reader_x

If people cannot argue fruitfully about questions that are part of their identity (and I agree with this premise), then it follows that for one to win politically (or convert them), the trick is not to convince people that your views are correct, but rather to convince people that their identity is threatened and that them maintaining their current identity (whatever that identity may be—and perhaps vagueness is key here) depends on you winning (or joining your group). Let them fill in the blanks on your views, wherever possible, as the specifics aren’t that relevant anyway.

This is what I perceive our political discourse has been reduced to. Maybe it never has been more than that.

I like the author’s conclusion that to keep an open mind, don’t make stuff your “identity.” Yet the instinct of many is just the opposite, so that not religion and party affiliation but even the most trivial things are stated as identity: “I’m a coffee person, not a tea person.” “I’m a dog person, not a cat person,” and other such bizarreness. Why are people seemingly so drawn to identifying themselves as anything at all?

Can you describe more specifically where the Botox was injected? What muscle(s) did it paralyze?

This article takes the $2,600/tent at face value (maybe bc it’s click bait?) and never digs in: •what does it cost a jurisdiction to clean streets and parks of human feces when there are no portapotties? •what does it cost charities to run a soup kitchen when people have no means to store or cook food? •what cost the homeless when they are robbed and victimized?

All these costs -and much more- are external to the equation as presented.

My basic research suggests benzene exposure is not associated with skin cancer: “ Benzene works by causing cells not to work correctly. For example, it can cause bone marrow not to produce enough red blood cells, which can lead to anemia. Also, it can damage the immune system by changing blood levels of antibodies and causing the loss of white blood cells.” https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/benzene/basics/facts.asp

Anecdotally, my mother died of multiple myeloma, a cancer related to bone marrow and blood, which is often misheard as “melanoma” (but that’s a different cancer). Her oncologist told me her cancer was associated with benzene exposure, but until now I could not imagine how she might have been exposed.

That’s so cool: just occurred to me it’s like the inverse of crowdsourcing. No one guesses the right weight of the cow, but the average of all guesses is almost exactly the right weight.

This is breathtakingly well-written and also terrifying.

Unfortunately this is but one version: it’s also not uncommon for children and grandchildren to milk their elders dry financially, particularly when the elders are a bit addled. If those elders leave unpaid bills to a nursing home, why shouldn’t those children be held responsible? It’s rough out there.

A doctor once told me that helmets are actually good for organ donation because they protect the brain stem just long enough to harvest the organs. Wearing no helmet at all just wastes perfectly good organs that could have been donated.

I think Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky already put the “rational market participant” myth to bed for good.

What fascinates me is that everyone with a strongly held opinion had a point before they formed that opinion. Individual Flat Earthers once weren’t, Nazis once weren’t, and so on for the rest of us. Is there research on that point of opinion formation? Does it tend to happen, say, before a certain age, or at a point of emotional vulnerability, or following a major life transition?

I’ve observed that to make everything “data driven” and efficient, one must quantify it. Keeping track of ‘stuff’ (copies I made, time I spent, conference rooms I reserved, etc.) requires procedures that can look like bureaucracy.

Could the containers themselves be used to help create such a temporary barrier?

A similar thing happened a few years ago after my friend died in a car crash: when I saw the unbelievable comments, I wrote to the editors begging them to delete all comments and disable any more. I feared my friend’s husband would stumble upon them. Why is a comment section even necessary on such an article?

Comments on HN are noticeably better than everywhere else. Thank you all for this oasis. I fear it’s fragile.

What fascinates me about this topic is the amount of words spent on it, yet the topic of how/when to have conjugal relations with a kid sleeping in the room is never brought up. What is the norm about this in cultures that commonly cosleep? Do they stop having sex? Only get their loving on the fire escape?

I agree about the learned helplessness. I observe it, and then I feel it creeping up myself when I see too many people around me have been bit. But no, we’ve got to find a plausible explanation for mass learned helplessness or we're part of the problem.

I agree with your conclusion that it’s more likely lack of competence.

I appreciate the article ending with the impossible NY website for COVID-19 vaccine registration. The situation is the same in Maryland, except that one must register for three so as to be on a waiting list with the county health department and the private pharmacy and the local hospital (as there is no telling which might get supply first). Not to mention the larger problem: the target group is people age 75 and up! No one seems to have thought that maybe an optional system of registration by phone, or through a call center representative authorized by the caller to register them on their behalf, is plausible. Somehow, three bad websites is considered fine. And one can’t blame this on ‘government’- the private pharmacies are as bad.

So is it incompetence, laziness, or sheer lack of concern whether the most vulnerable elderly get vaccinated? Incompetence might be the most comforting interpretation.