Let me begin by channeling T-Rex once again and imagining I'm an old man.
So there's this form of entertainment everybody's crazy about these days called "movies". You go to this theater that makes most of its money off of overpriced snacks, and then you play a video game with a bunch of strangers in the dark, except it's all one really, really long cutscene, and you can't even press start to skip parts. Could be tolerable if you really liked Final Fantasy VII, I guess. Thing is, if you come too early, they show you ads for other movies, and they always have the sound up really loud.
There's this other thing that kids these days are really crazy about that they call "music". It's a bunch of noises. Time was, there were all these rules about how much the noises could differ in pitch and how you could time them. The rules were all kind of arbitrary and suspicious, like the dogma of an ancient religion, but folks got used to them, so much that even I've caught myself tapping a toe or humming along to some music. Kids these days won't stand for rules of any kind, a'course, international standards least of all, so they told music theory where to go. They spent a few decades playing around with noises and seeing how much they could make us old folks cringe; then they got bored with the noises themselves and decided to just pick a handful they liked and loop them over and over while whining petulantly about how cops keep stealing their coke and they haven't been fellated in a whole week. And if it wasn't crazy enough that kids listen to this cacophony at all, they're so constantly hearing it on their headphones and from their car radios and from television and in stores and in restaurants and at parties that the world sounds eerily quiet to them if they aren't listening to music.
And don't even get me started on null-hypothesis significance testing. That, movies, and music will be the end of civilization as we know it, mark my words.
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"And they call this psychology!"
I realized the other day that I'm turning 25 in about six months. That made me feel like a dinosaur.
Are you disappointed, excited, or indifferent to the current hypothesis that most, if not all dinosaurs had feathers?
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/ukealii50/kylo.jpg - Thanks uke!
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!
I've warmed up to it, after the initial shock. It's cool how science marches on, y'know? And funny to think that the mental images of dinosaurs we all share are wrong not just in how the dinosaurs lack feathers but also in how paleontology surely still has a long way to go.
This is the image I think of whenever I think about feathered dinosaurs:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deinonychus_BW.jpg
Back on a more cynical note: can you believe that an actual human being once said "BDD is a second-generation, outside-in, pull-based, multiple-stakeholder, multiple-scale, high-automation, agile methodology"? Software engineering is terrifying. I get a little scared just reading WikiWikiWeb.
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"And they call this psychology!"
Topic title made me want to play MDK.
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http://lostfacts.net/
I've looked at the world for quite a few years now and I've found that if I don't laugh, I'll probably end up crying.
I keep running across cartoon characters that I find strangely repulsive and unsettling. I don't know what it is. It's like the uncanny valley. Maybe it has to do with the strange proportions of these characters.
Three examples:
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/184/181/thrillerd.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6je1jYFO41qetjcco1_500.png
http://images.kingdomofloathing.com/WRKS/ee.png
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"And they call this psychology!"
Is that last one supposed to be MC Frontalot, Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, and John Hodgman?
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
I haven't posted because I don't know what Mk II is and was afraid to be off-topic.
James: For all I know, yes.
Alex: "Mark II", like for military hardware. (Not to be confused with PaperSpock.) I was thinking of naming it "Random Thoughts: Electric Boogaloo", but for me, the phrase "Electric Boogaloo" is less so-bad-it's-good than so-bad-it's-horrible.
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"And they call this psychology!"
Kodiologist posted...
I keep running across cartoon characters that I find strangely repulsive and unsettling. I don't know what it is. It's like the uncanny valley. Maybe it has to do with the strange proportions of these characters.
Three examples:
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/184/181/thrillerd.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6je1jYFO41qetjcco1_500.png
http://images.kingdomofloathing.com/WRKS/ee.png
#1 didn't bother me. The other 2 were horrifying.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
I can't tell what's being said in this topic, but I like it.
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SIGNATURE
An example, Alex.
MK1- Tony Starks Ironman suit made in a cave.
MK2- The prototype that eventually became Warmachine.
MK3- Main suit.
MK4- Suitcase suit.
MK5- Avengers suit.
And so on and so forth. In other news, started playing MDK again, good game.
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http://lostfacts.net/
I've looked at the world for quite a few years now and I've found that if I don't laugh, I'll probably end up crying.
I saw the Avengers movie but not the Iron Man movie. But I think I do get the concept. In fact I've discovered that the knife I have is a Mk II military knife.
Diversity Awareness Initiative for Students
DAIS Community Norms©
The following norms function as a code of conduct during all meetings.
Ready, folks? The below Community Norms© are some of the worst words I have ever read. Not in the so-bad-it's-horrible sense, in the so-bad-it's-hilarious sense.
