I think I would prefer ‘tact’ in most cases, with ‘I wave shifgrethor’ as a notion / conversational signal (instead of just the ‘shifgrethor’ as a notion).
Mary Chernyshenko
Karma: 825
(making toys for people is an example that works for me.)
(I don’t think all silliness is fun. I have been hearing lame jokes of the same kind for months and they drive me up the wall.)
I know a guy.
The first thing I thought about him was that he had to be a hitman, judging by his freezers. Yet he was helping my family—practically saving my family, at the moment, I was simply scared out of my mind. We are friends.
And one day, a bit later, he said over tea: I paid for a Ukraine soldier to be “made a hero” (sent to the front lines) because he was blackmailing my woman, who used to be his woman.
I said nothing. It could be that the soldier lived, and I have a thing about blackmailing.
And one day, much later, he said over wine: years ago, I killed a homeless man who was refusing to leave. People here know about it. Nobody ever gives me any trouble.
It took some swallowing. But I managed. Now, though, I really dread to hear confidences, for all that I have only two friends.
(this is completely sideways, but recently I found myself thinking that other exams should not be testing intelligence instead of their stated purpose. When an English test requires you to hold in your head facts, …, it starts to be less about English and more about “something else”.)
Joke, take photos, and invent stories.
Once upon a time I bought a camera and started taking pictures. And I compounded it by making up meanings for the objects on the other side of the lense.
I kinda played at science.
People see… some sciencey thing, like a bacterial culture or an ionogram, and they make up meanings for it. It’s so much easier to do for an ionogram! You understand at once that it’s an abstraction (a number), and so has to be deciphered in a specific way. You may play around with different sets of them, with different software settings, but in the end, the knowledge you derive from it all has to obey a convention of understanding.
A bacterial culture is not an abstraction. It is a physical object, free from conventions. There are many ways to take abstractions out of it, and every one of them requires that a story be invented first (a causal structure). There are also many ways to make it a different physical object; for example, it can be overgrown by a fungus. Dr. Fleming saw it happen. He refused to invent that it had been spoiled (although he could not very well deny it), and that’s how we got antibiotics. After Dr. Fleming went with his outrageous new story instead, and got some abstractions out of it, and fitted to them some specific analytical tools.
I mostly can’t invent new stories. I like to do… what I like to do, a subset of that which I already know. And those new things aren’t here yet, to know them.
But my preferences are. I like to laugh. To not have to defend myself. To get awed. To be proved right. To meet friends as friends.
...Which was how I ended up taking pictures of our geese. But it started with a name.
Or rather, with two. Two very special characters, who had been “them big white birds” a day before. But now, they became photographable, and then, suddenly, visible.
I saw their shapes and colors. Ways they move. Things they do. Foods they love. I heard the sounds they make. All of it had been there before, we had “seen” it, we had to have observed it on some level to even come up with the names… but it had been big white birds’.
Not theirs. Not mine.
And now it was. After I had aimed my camera at them, and my husband aimed his.
Of course, we immediately antropomorphized them to hell and back. They had Views, like Granny Weatherwax. Fears. Mannerisms. Tropes. They started grumbling. Writing songs. Wishing people happy birthdays. Going through their old photo albums!
Other geese wanted in on the fun, which is how they behave anyway. They told stories about the cat, the ducks (including the Lady Duck, a wild bird who brought her babies to swim in our pond), the chickens, the dog, and the goats. We had a young rooster who used to fly over to the neighbors; it did not bode well for his life expectancy, at the hands of my father-in-law. But we named him Columbus, and suddenly, he was opening the New World. Twice a day. (He is now in his prime and a very fine chicken man).
...All of this would not let me discover antibiotics.
But I learned something from it.
To tell a story, you can start with taking a picture
...of something you might have named but not yet seen.
I think of expertise as a network of competent people with some nodes having more weight and some nodes being necessary for the whole thing to be a “-work”.
