The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a 1996 taste datapoint Nov 28, 2020

My household watched the 1996 Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame recently. A notable thing about it to me was that the humor seemed in such poor taste. Which made me wonder, was 1996 just culturally different? Slapstick humor includes an emaciated old man imprisoned in a cylindrical cage tumbling over and over while someone runs on top of it, before he escapes, only to accidentally fall into some stocks. Ha! During a song, romantic rivals are jovially represented as hanging in the gallows. Various jokes are made around two men being sentenced to hanging without trial or ability to speak (‘any last words? didn’t think so’). Maybe I’m wrong that this would all seem weird to current viewers, and instead I’m just out of touch.

No need to refrigerate Nov 27, 2020

If you are wondering whether a food needs refrigerating, you look at the label until you either see an instruction to refrigerate it, or have looked at the label enough to exclude the possibility of it containing that instruction somewhere. This seems clearly worse worse than the label just always saying whether or not the food needs refrigerating, so the procedure terminates as soon as you find that sentence.

It’s only a tiny bit worse—only a few seconds are at stake each time—but it is so clearly worse, it is interesting to me that it remains in the worse state.

Air walls and empty currents Nov 26, 2020

There is an experience archetype in my world that goes like this: you have been carefully navigating around a landscape of walls, or inching forward against an overwhelming current. Intently battling hard obstacles. Then you tentatively try walking right into a wall, and realize that they are all actually just air, and you can just walk straight through them. Or you find a turn of mind where you can just stand up straight against the wrenching current—not through huge effort and force, but through the current suddenly losing all physical relevance to your free motions.

Is this familiar? What circumstances are like this?

Salience costs and other lives Nov 25, 2020

Alice has a car that can only drive at 65mph.

Bob has a car that can drive at 70mph.

Every time they both drive 70 miles to the city, Alice spends almost five extra minutes driving.

When Bob’s car breaks down, he borrows Alice’s car. Driving it, he constantly has his foot on the accelerator, to no avail. The visceral slowness is encumbering and distracting. He spends more than an hour overcome with frustration, plus that extra five minutes driving.

Bob finds it hard to believe that Alice puts up with this, and supposes she must be really struggling in life, or making errors of judgment, if she hasn’t got a new car already.

*

There are many ways that you can fail to appreciate how bad other people’s problems are. But I think you can also systematically fail to appreciate how bad they aren’t, for the person. What is salient in moving from your world to theirs is not necessarily salient in theirs, so when most of the cost is from the salience, you might be overestimating it.

Room cleaning haikus Nov 24, 2020

Autumn clothes
from old websites
in my drying machine

Thin cardboard box
with pictures of face creams
now roaming nearby

Handful of tissues
collected from drifts
many tears and lunches

Social stigma of PPE Nov 23, 2020

One reason to wear less PPE is that it can be embarrassing to wear more PPE.

This potential for embarrassment seems interesting. Especially where the main cost of precautions is the social stigma.¹ What exactly is the stigma stigmatizing? Being so concerned about a widely-acknowledged-to-be-worth-a-lot-to-avoid disease that you are willing to risk social stigma? Why should you be embarrassed by evaluating a disease as worse than social stigma? Couldn’t it just be that you don’t expect the social stigma to be that bad? Is there some equilibrium size of social stigma implied by such a situation? (Or even if you evaluate the disease to be bad, isn’t that pretty clearly demonstrated by now?)

Some beauty, mid-2020 edition Nov 22, 2020

10 things society might try having if it only contained variants of me Nov 21, 2020

(Other than desperate efforts to fend off an impending demographic disaster.)

1. Shopfronts where you can go and someone else figures out what you want. And you aren’t expected to be friendly or coherent about it. Like, if you are shopping, and yet not having fun, you go there and they figure out that you are the wrong temperature, don’t have enough blood sugar, are taking too serious an attitude to shopping, need ten minutes away from your companions, and should probably buy a pencil skirt. So they get you a smoothie and some comedy and a quiet place to sit down by yourself for a bit, and then send you off to the correct store.

2. Ubiquitous virtual queues. Each person’s phone keeps track of their priority waiting, so they don’t have to keep track of it with the location of their body.

3. Efficient plane disembarkment. Like this. Saving many hours per lifetime of thinking about how planes could be disembarked more efficiently.

Personal covid responses as a technology microcosm or 18 ways I know to make the pandemic suck less Nov 20, 2020

With covid-19, basically everyone in the world is facing a set of personal problems that they didn’t have before, but which have much in common with everyone else’s new problems. Most basically, how to go about life without catching a deadly or crippling disease. But also, how to make alternative activities workable, and how to thrive and be happy in this potentially oppressive circumstance.

With everyone thinking about what to do about similar problems, an interesting set of questions to me is where do ideas for ways to improve the situation come from, and how do they spread? That is, how do people learn about them? How much are people benefitting from other people’s thinking about similar problems?

I’ve been extremely lucky in having a job that can continue fine from my house, living with a bunch of people I like who can also work from home, having started dating someone I already lived with in January, being in San Francisco, and having some spare money this year, so I’m not compelled to do anything very risky and thus my exact problems and solutions may differ from others’. Nonetheless, it seems good to share them.

Here are pieces of my own current apparatus for avoiding covid and enjoying life despite it:

What is it like to be a tidy person? Nov 18, 2020

A thing I have been curious about since I was about fourteen is why my living quarters are so much messier than other people’s. At that point it was mostly not my own fault, and now that it is, they are less messy. But still, there’s a clear gap between my room and many other people’s rooms that I see. Like for me, if you can see the places where the floor and the walls meet, or if there is a clear path between the door and at least one reasonable place to be in a room, these are victories (bonus points if you don’t have to do any unusual jumping or balancing to follow the path). And other people have entire twelve-foot cubes full of immaculately placed objects.