1. Be fully present
2. Speak from the "I" perspective.
3. Be self-responsive and self-challenging.
4. Listen, listen, listen and process.
5. Lean into discomfort.
6. Experiment with new behaviors in order to expand your range of response.
7. Take risks, be raggedy, make some mistakes... then let go.
8. Accept conflict and its resolution as a necessary catalyst for learning.
9. Be comfortable with silence.
10. Be crisp; say what is core.
11. Treat the candidness of others as a gift: Honor Confidentiality!
12. Turn off or set to silent alert all cell phones and pagers.
13. Refrain from text messaging or checking e-mails on phones, laptops, or any other electronic equipment.
Arguably, this kind of insanity is standard fare for awareness-raising, which these days is mere self-congratulatory lip service against bigotry. Whatever happened to the glorious tradition of radical-feminist consciousness-raising? If I were more of a Marxist, I'd blame the bourgeoisie for appropriating and perverting revolutionary ideas. But I am more inclined to blame the activists. However it happened, it seems that civil-rights folks have gone soft. Perhaps they were too easily appeased by what victories have been achieved in recent decades. Or perhaps the real civil-rights activists of today reason they have bigger fish to fry in the third world, like ethnic cleansing and the treatment of women in fundamentalist Muslim circles, and so have left issues closer to home to be dealt with by people who use terms like "raggedy", "privilege", and "heteronormative".
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"And they call this psychology!"
One of the many miserable features of the human condition is our tendency to get swamped with details. We spend so much time maintaining ourselves, our possessions, our personal relationships, and our environments—sleeping, cooking, eating, cleaning, bathing, exercising, traveling, shopping, tending to our ledger, talking to our parents on the phone, checking PMS—well, even if not everyone does all the same kinds of maintenance, everyone has to do a lot of it. And even when we try to do something meaningful, something that has the potential to make a lasting difference, like scientific research, or teaching, or debugging popular software, the universe, whether in the form of an institutional review board or our own laziness, seems to conspire against us in our quest to make real progress. The signal of human intention is almost drowned out in the noise, nay, the roar of the human condition.
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"And they call this psychology!"
Have you perchance watched My Dinner with Andre? It talks about some of the same things you're hitting upon there, in its second half.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
I haven't. Interesting.
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"And they call this psychology!"
I'm feeling like a million bucks wearing my new "A wizard has turned you into a whale. Is this awesome (Y/N)?" T-shirt.
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"And they call this psychology!"
Papery Spock, do you fear lizards?
http://www.samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.html
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"And they call this psychology!"
Not particularly, though I can't imagine I'd be fond of some of the more ferocious varieties in an up close and personal capacity.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
The capitalization of words for races is tricky. Most people write "black" and "white", but two kinds of people make a point of capitalizing these words: social scientists and racists. Most people capitalize "Hispanic", so I thought James made a typo here:
http://arfer.net/pms/topics/59668425#post030
but my Bayes textbook, whose first author, Andrew Gelman, is a political scientist, consistently has it in lowercase. Goodness knows what the story behind that is.
On the subject of race, I often have a great deal of trouble understanding thick accents. It's very embarrassing. I end up, for lack of better ideas, trying to pretend that I understand the speaker, feeling racist all the while. Ah, white guilt. And it seems mysterious that I in particular have trouble understanding accents. My hearing is excellent. It's possible that my vision is somehow to blame, but I think I do worse than normal on the phone, too.
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"And they call this psychology!"
Garland was into lolcats before they were cool (about four years before the term "lolcat" was coined).
http://www.nuklearpower.com/2002/04/02/episode-133-a-but-not-a-very-good-psychic-if-you-didnt-see-this-instead/
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"And they call this psychology!"
Ah, the trials of night managers.
http://felkes.tumblr.com/post/23019812161
Imagine you had been this manager. What would you have done? I might've been tempted to say to myself "Okay. The new hire thinks she's a werewolf. We can work with this." But Felkes isn't quite framing this fairly. She says "I did lose my job because of my identity", but she didn't merely tell her boss she was a werewolf, she growled and snarled at customers and then told her boss that the urge to engage in such behavior "sometimes happens to a degree where I can’t hold it back". Thus, she, in full presence of mind, disclaimed accountability, both past and future, for acting like an animal. That is an eminently reasonable thing for which to fire somebody.
Or is it? Taking this line of thinking to its logical conclusion suggests that managers should also be able to fire people with tics. Such people, too, will generally say they can't help doing the weird, potentially upsetting thing they do. Lay psychology demands a clear distinction between tics, which are truly involuntary, and shifting, which therians merely believe is involuntary. However, I don't see how this distinction can readily be made empirical. It's not as if Felkes can actually do anything about acting like a wolf, right? She isn't just plain lying, right?
