handoflixue

Karma: 3,206

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 10:44 PM
5 points
in reply to: jooyous’s comment on: [LINK] An internet source of offended people misunderstanding each other.
I’m just saying, my experience is that it does go both ways: Alice is offended, and so plays Bob off as being middle-of-the road when he was super-nice, and crazy-loon when he was middle-of-the-road. Or Bob is genuinely a loon, but insists that okay, he was maybe middle of the road a few times, but super nice the rest of the time.

I’ve seen this as an impartial observer, and I’ve been on both sides of the fence. My friends know not to take me too seriously when I’m upset about someone...

EDIT: You’re probably also right about defensiveness not being apparent. I’m not suggesting this is ALWAYS the case, just that it’s a bad idea to seriously assume that the first poster is ALWAYS in the right and that the rebuttals MUST be mere defensiveness and not genuine outrage at such a false portrayal.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 10:05 PM
3 points
in reply to: jooyous’s comment on: [LINK] An internet source of offended people misunderstanding each other.
When two people are saying different things, it seems unreasonable to assume that the person is describing their own behavior wrong, as opposed to the other party reporting it inaccurately.

Especially on a website where you’ll get karma/attention/sympathy for making the other party out as a crazy loon or a sadistic villain...

To say nothing of cultural differences that genuinely lead to one person saying X, and the other person understanding Y instead[1].

And then there’s the weird tendency to hold first dates in noisy environments, where it’s easy to mishear...

[1] I almost broke up with my girlfriend recently over similar. She told me “I would have shown up if it was planned” and I took that to mean “You failed to make a concrete date, so I felt okay blowing you off” when it was actually “I got dragged in to support an unplanned intervention for a family member” >.> That was awkward, especially since she really had been blowing me off due to insufficiently concrete plans a month ago.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 8:33 PM
2 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
The dimmer switch does indeed control the number of diodes (as well as the RGB balance)

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 7:16 PM
0 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Would you be fine with the compromise of “we should get offended over genuine harm”? i.e. bullying is offensive, and gay kids are not. Rape is offensive, and the wife having a low sex drive is not.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 7:14 PM
1 point
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
99% of projects do not need the top 1%. More than 1% of the world is racist.

Why should I believe you actually need the top 1%, when the statistics say there’s a greater than 50% chance that you’re actually just racist?

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 7:11 PM
8 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended

In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean “you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don’t like”.

“Gay people shouldn’t marry because it will undermine the very fabric of civilization” “Women shouldn’t vote, because they don’t understand male concepts like War and Empire” “Everyone knows Irish people get drunk on St. Patrick’s day!”

This is the sort of stuff that frequently arises in the world.

I would suggest you probably live in a very filtered environment. It’s cool, most people do. I’ve been trying to re-filter my own environment. But, trust me, these things are all still alive and kicking out there. Following the news, activist blogs, or just having friends who are oppressed in their daily life and talk about it, will quickly draw this sort of racist, homophobic, sexist comments to your attention.

If you really think this qualifies as “stating an unpleasant truth” then… wow.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 7:02 PM
0 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
I’m fairly sensitive to strobing and I’ve never noticed that from the strip of LED lights I have. But it also has multiple LEDs (at least 6, 2 each of RGB), so perhaps it’s just a different design?

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 1:43 AM
2 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository

no one has had potassium related issues on a 30 bananas a day (12,000mg) diet.

If I eat 1 banana per day, every day, I will get horrible leg cramps within a week. I really like bananas, so I’ve spent a lot of time testing this, although it’s hardly a double-blind high-sample-size study.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 1:38 AM
10 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
My understanding of the ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ rule was “80% of the work takes 20% of the time”, so this seems already covered?

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 1:34 AM
3 points
in reply to: jklsemicolon’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Downvoted for being deep/punchy instead of practical.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 1:29 AM
7 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Why?

handoflixue Mar 7, 2013, 10:21 PM
5 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
That feels a bit mis-representatative: There’s no conclusive evidence, but there is weak evidence in favor.

The first doctor says it doesn’t matter, the second says it does, and the three linked studies say (mildly harmful, no effect, no effect), with small sample sizes. The first doctor also explicitly states that he’d still wipe front-to-back if he were female!

I’d call that weak evidence towards harm, i.e. this is potentially harmful advice.

handoflixue Mar 7, 2013, 9:16 PM
−10 points
on: Don’t Get Offended

The other problem I have with the concept of being offended as victimization is that, when you find yourself getting offended, you may be a victim, but you’re being victimized by yourself.

Right, and when I punch you in the mouth to make you fucking SHUT UP and stop saying such STUPID, IDIOTIC THINGS, it is merely YOUR body victimizing you with sensations of pain. It’s not like I’m going to break your damn jaw, no matter how much that would make my life a joyous place, because then I would never have to listen to you open it again.

Who the hell thought this piece of shit was worth upvoting?!

EDIT: Oh god, you get even more absurd.