For instance, take nature conservation. It always deals with very specific things (plants, bird migrations, fossil fuels, roads, treaties, whatever.). It’s a hodgepodge. You might need many specific experts. But in the center, there is always the need to balance the needs of man and the needs of nature; and this is usually the work of a few.
And it is these few that you most hope to be “real”.
It kinda seems to me that we should then also add the duration parameter or the range-of-context parameter. The no-shoes-in-the-temple taboo hardly governs your behaviour when you aren’t doing temple-related things. The no-inbreeding taboo seems different?
And I still maintain that people use taboos to focus people’s attention to the ‘safe’ forbidden things.
We Need a Taboo Theory (or I need to get out from under a stone and read about what we already have)
In practice, the word ‘taboo’ can mean two different things: ‘you must not do it’ or ‘you must not have your own opinion about it, are you even listening’. Could be both at once. (Are there more?)
The second meaning allows to direct attention to things which otherwise, perhaps, would not be considered so interesting, and to force an agreement. It doesn’t have to be some agreement about what is the right attitude towards something; it is enough if people agree that they should have some attitude at all. Who knows what they would have thought about otherwise.
Taboos degrade with time, but you can still use them. First, you have a must-not-do taboo. It gradually fails. Now, you can have a great revelation about what it meant for you and your culture. You can demilitarize, for example; you learn about informed consent. You move forward, towards the must-not-have-your-own-opinion-about-exactly-this-thing taboo.
And it never occurs to you that you just don’t have to do that.
For jobs which pay in other things, the employees often band together to provide for each other. Take gossip. As a teacher you get an awful lot of interaction with people, but there are limits on its content and form. However, you still get to gossip with other teachers, support and get supported in turn. (And this codependency has implications for the manager’s role and capabilities in the team.)
I would say that ‘meaning’ is a long-term consideration (school-year scale or longer) but ‘gossip’ is a short-term fix. The fix should be also acknowledged.
Probably you should avoid “washed” food because if it has not been washed right now, fungi and bacteria are developing on it more rapidly profiting from the moisture. (I am thinking, in particular, about packets with micro-greens / leaves /..., which you can “simply put on your plate”. I once found bits of wet grit (?) in one. Not buying them anymore.)
I kind of agree. And I probably do like a more confrontational approach than you do. (A tangent. I have deliberately put strangers into situations that were really uncomfortable for everybody, within the boundaries of 1) law and 2) common sense. Nobody was there for honest discourse. I was there for the thrill, they were there for the money. It was interesting, though, how we all still respected some lines in the sand without having to name them, like “give a warning for the first offence” or “go for the camera and not for the eyes”.)
What you say doesn’t matter as much as what the other person hears. If I were the other person, I would probably wonder why you would add epicycles, and kindness would be just one possible explanation.
It’s always funny when you say there’s a lion across the river, everyone knows there is a lion across the river, and everyone knows everyone is actually speaking about the social reality, because who cares about the lion, anyway.
(Personally, I would be rather intimidated by such a long list of questions at Step 6. I would be thinking something like, question one: why do I think it wasn’t just sheer dumb (lack of) luck? And question two, have I had fun?)
In chemical names it’s so hard. At least when one is not a chemist. They say “follow the IUPAC recommendations” which in practice means”find someone who knows how to follow them”.
What happens to substances in ergot as it is metabolized (by a nonhuman body)? (I think it strange that humans have this strong reaction to e.g. bread made with the infected flour.)
Perhaps the properties of the original LSD as seen in the human body are just a side effect due to some biological role it plays in nature. Do animals have anything like what the humans do, after eating the infected wheat, behaviourally speaking? Perhaps the “feeling” part of it is not important compared to the “acting” part, from the fungus’s point of view.
Maybe the chemists had had an inkling before they tasted things. Do the sweeteners smell of something? Maybe a chemist has a stronger sense of smell.
(joke) We don’t mollycoddle our kids, we’re testing how to not tolerate preventable failure which we shall need to colonize space.