Crazy as it might sound, I'm tempted to put the blame here on capitalism. Well, okay, I'm happy to blame Felkes for thinking she's a werewolf. I don't think believing in anything supernatural is defensible. Otherkin-ness is no more reasonable than Christianity. At the same time, I guess I wouldn't bet that reading Karl Popper or Carl Sagan would cure her of her snarling fits. The thing about capitalism, as I was going to say before I interrupted myself, is the inherent conflict of interest between self-interest and fairness. Expecting employers to hire anybody out of a sense of fairness would endanger their business as its fate came to rest in the hands of werewolves, people with tics, albinos (yes, I'm a competent scientist, but imagine if I tried to be a lifeguard), and good-old-fashioned lazy people. On the other hand, if employers could hire and fire without restriction, then we're back to Jim Crow. I would prefer a society in which jobs are done by the people best equipped to do them, whether by having relevant talents or by simply not being a werewolf, and people's access to food, shelter, and the Internet is independent of what job they do. And I want a pony.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
I'm irked that Twitter has somehow achieved ownership of the characters @ and #. To a Unix geek, those are most emblematic of roguelikes and the su prompt, respectively.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
It also made Chrono Cross humorous in hindsight--all item names start with @. I can't speak for #, but at least @ is denoting a person in Twitter AND roguelikes, so there's at least a vague similarity in usage.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
…but at least @ is denoting a person in Twitter AND roguelikes…
Oh yeah, I never realized that. Now somebody needs to write a roguelike interface to Twitter.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
I just added a lot of stuff to Arfer.net, but a lot of it started out as PMS posts.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
On tonight's Omegle Adventures:
You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
# hi
> Greetings, "a random stranger".
# im a girl
> And I'm a boy.
> Pleased to meet you.
# 19
> Twenty-two.
# you too
# im from england
> I am from… well, Manhattan originally, but then somehow I ended up in Long Island.
> Graduate school, y'see.
> And now I'm visiting my parents in New Jersey.
# cool
> "Cool"? I don't think you understand how we New Yorkers look down on "Jersey".
> We curl our lip in disgust at them.
# lol xxx
# ur funny
> And yet my own parents decided to move here.
> I'm ashamed of them, practically.
# whats your name?
> Kodi Arfer. Here's my neato website: http://arfer.net
> I used to go incognito on the Internet, but now I figure I ought to keep my cyberself and meatself well-integrated.
> Leverage the strenghts of both for communication, etc., etc.
# well my name is danielle
> So, I dunno, what part of England? Not that I know much English geography. Or any geography.
# manchestee
# manchester
# well outskirts :)
> And what are you doing with your life right now? Are you in university?
# no looking for work actually
> In what? Just anything that'll feed ya?
# yeah
> It's hard for me to stomach such a prospect myself. I live for my career dream, which is to be a scientist.
# nice lovely ;)
# do u have kik? we can be friends x
> Nah, I don't do any of that newfangled stuff.
> I'm a Linux geek.
# oh
# okay well im kinda erm....
> I feel like having Skype is enough of an affront to my principles.
> Kinda erm?
# horny :/
> Ah, I'm afraid you picked the wrong fellow. I'm celibate.
> I'm flattered, though.
# oh but im nice just stating tho lol
> I'm sorry, I don't know how to interpret that.
# bye
To think, a website full of horny dudes and she ended up with me. "God often gives nuts to toothless people." Unless she was really a hairy forty-year-old man living in a basement in Alabama, of course.
I have a new appreciation for the guys who say "asl" and then immediately disconnect when they see I'm male. They're out for cybersex and they give not the slightest indication that they're interested in conversation.
In hindsight, I should perhaps have taken the unprompted early gender mention, the "xxx", and the wink as red flags.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
Wait a minute, I'm twenty-three! I've been twenty-three since June. Am I already getting sloppy about mentally updating my age? Now I feel really old.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
I find it funny that you go on Omegle.
I'm attracted to it by the potential for weird conversations, and indeed I've had several fun, interesting, weird conversations, but it's annoying to slog through all the asl-ers to get there. I wish all those people would go to some site that was especially for cybersex.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
Last night, for example, in the spirit of http://xkcd.com/1053/, I described the Milgram experiment to an Omegler who was interested in the Holocaust. Kinda fun.
