way of fixing the actual problem → improved but still stunted longevity
Etc.
People can mean one of two things when they talk about sex ratios; the first is birth rates, and the second is the number of people that exist at a given moment. In much of the world men have a lifespan several years shorter than women (and lead riskier lives, though that may already be taken into account), which may indeed lead to women being the majority.
The best solution I’ve heard started by looking at who benefits from this norm [older women] and wondering whether they could have contributed to it.
Young men benefit from the decreased competition in the mating market.
Another, less plausible, suggestion I’ve heard is that it’s to do with mental capacity. I find this unconvincing because we have few objections to a high-status man dating a beautiful but low-intellect woman.
The objections never seemed all that few to me. The negative connotations of the term “trophy wife” are pretty well-established, IMO.
The Happiness and Self-Help-section might have Klevador’s Be Happier in it. The post could serve as an index to many of the recurring themes in that section, as well as a springboard for further research, what with all those sources plugged at the end.
The two links to an article on Solving The Wrong Problem found in the original are dead. I’m doubtful of that article having much of value to add to what’s right on the tin, but in case it did (or simply for the sake of completeness): does anyone know where it could be found? Googling the title returns thousands of hits, some of them blog posts by the same name by various authors.
I’m considering buying Parachute and Flow, but I have a few questions about the latter. Its author has written more than one book on the topic, so I’d like to know:
a) Is this the only book among his publications that I should read? b) …and if not, which ones should I read and what’s the appropriate order? c) Are you recommending this particular book over the others by Csíkszentmihályi because you’ve read them all and consider it the best, or because you’ve only read the one and found it worth the time even in isolation?
I believe EY mentioned somewhere that ‘Verres’ was a composite of Herreshoff and Vassar.
There are anecdotes where pseudo-explanations like “memory bias” just don’t cut it—in order for you to confidently deny psi you have to confidently accuse them of lying,
Can you give an example or two of such anecdotes?
Am I only one who has serious trouble following presentations in a fictitious dialogue format such as this? The sum of my experience of the whole Obert/Subhan exchange and almost every intermediate step therein boils down to the line:
Subhan: “Fair enough. Where were we?”
On Skype with Eliezer, I said: “Eliezer, you’ve been unusually pleasant these past three weeks. I’m really happy to see that, and moreover, it increases my probability than an Eliezer-led FAI research team will work. What caused this change, do you think?”
Eliezer replied: “Well, three weeks ago I was working with Anna and Alicorn, and every time I said something nice they fed me an M&M.”
Made me smile. Thanks for sharing.
I don’t remember anything about the spell not being able to hit anything but the intended target, either in canon or the MoRverse. What’s your source? Or, if there is no explicit source, what makes it “obvious”?