Will Shetterly's Blog, page 156

advice for colonoscopy prep

The prep includes drinking eight glasses of water a day, as well as drinking 64 ounces of Gatorade mixed with Polyethylene Glycol 3350 powder. If you refrigerate the liquids, you'll increase the odds that you'll get the chills. Drink the water hot and the Gatorade at room temperature, and you'll be much more comfortable.

Why, yes, I do have a colonoscopy today. They've made changes in the prep since I had one six years ago. It's been much less uncomfortable so far.

the Plymouth Colony was an experiment in mercantilism, not socialism

Conservatives are desperate to prove that socialism can't work, so they seize on anything that might be interpreted as a socialist failure. A favorite example is the Plymouth Colony.

PointySextant answers that at Pilgrims were socialists - snopes.com:

The land of the Plymouth Colony was not commonly held by some nebulous public system but by a joint stock system between a group of investors and the Crown, with the Crowns major investment being a royal writ for the territory claimed by the...

Chimera: Now available as an ebook!

From Booklist:

In the twenty-first century, gene splicing can produce a human-shaped being with a killer whale's strength and ferocity and artificial intelligence (AI) that can be selfish as a four-year-old. Part-animal chimeras and AIs aren't fully equal to humans, however; chimeras, for instance, can go murderously insane without warning. Should such creations have the rights of humans? PI Chase Maxwell is reasonably enlightened but hadn't thought much about such issues. Then a lithe, beauti...

a few essential points about censorship and "the left"

Death threats and censorship have once again risen in science fiction fandom, so I'd like to address a few points:

Would-be censors love to claim that only governments censor, but that claim can only be made by people who reject dictionaries. As the ACLU notes, "Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well a...

Faking rationality: yet another Rationalizing Animal post

I said yesterday I was done with this, but I'm a rationalizing animal, too, so I'm happily inconsistent.

Also, I realized I had lied to myself. Accepting that humans are irrational animals did not make me happy. It made me quite depressed for about 48 hours, so I'm going to go back to being irrationally optimistic about my irrational species. I intend to cling desperately to the notion that we can fake being rational sometimes, and someday, we'll be able to fake it often enough to make a bett...

It's easier to like our species if you remember we're all crazy: an end to the Rationalizing Animal posts

I'll despair for my race if I keep posting about humans as rationalizing animals, so I'm stopping for now. All I can say is that believing humans could be rational was the most irrational belief I've ever had. No longer believing that does not make me rational, but it does make me happy. If you think of humans as a cross between chimps and bonobos, you'll continue to wish they took better care of themselves, their fellow creatures, and their environment, but you'll stop getting frustrated whe...

Choose your group carefully—you will conform: Rationalizing Animal #7

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” ― Henry David Thoreau

William H. White, who coined "groupthink" in 1952, said, "We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity — it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity — an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well."

From Following the Crowd: Changin...

Got cognitive dissonance? Try hypocrisy! or Rationalizing Animal #6

Call someone a hypocrite, and they may think you're calling them a liar, but hypocrites usually aren't liars. Or if they are, they're people who have fallen for their own lies.

The most famous example of calling out hypocrisy may be Jesus's "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." That's not addressed to a liar. That's addressed to someone who can't see what's blocking his vision. It's a...

Even "real" scientists do cargo science: Rationalizing Animal #5

From "Cargo Cult Science" - by Richard Feynman:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to...

even "real" scientists do cargo science: rationalizing animal #5

From "Cargo Cult Science" - by Richard Feynman:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to...