I guess it's now trendy among web designers to include validation links on webpages, but ensuring that one's pages actually validate hasn't caught on, so I—as somebody who religiously ensures his pages are valid but never includes validation links*—take a certain smug satisfaction in clicking on such links. Example: http://www.warren-wilson.edu
* If only because of a bug in the W3C validator: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator-cvs/2012Jul/0004.html
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
Kodiologist posted...
I'm attracted to it by the potential for weird conversations, and indeed I've had several fun, interesting, weird conversations, but it's annoying to slog through all the asl-ers to get there. I wish all those people would go to some site that was especially for cybersex.
If you were willing to fill out captchas, couldn't you write some sort of program to automatically respond to ASLs to weed out the ones that wanted sex? Basically, it would connect, send out an automated message, give non ASLs to you, give your standard answer to ASLs, and then send those that did not then disconnect to you as well?
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
Hm… maybe? Thing is, most of the time wasted is for waiting for the other party to do something or for Omegle to connect. The only way to speed things up would be to use multiple connections at once, and then, if I happened to find multiple people worth speaking to at once, I'd have to abandon one of them. Unless I stuck them all in a common chat room. Hm. Programming against Omegle would be annoying, though, since it has no API.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
I typically juggle three tabs at a time on omegle, and usually can keep up with them, given the pauses in the conversation, and the fact that on average, only two full fledged conversations will be running at a time.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
Today's Charlie Brown moment: I began a voicemail message by saying "Hi, Kodi…"
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
And the stealth-pun-of-the-month award goes to "Why Branding Matters: Stand Out From the Rest of the Herd".
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
I just saw a pigeon outside. I thought how odd it was to see a pigeon in Long Island, but then I figured it might've been a displaced Manhattanite like me.
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To live is to suffer. The suffering only stops when you die. In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful.
Here's an example of how social psychology can be funny and scary at the same time, from: Merritt, A. C., Effron, D. A., & Monin, B. (2010). Moral self-licensing: When being good frees us to be bad.
Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 344–357. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00263.x
More recently, Czopp (2009) obtained similar results but kept the target behavior constant across conditions. This study examined Black and White participants' reactions to a White target who made a potentially offensive claim about African-Americans, varying whether he preceded his statement with the disclaimer, "I'm not racist or anything, but …". When this preamble was added, White participants thought the speaker was marginally less racist, but Black participants thought he was significantly more racist.
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
An albino-approved advice animal: Sudden Clarity Clarence saying "Albino animals are like shiny Pokémon in real life."
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Math Corner: Last night I lay awake wondering about a weaker version of "Cauchy's wrong theorem". Cauchy thought that the pointwise limit of continuous functions is continuous. We know that if the convergence is uniform, then we do get the conclusion; however, can we get some weaker conclusion from the original premise? In particular, it seems difficult for the pointwise limit of continuous functions mapping R to R to be continuous nowhere. I tried and failed to construct such a sequence that converged to the Dirichlet function. And indeed, Wikipedia tells me that the pointwise limit of continuous functions can be discontinuous only on a meager set (i.e., a countable union of nowhere dense sets).
But thinking about the Dirichlet function as a limit made me think about dense versus non-dense subsets of the rationals. Q is dense, and it obviously remains dense if we remove any finite number of elements. But we can remove infinite subsets, too, like the integers, and the remainder is still dense. We can even remove infinite bounded subsets, like {1/n : n natural}. How far can we go? How can we characterize the dense versus non-dense subsets?
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I don't know what *any* of that means :(
I'm afraid real analysis is not the sort of thing one can explain with a single analogy to Iron Man.
The complete contents of my refrigerator are currently a jar of peanut butter, a tub of grated cheese, a package of sliced cheese, a bag of baby carrots, and a pitcher of water. Good thing I'm getting groceries today.
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
It just occurred to me that while one is generally expected to treat people above you gently and people below you roughly, I do the opposite: I'm irreverent to superiors and kind to inferiors.
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
According to the OED, the British pronounce "albino" as "albeeno".
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
What I thought after seeing the first two episodes of Friendship is Magic: why are there no card catalogs in Equestria?
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Since the Adventure Time thread is dead, let me add that, wow, "Tree Trunks" was creepy.
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Today in my class about attention, the instructor was talking about how a paper he'd assigned us to read was a "guilty pleasure" for him, and how, when he'd first stumbled upon it as a graduate student, he'd been unable to stop reading it. I quipped "Was it love at first cite?"
(Actually, I said "Was it love at first cite… ation?", because I was afraid nobody would get it otherwise.)
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They say I'm just scared. Yes, I am scared. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I've spent a while digging through Bernard Apfelbaum's website ( http://bapfelbaumphd.com/ ) trying to decide exactly which of his ideas about entitlement to feelings are worth repeating.
