Good response.

I actually think this is actually a big component of widespread distrust of science, and experts more generally. I remember during COVID how some people in my country were distrustful based on how the science seemed to be changing. Specifically, how initially, it was uncertain whether COVID was transmissible via air, or just through the droplets spread through coughing or sneezing. This is part of why the policy messaging around mask usage seemed to be a bit muddy — because initially we didn’t even know to what extent a regular cotton mask would help, or how important good airflow in indoor venues was.

Real science is messy and always evolving. Some of the most interesting scientific research happens in areas where our knowledge is tentative. What took me most by surprise was that some of the people expressing distrust in the science weren’t anti-vaxxers or others who have already made up their mind against science, but just regular people who were so used to trusting scientific knowledge as an abstract construct that they ended up distrusting the scientific process. I think about this a lot.

I disagree, on the basis that sometimes when I want to cause my friends (the majority of whom are ex-emo-kids) to start singing that song, the trigger phrase is for me to go “Wake me up” in that somewhat rough way that the male vocalist does it, and then my friends are often compelled to singing Amy Lee’s part. It’s a simple spell, but quite unbreakable

“too dumb to understand code requirements in every industry and profession.”

Or selfish. Unfortunately Hanlon’s razor can only cut so deep.

Similar to you, I’ve found that writing the notes helps me to remember stuff, but I found that my on-the-fly remembering really improved when I started to make my notes more findable by the use of tags. It doesn’t even need to be a formal tagging system — even just including “#tag” in the note body helps me to find things better.

The key to this approach is asking yourself in what context you might want to refer back to a past note, and to not just add a scattershot of possibly relevant tags. For example, if I’m writing down my thoughts about a movie that I want to talk about to a friend, I might write “I should ask #Becky what she thinks about this”, or “this reminds me of what #Sarah was saying about #thing” (if #thing is a topic I’ve written other notes on). I found that doing this became easier over time, and this was reinforced by the fact that I found myself referring back to my notes more often (which also helped me to make more connections between thoughts I’d been having)

Edit: To give an example relevant to the original post, I might tag a note about a good movie with #movie (I don’t need to qualify that with “favourite”, because that is too specific, and realistically, if I’m writing about a movie, it’s probably one that I like), or a brief note about a great restaurant might be tagged with #goodfood and #city

I find it cool that Dolly Parton’s stage persona is so thick a mask of glamour that when she’s not “in character”, she can go out and get to live like a normal person, who no-one recognises her. I don’t know if this was by design, but it sure seems to be a smart choice

I agree that baby steps are important. So many of the less techy people I know have become so accustomed to being annoyed at tech that they just suppress it, thinking that there is no alternative. I’ve been told a few times that my freely incandescent rage at technology is validating because “if even [I] are frustrated at things, then it’s not just a problem of [them] being bad at tech”.

Step one is acknowledging the problem

Because you were considerate enough to share that link with us, I also learned something new, so thank you. (I am ever curious, yet also lazy)

Something that I find interesting with Rome is that arguably one of the ways it managed to keep going for so long is that it was continuing to push its borders outwards through conquest. Assimilating a land and its people into the Republic/Empire is one way of dealing with the problem of invading “barbarians” (even if that is just transmuting the problem such that your external threat is a new group of “barbarians”, and the old potential invaders potentially pose a threat from within).

Continuing to push outwards is a way to continue developing the military though, and to distract the military from the potential option of seizing power for themselves. There’s only so far you can push before the borders you need to secure are too large to do effectively, and the sheer area to be administrated is too large, even for Rome.

As you highlight, it’s a common misconception that people don’t realise that the Fall of Rome was far more protracted and complex of a process than a single event. I think that’s a shame, because I find it so much more interesting that historians can’t even agree on when the Fall of Rome even was.

“Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob.”

I’m not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The “secession of the plebs” was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.

Commenting to echo my agreement. Rome was bloody huge, and it was hard to administrate. Things like high quality roads and advanced administrative systems help to manage it all, but when you’re that big, even just distributing food across the empire is a challenge. Rome only became as large as it was because it was supported by many economic, military and political systems, but the complexity of this means that we can’t even point to one of them and say “it was the failure of [thing] that caused Rome to fall.”

An analogy that I’ve heard that I like is that it’s like a house falling into disrepair over many years. A neglected house will likely become unliveable long before it collapses entirely, and it’ll start showing the symptoms of its degradation even sooner than that. The more things break, the more that the inhabitants may be forced to do kludge repairs that just make maintaining the whole thing harder.

Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I’ll check it out. I learned about a lot of this stuff via my late best friend, who was a historian, so continuing to learn about it makes me feel closer to him

They don’t want people off the streets. The right thrive on stoking the fear and resentment of their base, and what better fuel for the fire than people on the lowest rungs of society.

This is why I have been increasingly frustrated at the UK’s current government, who are shitting themselves about the rise of the right wing Reform party, but refuse to understand that capitulating to their “stop the boats” anti-immigrant rhetoric, they’re just yielding more ground to the reactionary right.

