primeideal

In one of Martin Gardner's math columns, he wrote about inductive reasoning and the difficulties trying to generalize from very abstract, closed systems to the real universe. Scientists observe many similar phenomena, and then they try to form rules or hypotheses that explain the overarching pattern. When you make a hypothesis like "All X are Y," then finding a single case of an X that is not Y would falsify the theory, but each individual discovery of a new X that is Y doesn't prove the theory conclusively, only adds more evidence. Gardner cites Paul Berent for examples of how this can go wrong:
I think I sometimes have this problem in social settings. I make a new acquaintance. Hypothesis: we have things in common and we can maybe become friends. Evidence: they like talking about baseball, I also like talking about baseball, good! That's a step in the right direction. Another piece of evidence: they complain about a politician I don't like and voted against. This should be another piece of evidence in favor of the hypothesis, but I feel like when I update my probabilities, the hypothesis is now less likely to be true. There's a higher chance that this person has exacting litmus tests for ideological purity, and even if I don't disappoint them on this axis, I will on some other issue, so I might as well get it over with now and back away before either of us are burned further. Obviously this creates lots of problems, like, I don't want to play devil's advocate and defend the politician who I didn't even vote for...

Multiply this by a higher scaling factor if there's a risk that the other person is being hyperbolic/sarcastic/deliberately doomerist for the purposes of ???/The Neurotypicals Are At It Again.

Do I need a tag for "this is tangential to an upcoming book review but it's sufficiently its own thing to make it its own post"? At this point, probably.

( Content note: pandemic discussion )

This is yet another "framework I turn over in my mind for a while, never have an excuse to write about, want to write a long and rambly book review, this will be a long and rambly digression, better make it its own post." As usual, I can't really talk about just one thing without a lot of digressions/tangents, but it fits together in my head. And a lot of it I've probably actually said before in different contexts, because they're long-term preoccupations, but I might have better ways of articulating it now than I did years or decades ago.

Also, I am absolutely not telling anyone to think this way or feel this way, I understand that it's not healthy. I'm trying to explain a neurosis that I already experience.

( Read more... )

If you're inviting colleagues who you might not know well over to your house, it's well and good to say stuff like "we have a dog" in the e-mail. This kind of generic information may be important to people who are allergic to dogs.

What's even more useful to more people is if you specify whether your dog is old and sedentary, or one of the crazy kind of hyperactive creatures that will jump onto and bark at random strangers as soon as they come inside...

-Over a year ago there was a book sale on mostly academic nonfiction books from a university press, so of course I splurged on a bunch of e-books and then...didn't read them, usually when I'm staring at a laptop I'm not in "book reading" mode. Then I got a Kindle, but womp womp, Amazon won't transfer those file formats. So I've been procrastinating on them but slowly getting through a couple, usually as palate cleansers between the SFF bingo stuff.

One of them was about visual art/imagery around the Olympics, and I wasn't sure whether it was going to be mostly a photo book or what. Maybe it would be a fast read, just browsing pictures. Turns out there's a lot of writing/analysis surrounding the artworks. But it also turns out that...none of the pictures display because they don't have a digital license. I can try Googling the captions, but can't copy-and-paste them because plagiarism bad. Someone did not think this through.

-It's amusing how good/bad fanfiction search can be. Today someone posted on reddit they were trying to find a fic they'd read in the past about a nameless Animorphs character who shows up only in book 29. They don't know the title, the author, or the name they gave to that character, and suspected that it would be very hard to search for unless someone had read it recently or frequently. I have not.

Well, lo and behold, when you type "29" into the search box for the Animorphs page on Ao3, there are only 14 hits, and from there it's straightforward to skim through and figure out which one it is from the summary. I'm a genius! ...Actually no I'm just lucky and familiar with Ao3. (Edit: OP confirmed, yes, this is the fic in question--although it's a WIP that was last updated in 2019.)

But then I realized I had mentally thought of a fic about a different nameless character who shows up only in book 29, a few pages later. If it's on Ao3...let's see, it's probably in English, marked as "complete," not a crossover, probably less than 5000 words? And doesn't contain any of the major characters except maybe Cassie. Boom, that filters from ~1600 works to ~130. Sort by kudos and I can browse through the first couple pages--if it's not there, it's probably not on Ao3 at all. Now what? Search on FFN, but what keywords? "Controller"? "Infested"? That's for the first fic, not this one. "McDonald's?" Hmm...

Okay, forget FFN summary search, just go to Google. site:fanfiction.net Animorphs McDonald's door. Boom, page 2, hit from 2004. And yes, I backed it up.

-I had an appointment with a new-to-me counselor last week and another one today. And by the end she candidly said "I don't think I would be a good fit for you, you should look for someone who takes a different approach." I admire the honesty! Because I feel like a lot of my conversations with counselors go like

( cut for rant )

...Anyway, at least we got to this point early and didn't waste each other's time.

"A zealot is just someone who can't change her mind; a fanatic is someone who can't change her mind and won't change the subject."

I'm half an hour into day two (out of two) staffing a conference with the world's perkiest oversharer. Send help (and snacks because the student union is closed for the weekend).

Edit: just heard about Comrade No-Boundaries' bad experiences with gyms for the third time in thirty hours. Stoooooop.

Waiting for stuff to post about is like waiting for a bus, you wait a while and then, if you're me, the bus comes but you're on the wrong side of the street because you didn't zoom in on Google Maps properly and then by the time you cross over it's gone so you have to wait and...Never mind, this was a metaphor. I have lots of things happening! Mostly good. And I guess there's no rule that says I can't make one monster post with multiple topics but it feels like there should be one in my head.

( the not-so-good thing )