What Apfelbaum describes as the "focus of ego analysis" is the problem that we usually don't feel entitled to our pain. That is, we don't feel we have the right to suffer.* This lack of entitlement makes us feel ashamed or doubt ourselves or hate ourselves, and these meta-feelings, the thinking goes, are the proximal causes of many kinds of persistent distress. Apfelbaum cites examples of how people who have experienced major traumas, such as war or parental sexual abuse, are haunted by guilt. They feel they ought to get over the experience and feel chastised for not having done so, ironically making it all the harder for them to get over the experience. This kind of problem is in a sense worse in the case of everyday, banal traumas, like being made fun of for something one is sensitive about, because, Apfelbaum writes, "we have a lot of difficulty telling whether an experience is traumatic or not. We have mini-disasters, maybe micro-mini-disasters all the time in reaction to external and internal events. But that is not the problem. The problem is that it is hard for us to recognize these crises." Not realizing that such experiences have caused us suffering in the first place makes it virtually impossible to feel entitled to this suffering, which we feel regardless of how conscious we are of the cause.
And if all that weren't enough, Apfelbaum argues that many cases of seeming overentitlement are actually symptoms of feeling unentitled. Think of a woman who berates her husband for paying too little attention to her, and reels off ways in which he has ostensibly neglected her. She may suffer from a lack of entitlement to feeling needy and abandoned. It could be that her very insecurities about her neediness are what motivate her to expend so much effort trying to justify the idea that her husband neglects her. You might say that her problem is not being too dependent, but an inability to be "effectively dependent": the fact that her actions arouse anger rather than sympathy in you (the husband, the psychotherapist, or just an observer) is a clue that, just as she fails to convince you of the legitimacy of her suffering, she is herself unconvinced of the legitimacy of her suffering.
What this adds up to, I guess, is a defense of the importance of compassion. We must be compassionate both towards other people whose suffering we're tempted to sneer at (along the lines of what I've called "the right to complain": http://arfer.net/w/right-to-complain ), and towards ourselves. I've chafed at the concept of self-compassion for a while, since it seemed a contradiction in terms, but I now understand a form it could take: consciousness of one's own suffering and meta-suffering.
As a final thought on that note, here are some words of wisdom from Dan Wile, a couple therapist and intellectual confederate of Apfelbaum's. Wile talks about the importance of being a spokesperson for one's patients, of finding in the patient "something wanting to be known that, given voice, produces an immediate sense of relief". Being a spokesperson means granting patients' feelings and actions a certain legitimacy that's withheld when the therapist takes an adversarial position, as by characterizing the patient's behavior with condescending terms like "defensive". Wile enumerates several guidelines for keeping one empathetic. Among them is: "When I find myself pathologizing, I normalize and universalize. I ask myself, 'What common couple or human issue is this person experiencing in a particularly clear and intense form?'" I think that's not a bad way to handle ordinary interpersonal conflict. Perhaps the next time somebody** does something unpleasant to me, my rage will cool a bit when I remind myself that they are, in their own possibly inept way, struggling with the human condition.
* Here, as elsewhere, I don't observe the distinction ACT makes between pain and suffering, because I think it's pernicious.
** I have virtuously resisted writing "somepony".
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
Yesterday, I wrote to Ryan North, regarding the title-text in that day's Dinosaur Comics strip ( http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2299 ) , "ryan it is a single giant city-sized bacteriUM". He replied, within a minute, "DAAAAANG I have made the correction - thank you!" And today's strip ( http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2300 ) is about correcting people's grammar. I haven't felt this unjustifiably warm and fuzzy since I submitted a bug report about typos in the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual and rms himself replied. Man, I rub elbows with all kinds of glamorous celebrities.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
Yeah Ryan North is astonishingly responsive. I sent him the Dino Comic I made when I was excited about making one, and he replied to me and told me it was awesome.
Another addition to that old list of "things that get no hits on Google": "Emacs Certified Professional".
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
This weekend, I wrote a JSON-RPC server in R. Well, actually, I only wrote that particular bit of code this morning; it's just that it took me a Friday and a Saturday of mucking around with FIFOs and sockets and SSH tunnels and R's iffy I/O capabilities and getting utterly confused and reading a lot of things before I realized what was possible and what I wanted. Now I feel like a real Unix geek. Well, I haven't written any kernel modules yet, but hopefully I'll never have to undergo that particular rite of passage.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
The word "noun" is a noun, "word" is a word, "portmanteau" is a portmanteau, "eggcorn" is an eggcorn, and "crash blossom" is (part of) a crash blossom. But "palindrome" isn't a palindrome and "joke" isn't a joke. The question is, is "self-reference" a self-reference?