I don’t expect establishment politicians to actually give a fuck about regular people, but they are actively at risk of losing their political power if they continue to ignore the actual root causes of the social malaise that Reform are exploiting. It’s beyond obvious that we are in dire need of investment in services and infrastructure, but I guess they’re afraid of pissing off their political donors and other people with unelected power (billionaires etc.)

I appreciate the edit to your comment.

I can understand where your frustration is coming from. I apologise if this is explaining something you’re already familiar with, but your comment reminded me of research about the “double empathy problem”: how the problems in socialising that autistic people experience seem to mainly present when they’re communicating with neurotypical people — these issues are much lesser when an autistic person is communicating with another autistic person. The theory also suggests that rather than these difficulties being attributed to communication deficits on the part of the autistic person, as has been the historic view, we might be able to better understand the problem in terms of a lack of mutual understanding between an autistic person and a neurotypical person — that is, neurotypical people struggle to empathise and understand autistic people as much as autistic people struggle to do the same with neurotypical people.

I find this quite an empowering perspective, because it disrupts the idea that autistic people are inherently broken or lesser (which unfortunately, many of us have deeply internalised over the years). However, I have seen people who take this notion and seem to twist it into the odd, prescriptive logic that you describe being annoyed at. I find it bizarre because to my eyes, research like this should cause people to be more hopeful about neurodivergent and neurotypical people mixing; if both parties are able to effectively communicate in other contexts, then it should certainly be possible to build mutual understanding.

It may take a little more work to build, but if anything, that’s all the more reason to do it. Empathy and communication are skills that can be honed, and there’s always room for improvement.

This is a long way of saying that I feel your frustration, and I suspect we have heard some of the same rhetoric. I’m glad that you were big enough to acknowledge that your bad mood negatively influenced your original comment. I hope that your day improves, and that you are able to be kind to yourself in the meantime.

I joke that whether I click with someone is like a litmus test for neurodivergence; due to the particular bundle of idiosyncrasies that I am (influenced by both ADHD and autism), I’m a pretty intense person who people tend to either love, or hate.

It’s nowhere near as robust as a peer reviewed diagnosis (that’s a hilarious way to describe it, and I’m definitely stealing that phrasing), but I’ve ended up indirectly causing quite a few people to end up seeking out formal diagnoses.

To step away from the jokes a moment, I do think that “peer reviewed” diagnoses can be powerful, especially when it can be extremely difficult to access the formal assessment process. I am fortunate to live in a country with free healthcare, but a decade plus of cuts mean that most will wait months (or years) for an autism or ADHD assessment. I’ve found that adults who eventually get a formal diagnosis will start out being super anxious of themselves, often worrying that they are appropriating the label or something. No-one wants to be the weird person who seems to be jumping on the neurodiversity “trend” (though in my experience, people who are doubtful in this manner are the furthest thing away from that kind of online trend jumper).

If anyone who reads this comment doesn’t yet have a formal diagnosis and worries that they may be intruding by being in this community, allow me to use the legitimacy bestowed upon me by the scrap of paper the doctor gave me many years ago to tell you that You are welcome here, formal diagnosis or not. Even if you never end up getting a formal diagnosis, you’re still welcome here.

The scientific and medical establishment is an important part of coming to understand neurodiversity, but so are the conversations we have here; we’re all figuring this out together.

As well as having ADHD, I’m also autistic as fuck, so I can’t tell whether you’re being sarcastic and the actual meaning of your comment is “I probably do have ADHD but I’m in denial”. If you were sincere in your statement that you’re not neurodivergent, I’m curious as to whether you have theories as to why you have so many neurodivergent friends.

Is it? I didn’t get that sense. What causes you to think it’s written by chatGPT? (I ask because whilst I’m often good at discerning AI content, there are plenty of times that I don’t notice it until someone points out things that they notice that I didn’t initially)

Sometimes, I feel like writers know that it’s capitalism, but they don’t want to actually call the problem what it is, for fear of scaring off people who would react badly to it. I think there’s probably a place for this kind of oblique rhetoric, but I agree with you that progress is unlikely if we continue pussyfooting around the problem

I will think of him when I next use a paper guillotine to cut paper. That will make me feel a little less sad for him.

Quelle surprise

I find it odd that you seem to be more comfortable to think of the impact this will have on paragliders dropping bombs on people than on the innocent people bombed in this attack. I get that being a paraglider must be scary because it inevitably comes with the risk of being shot, but this is a story about civilian deaths due to a bombing, not paraglider deaths due to gunfire.

I’m of the view that there’d be more productive discussions if we collectively started to use the word “terrorism” in a more nuanced way that allowed for the possibility that not all terrorism is necessarily morally bad.

What got me started thinking this was that there is a character in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 who is open about the fact that she used to be a terrorist — except this was in the context of resisting a brutal occupation of her planet. I have recently been rewatching the show, and it’s interesting to see how the narrative frames this as an overall morally good thing whilst also reckoning with the aspects of the resistance that were morally bad. Makes me wistful for that kind of nuance in real world discussions of violent resistance.

It might also make it easier to vehemently condemn senseless acts of state sanctioned terrorism such as this bombing. Though based on the long history of interactional inaction towards multiple genocides, that probably wouldn’t make much difference.