Personally, I have found that the cognitive effort required to build a habit of not getting offended pays immense dividends

Huzzah, yay for you! Way to rub it in, bastard. What the hell sort of asshole goes around all proud of not being offended? Do we also tell women to just suck it up, sexism isn’t that bad, you’re just victimizing yourself? I mean, seriously, how fucking privileged is your life, that you seriously think that this is just a casual skill learnable by anyone? Do you make ANY effort to comprehend the ACTUAL world before opening that ugly mouth of yours?

handoflixue Mar 7, 2013, 9:06 PM
9 points
0
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
On the other hand, you also have the problem of people who will ask questions that could be answered in a 1-minute Google search or by reading the documentation, thus breaking the flow of the senior programmer and wasting 30 minutes of their time.

It does go both ways.

My personal policy is to spend 5-10 minutes searching if I’d be interrupting someone’s concentration.

handoflixue Mar 7, 2013, 8:47 PM
3 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Like maia said, females get told this is unhygienic. Not the first time I’ve seen advice-specific-to-one-gender generalized to another, especially since OrphanWilde is generalizing the other way in recommending back-to-front :)

handoflixue Mar 7, 2013, 8:46 PM
17 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Downvoted: This is potentially harmful advice if you have a vagina.

The majority of cases of cystitis or urethritis are from E. coli, the normal flora that lives in your gastrointestinal tract. This helps you digest your food, but if you wipe from back to front you risk smearing it to your urethral meatus (pee hole). Then the bacteria get into a sterile environment [your pee hole] and cause a UTI. This was traditionally taught in medical school to be “Honeymoon cystitis” as many women would get UTIs after their vigorous honeymoon weekend and come back with this normal infection. Maybe we see less of this these days with premarital sex and living together.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5805108/which-direction-should-i-wipe

handoflixue Mar 5, 2013, 8:30 PM
7 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare
Quoth said Wikipedia article, in the “criticisms”:

“EBM applies to groups of people but this does not preclude clinicians from using their personal experience in deciding how to treat each patient. One author advises that “the knowledge gained from clinical research does not directly answer the primary clinical question of what is best for the patient at hand” and suggests that evidence-based medicine should not discount the value of clinical experience.[26] Another author stated that “the practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research”.[1]”

Which suggests that the precursor to EBM is a combination of Education and Intuition. Sorry if I’m not framing it terribly well—there’s an intuitive category in my head for this method, but I’ve never really had to refer to it explicitly. It’s the same technique I use to troubleshoot computer problems—I get a hunch as to what is causing it, and then proceed through a mixture of “safe, generalized advice” (try rebooting!) and “advice specific to the problem I think it is” (aha, you must not have your DNS configured correctly). If both of those fail, THEN I’ll resort to actually collecting data, analyzing it, and seeing where that leads me—“have you had other problems?”, “hmm, let me look up this error code...”

I’ve generally observed this path as the default human behavior, with “call someone else” occurring when they hit the limit of their abilities.

handoflixue Mar 4, 2013, 8:39 PM
2 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Giving in to small vices

Australia seems to have cracked training people not to litter.

Having visited downtown Sydney for New Year’s Eve 2011, I’m sort of shocked to hear someone claim this. Sydney was definitely subpar compared to my home towns (Seattle, WA and Portland, OR, both in the USA), and I was shocked how few rubbish bins there were. It genuinely bothered me a few times to be in such a gorgeous city and see it marred by litter.

The problem did seem localized to downtown—I didn’t see much of any litter out in the suburbs. I was down there for a couple weeks (Christmas through to ~7th January), so it wasn’t just the New Year’s messes I saw (and that mess was still worse than I’d expect from a similar event in Seattle)

handoflixue 27 Feb 2013 19:56 UTC
5 points
on: How much do you value your current identity vs. your life?
I’d think there’s a simpler test: at what odds would I risk myself to save someone else? It’s a nice clean demarcation between valuing “me” and “life”. If I’ll run in to a burning fire where I have a 50% chance of dying and a 50% chance of escaping alive with one trapped person, then clearly I only value “me” because I’m a life. If I wait until I’ve got a 95% chance of rescue, then clearly I value “me” vastly more than I value life.

By using an actual-other-person, we have a very clear demarcation of what is, and is not, “me” :)

handoflixue 27 Feb 2013 19:19 UTC
11 points
in reply to: jdinkum’s comment on: Need some psychology advice
No, no, no. Do not do this. It is bad advice!

First, asking for ANY precommitment not to break up over X is going to be a “major relationship step” and unless you are very experienced with relationships it is not something you ask for during the first two weeks, because there’s a decent chance it’ll harm or end the relationship.

Second, it’s a stupid precommitment to agree to! There’s all SORTS of good reasons to break up with someone who texts you, since the content can be basically anything.

Third, any breakup can be blamed on texts / emails, so it’s a big red flag that you’re going to be a serious creep if you ever do break up with them.

Phrased more specifically, in a stable, long-term relationship, and done by someone who is fairly experienced negotiating boundaries, this CAN be useful, but none of those qualifiers seem to apply here!