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
Whenever I see mention of propranolol, I can't help but notice the LOL.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
A vaguely relevant quote from the Haskell WIki:
<lyceen> I speak english, german french and dutch lol
<ibid> what's this language "lol"? never heard
<Lemmih> ibid: It's from the strange land of counter-strike players and noobs.
<ibid> Lemmih: figures
<ibid> are there different dialects, english lol, german lol, and perhaps ... dutch lol?
<Lemmih> I think it means 'end statement' or ';' from C.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
I sometimes wonder how often people use Microsoft Office instead of OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and MATLAB instead of Octave, solely because they don't know a free-as-in-beer alternative exists.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
What's that expression? Never heard "free-as-in-beer".
It means "free" in the usual sense of zero-price. The purpose of the expression is to distinguish from "free" as in "freedom".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]
I'd been looking forward to reporting that today was a particularly Kodiological day, since I was scheduled to give a presentation about sexual influences on JDM in the morning and a presentation about R in the afternoon. The latter presentation was in fact canceled, but the first went well, so I shan't complain.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
This is what rap sounds like to me.
http://youtu.be/0bLFO4ZV0i4
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
Rap rap, rippity rap.
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You became the boss. You are great.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jA7nRwQp_E
Well that's an incredibly old alt I don't remember seeing before.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
I've always made a lot of careless computational mistakes, maybe as part of my larger problem of absentmindedness. I got better in college when I had a calculus teacher who counted tiny mistakes the same as leaving out a problem, but I've gotten soft again. I'm particularly prone to off-by-one errors ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error ). The biggest off-by-one error I ever made was not while working on a math problem or programming but while playing Heroes of Might and Magic III. There's a level that requires you to capture a heavily-defended town within three months. The game's calendar starts at Month 1, Week 1, Day 1, and I was tearing my hair out trying to build up a strong enough army to take the town before the beginning of Month 3. I think I realized my mistake only when I tried to see what happened if I let time run out.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
There ought to be a scene in a video game where you have to navigate a touch-tone menu (with all the usual annoyances like "Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed" and "Your call is important to us") while busy holding off zombies or rafting down a dangerous river or landing a plane or something.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
Also, there should be a work of fiction about a sysadmin superhero (inspired by http://xkcd.com/705/ , and as an antithesis to the BOFH) with IT-related Aesops like "Use good passwords", "Back up your junk", "Security through obscurity is rarely a good idea", "Keep your code neat", and "Don't optimize prematurely".
Yesterday, I got some junk mail addressed to "Kodi Arfer and Emily Hintze". I hope nobody married me off to this Hintze character without my knowledge. That ought to be illegal.
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"I'm sure everyone on this list will be glad to know I don't plan to reproduce myself." -Richard Stallman
Apparently the Book of Mormon in written in a KJV-esque dialect ("and becometh as a child") despite being first published in 1830. How cheesy.
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Brandon: "I had casual sex this weekend." Alex: "I had sex too, with someone I love who accepts and loves me." Kodi: "I cleaned up my .emacs."
I like the fending off zombies option.
Hilarious psychology study of the day:
Wood, M. J, Douglas, K. M., & Sutton, R. M. (2012). Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3, 767–773. doi:10.1177/1948550611434786
Abstract:
Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement. In Study 1 (n = 137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered. In Study 2 (n = 102), the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive. Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up (Study 2). The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.
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Brandon: "I had casual sex this weekend." Alex: "I had sex too, with someone I love who accepts and loves me." Kodi: "I cleaned up my .emacs."
Sometimes people call sex "intimacy". I enjoy abusing the word "intimacy" in the opposite fashion. For example, when writing about a psychology experiment on vision where there were these moving dots that sometimes got close to each other, I spoke of the dots' "fleeting moments of intimacy".
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Brandon: "I had casual sex this weekend." Alex: "I had sex too, with someone I love who accepts and loves me." Kodi: "I cleaned up my .emacs."
Not even the Crystal Empire's huge library has a card catalog. Geez.
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Brandon: "I had casual sex this weekend." Alex: "I had sex too, with someone I love who accepts and loves me." Kodi: "I cleaned up my .emacs."
Loyalty should be considered a sin, not a virtue (sorry, RD). When an organization values unity over its original purpose, or the safety of its members over the accountability of its members, it undermines its own goals. Think of policemen hiding each others' abuses, the Vatican covering up pedophilia among priests, and labor unions making it as difficult as possible for the incompetent to be fired. Perhaps clanishness corrupts in a similar way that power does: the greater one's devotion to a group, the nastier things one will be willing to do to protect the group. At any rate, one's ultimate loyalties should lie with principles, not with people. Whistleblowers are the kind of hero the modern world needs. Perhaps theists who consider God a higher authority than any mortal would sympathize.
