Comments on: I Aten’t Dead

By: Error

Error — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 17:52:59 +0000

I showed this to my partner. She works in a hospital (housekeeping, not medical) and asked me to pass on her sympathies that you must deal with the general omnipresent insanity.

I’ve heard hospital train wreck stories from her, but the doctor’s perspective is new to me, so this is fascinating.

Report comment

By: N

Fri, 19 Jul 2013 10:25:47 +0000

I’m really moved by your article. I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating mindfulness and meditation techniques to help cope with horror. I’d be honored to share some of that with you if you’re interested. In the meanwhile. hold strong – you are working with people who want to create a better world.

Report comment

By: Ted Seeber

Ted Seeber — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 19:44:00 +0000

I came here to find out why Euthanasia supporters like your post on dying in hospitals, only to find a question that I as lay Catholic doing the New Evangelization by blogging, can actually answer.

Scapulars are extremely popular. They’re usually just a couple of bits of felt and a ribbon. They aren’t just worn at the moment of death, normally. Normally they’re worn for YEARS. I even knew a guy who was so fanatical he wouldn’t even take it off for a shower. He was so fanatical that his was actually several of them of different colors sewn together.

The colors vary, the promises vary, but they’re all what the Catholic Church calls “private revelation”; that is, a vision somebody had of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the last 1800 years or so; starting a good few centuries after her death.

I’m sure what you witnessed was evidence of a family member whose faith runs more to visions and miracles than to reason and logic.

Report comment

By: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 01:32:53 +0000

Was true then. Now I’m down to more like twelve hour days most of the time unless I’m on call.

Report comment

By: Bob Unwin

Bob Unwin — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 16:08:28 +0000

Agree with Komponisto. Eloquence diverts from the substantive issue. How good at math would non-mathy smart people be if they were much more strongly required to do math to a reasonable level? How much would they enjoy it? The LW community encourages math interest, but not that strongly. (And the math in encourages is quite specific and narrow).

Case studies: many people have to do math as part of political science, quantitative sociology, psychology (either in stats or in mathematical psychology), epidemiology, computer science, and any part of engineering. My experience is that people in these fields often haven’t much like math in high school. Then at college or grad school there’s some math that they have to learn and to use very frequently. I’ve been impressed at the competence that they achieve. (Not that these people become great mathematicians or have much creativity in math, but they gain competence in non-trivial mathematical ideas and are able to understand the mathematical ideas of more skilled practitioners in their fields).

Some analogous situations: in the sciences and engineering today, everyone has to have basic coding skills. In many fields, people end up doing LOTS of coding (but maybe a very specific kind of coding). If some smart people just couldn’t enjoy/do coding, this would seem very problematic. But my sense is that people get good enough at coding when it’s utterly required of them.

Then there are weird cases over a wider range of intellectual ability like haredi males who have to spend studying jewish religious texts. how good do these people get?

Report comment

By: komponisto

komponisto — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 15:15:41 +0000

Why/how do you think [Scott] should acquire an interest in mathematics?

I think he should avoid language which suggests that “people interested in mathematics” constitute a separate tribe from him and should regard his interests as lying on a continuum with theirs.

Report comment

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 18:26:19 +0000

I would guess from Scott’s post that his stance is indeed contrarian within his social group (though not society in general).

Why/how do you think he should acquire an interest in mathematics?

Report comment

By: wallowinmaya

wallowinmaya — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 16:06:49 +0000

>…back when I wasn’t working sixteen hour days, six to seven days a week?

Is this statement really true or an exaggeration?

Report comment

By: komponisto

komponisto — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 22:04:35 +0000

(The above should probably be understood mostly as an emotional communication, as opposed to a contribution to formal epistemology designed to be generalized. Just as Jeopardy requires answers to be phrased in the form of a question, the norms of this community as internalized in my mind require that opinions be expressed in the form of epistemological theories that imply them.)

Report comment

By: komponisto

komponisto — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 20:28:40 +0000

Hardy’s quote ends with “by definition, there are already plenty of other people to do that”, which suggests that numbers can balance out eloquence. (This seems right to me: an opinion with both numbers and eloquence on its side will seem overwhelmingly compelling, and I don’t think majority opinions that people take the trouble to defend eloquently are typically deserving of such exalted confidence levels.)

I suppose that my true rejection of the previous post may be that it was dark-artsy, using tone and charm to disguise a fairly banal majority position (“I don’t like math, and this trait is immutable”) as an incisive contrarian stance. (Naturally, this tactic is particularly irksome when one disagrees with the majority position in question, as I do here.) On a deep level which may be hard to explain concisely, it sort of pattern-matches to all kinds of situations where people motivatedly deploy eloquence in support of existing power structures that they themselves benefit from.

Report comment