(This post is dedicated to David Kaczynski.)
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
It seems odd that people are so eager to cite Shakespeare to show how a word is used (the OED, for example, cites Shakespeare a lot) when Shakespeare is also considered an important innovator for the language. If he frequently used words in new ways, it follows that he wasn't very representative of his time, doesn't it? I'd expect that his writing was idiosyncratic. At best, he was ahead of his time. If we want to know what Elizabethan English was like, we should prefer less inventive writers.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
Argghghhhghgh... Alan Baddeley is driving me bonkers. I'm reading a chapter of a memory text written by him (thankfully some chapters are written by others). He just spent half a page discussing a model for amnesia he made up at some point in his career, abandoned due to difficulty testing said model, then totally abandoned after a colleague of his let him test a patient. I seriously have no clue why he felt the need to discuss this in a textbook. Oh, and his organization is horrendous.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
Maybe he wanted to reader to suffer along with him. Or perhaps he thinks it's good to educate students about obsolete theories, on the hypothesis that students will thus learn more about the scientific method and are less likely to repeat past mistakes. I guess I'm not crazy about the history of science myself. Having a short history is the only good thing about psychology being so young.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
Did you hear about Samus and Link's wedding? It was a bust. For some reason, neither could manage to say their vows.
On a more serious note: moods feel constraining, don't they? For a few days now, I've been living in the shadow of a vague and sourcesless fear. The intense drive to Get Things Done that I usually subsist on is at low tide. I feel shackled, a hapless victim to fortune. And yet these very chains could provide a strange kind of liberation. See, normally, one's emotional experience is subtle and complex. You have a lot of different small feelings all swirling around in your head at once. Keeping track of them is more trouble than it's worth, and it's anybody's guess how they all interact to meaningfully affect your behavior and cognition. But when your subjective experience is characterized by a single overwhelming feeling, you have only one feeling to think about. And it ought to be easier to predict the consequences of one strong feeling than many weak feelings. It should then be more possible than usual to properly compensate for one's own emotional biases, at least insofar as they have a phenomenal mechanism of action.
A perhaps more credible argument to a similar conclusion is: whenever you need to exercise self-control just to execute your usual habits rather than succumb to a single intense motive (whether that's the motive to eat a doughnut or cower in a fetal position), you have to be more deliberate than usual, and being more deliberate increases your overall ability to make decisions pragmatically.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
I'm not so sure. Is it easier to ignore one loud voice than many quiet voices?
Ignore, no, definitely not. Respond rationally to, perhaps.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
The best thing I wrote in my comments on students' papers this semester: "Please also give the reader a better sense of what this test measures. I mean, are we asking subjects whether they can wipe their tushies or whether they get along well with co-workers?"
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
lol how very professional
"Professional" is my middle name. Well, my second middle name, after "Danger".
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
The difference between a geek and a nerd is what they think of when they hear the name "Vronsky". If you think of linear algebra, you're a geek. If you think of Anna Karenina, you're a nerd.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
And if you don't think of anything?
Then you get out too much.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
The deeper I get into psychology, the more I worry about taxonomy. First of all, there's the problem that lay theories about the human mind and human behavior endow us with an intuitive taxonomy that can mislead us. For example, we tend to think of memory and imagination as fundamentally different faculties, but the reconstructive nature of memory suggests there's plenty of overlap. Even after we as psychologists transcend lay theories, though, we have to make a lot about decisions about how to carve up the phenomena of interest, just as all other scientists do. And the more you think about a taxonomic issue, the more possible solutions you can imagine and the weaker the argument for any given solution sounds. Emotion is a great example of such an issue. Think of the words "affect", "emotion", "motive", "mood", "feeling". Are some of these terms synonymous, or do they all refer to distinct phenomena? How are they related: is affect a kind of emotion or is emotion a kind of affect, and do moods imply feelings or do feelings imply moods? Smaller-scale issues include old favorites like the distinction between guilt and shame and whether animals have emotions.
As I think the example of emotion makes plain, taxonomy has a much more important role in science than it's usually given credit for. Despite how taxonomic issues aren't empirical themselves, taxonomies guide empirical research, and they must in turn be shaped by empirical research in order for them to remain useful. But how are we to manage our taxonomies, our names? How do we reconcile all the different ways different writers have used the term "emotion"? How do we decide when to change our minds about a past taxonomic decision? In particular, how do we know when we need to introduce novel distinctions, or radically reorganize existing systems? And, maybe most pressingly of all, while we're trying to make all these decisions—which, to be clear, aren't just a matter of writing up a style guide; they're a matter tightly intertwined with the everyday practice of science—how do we talk about anything? Not to mention the problem of searching bibliographic databases for a concept that doesn't have a name.
The standard practice in the social sciences is to do it all ad hoc. Authors of experimental papers describe in the introduction (or perhaps in the discussion section) conceptual changes they think are necessary. Authors of review papers introduce their own conceptual schemes and justify them implicitly in the process of reviewing the literature in question. I feel like this isn't cutting it. Psychology is a century old and it's still struggling with seemingly the most fundamental of taxonomic issues. This problem isn't limited to the higher-level domains of psychology like emotion. Even in visual perception, which is about as nitty-gritty as psychology gets, there remains a lot of controversy with respect to what attention is, what working memory is, what recognition is, whether the binding problem is in fact a problem, what counts as a feature, what counts as an object, and so on ad nauseam. Behaviorism perhaps gets closest to avoiding the taxonomy problem, but if we wanted to do psychology entirely as radical behaviorists, we'd eventually need taxonomies of behavior patterns. (On a related note, behaviorism can't be perfectly atheoretical any more than a scientist can be perfectly objective.)
So, what do we do? I don't know. We could get serious about developing and maintaining formal taxonomies, like the Library of Congress Subject Headings, or perhaps ontologies (by which I mean taxonomies with richer formal structure, so they can express notions like "short-term memory doesn't last as long as long-term memory"). But I feel like this wouldn't be enough. A formal taxonomy is only useful and maintainable insofar as it's stable, and keeping pace with research would require changing quickly. And how is a formal taxonomy supposed to handle genuine ambiguity? Premature commitment (e.g., deciding that motivation is a kind of emotion) could keep a taxonomy from developing as it ought to. And crowdsourced folksonomies seem out of the question because making good taxonomic decisions requires real scientific understanding.
Perhaps what we need is a new breed of scientist, whose job is to synthesize empirical research and maintain taxonomies. These two activities, as well as hashing out disagreements with other such scientists, and communicating with and consulting for ordinary scientists, could readily consume a career. Perhaps what I'm actually describing is a librarian. If so, I guess we need more librarians, and they need to be better represented in journals, conferences, and education.
Now, if only we had strong AI, we could have a whole bunch of agents continuously digesting research literature and talking to each other, and whenever you wanted to know what's already known about a scientific issue, you could ask an agent about it and thereby tap this vast reservoir of concentrated wisdom. Man, I have weird fantasies.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
Although, come to think of it, I think I got that idea from Snow Crash.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
It seems like your problem would be solved with a bit of effort on author's parts for tagging, and then a good search engine and maybe a central database of scholarly articles (so when you search for "love" you don't get the most popular result which is going to be something inane).
Abstracts databases like PsycINFO are pretty much central databases of scholarly articles, or at least the aggregates of abstracts databases offered by EBSCO, ProQuest, Ovid, and so on are. These databases usually have tags of some kind, like the "Subjects" field of a PsycINFO record. But there aren't anything like comprehensive efforts to keep these tags updated, nor are sophisticated solutions offered to problems like ambiguity and partly overlapping concepts. The NIH's MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) seems pretty ambitious, but it only applies to the clinical end of psychology.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
One of the rare pleasures of scavenging through scientific literature is when a writer echoes exactly what's been bugging you. For example, Adams, Wright, and Lohr (1996) is a study notorious for its remarkable finding that homophobic straight men, but not non-homophobes, were sexually aroused by gay porn, according to phallometry. Today, I grinned to see that Meier, Robinson, Gaither, and Heinert (2006) wrote
However, we do note that no one has published a direct or conceptual replication of this effect with any type of task or instrument designed to measure unconscious forms of sexual attraction. This absence is particularly puzzling given the attention generated by the article. We find it interesting that many diverse sources of information (e.g., journal articles, books, and countless websites) appear to accept this finding as support for a psychodynamic explanation of homophobia [namely, that homophobes are defensive gays], even in the absence of follow-up empirical research.
Adams, H. E., Wright, L. W., & Lohr, B. A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440–445. doi:10.1037/0021-843X.105.3.440
Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., Gaither, G. A., & Heinert, N. J. (2006). A secret attraction or defensive loathing? Homophobia, defense, and implicit cognition.
Journal of Research in Personality, 40(4), 377–394. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2005.01.007
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
This topic was closed before it was purged.