Sarcasm sign
Mar. 9th, 2011 08:19 amShould I actually make "sarcasm" and "not sarcasm" signs I can keep in my wallet and take out and hold up when it would be informative and/or funny?
Mar. 9th, 2011
Achieving things with high variance
Mar. 9th, 2011 10:31 amMany things, even things which are hard to achieve, we get a little bit better at, and a little bit better at, and eventually we're good enough and we achieve something notable (or we don't get that good and don't).
However, many other things have a large luck component to success as well as a large effort/skill component. For instance:
- Finding an ideal romance
- Finding any romance at all
- Finding an ideal job
- Finding any job at all
- Using a computer to search for a key to a cryptosystem
- Climing a Himalayan mountain
- Doing well in some (but not other) computer/roleplaying/board games
For these, by far the most common observation I've heard is "I tried for ages, and I kept wondering if I was getting anywhere, but I tried again and this time it just happened easily."
The trouble is, that makes you feel you didn't deserve the success, which tends to make you undervalue it.
However, I claim it's only to be expected that that's how it works. Whether you get a job or whatever is determined by something like "how good you are at getting a job generally" plus "whether this job is especially appropriate or innapropriate for you, how you feel this day, what other candidates there are, etc". The first is mostly under your control (even if you can only improve it slowly), the second mostly isn't. If you're bad enough, you'll NEVER succeed. But if you slowly improve, the near missess are not guaranteed to be just before the success, once you get to the point where you're likely to succeed sometimes, but aren't yet guaranteed to succeed every time, you'll still get some miserable failures but likely a surprising success.
This is the advice I often want to hear myself when I'm striving for something, and what I would say to other people. If you have no decent romance and would like one, it's incredibly frustrating. But what will most likely happen is you'll have a few vague prospects that don't seem to go anywhere, and then you'll suddenly meet someone incredibly lovely who inexplicably thinks you're equally wonderful[1]. And what I want to say is, don't be suspicious that it seems easy, it may or may not be right, but expect it to seem sudden.
[1] Obviously this is accentuated by hormones and things making people prone to liking people who like them, but it's true even without them.
However, many other things have a large luck component to success as well as a large effort/skill component. For instance:
- Finding an ideal romance
- Finding any romance at all
- Finding an ideal job
- Finding any job at all
- Using a computer to search for a key to a cryptosystem
- Climing a Himalayan mountain
- Doing well in some (but not other) computer/roleplaying/board games
For these, by far the most common observation I've heard is "I tried for ages, and I kept wondering if I was getting anywhere, but I tried again and this time it just happened easily."
The trouble is, that makes you feel you didn't deserve the success, which tends to make you undervalue it.
However, I claim it's only to be expected that that's how it works. Whether you get a job or whatever is determined by something like "how good you are at getting a job generally" plus "whether this job is especially appropriate or innapropriate for you, how you feel this day, what other candidates there are, etc". The first is mostly under your control (even if you can only improve it slowly), the second mostly isn't. If you're bad enough, you'll NEVER succeed. But if you slowly improve, the near missess are not guaranteed to be just before the success, once you get to the point where you're likely to succeed sometimes, but aren't yet guaranteed to succeed every time, you'll still get some miserable failures but likely a surprising success.
This is the advice I often want to hear myself when I'm striving for something, and what I would say to other people. If you have no decent romance and would like one, it's incredibly frustrating. But what will most likely happen is you'll have a few vague prospects that don't seem to go anywhere, and then you'll suddenly meet someone incredibly lovely who inexplicably thinks you're equally wonderful[1]. And what I want to say is, don't be suspicious that it seems easy, it may or may not be right, but expect it to seem sudden.
[1] Obviously this is accentuated by hormones and things making people prone to liking people who like them, but it's true even without them.
"Jedi" doesn't matter a lot
Mar. 9th, 2011 01:06 pmI don't know this for sure, it's just my guess, but it seems likely to me that:
(1) People who check Jedi on the census are commonly (though not always) non-religious, or not especially observant
(2) The census people know this
In which case, I expect them to have a pretty good idea of the breakdown of the country whether people write-in Jedi or not. Apparently some people take it very seriously, and think you absolutely have to follow this silly meme. And some people take it very seriously, and think it's totally disrespectful to do so. But to me it seems like the meme's a bit dated, was funny at the time, and is still a bit funny and practically an anglophone tradition, so it really doesn't matter much.
If they had check boxes which gave a creditable attempt to distinguish between "atheist", "agnostic", "non-religious", etc, etc, then I'd assume they were trying to compile exact demographics for those[1]. But it seems (am I right?) they mainly care about named, widespread religions -- and everyone else.
[1] Eg. you can be atheist or agnostic, but it doesn't try to categorise people who might be one or the other, or both, or who are atheist but also follow a religion, supernatural or not. If they actually cared, it would as bad or worse as the problems with the "gender" box.
(1) People who check Jedi on the census are commonly (though not always) non-religious, or not especially observant
(2) The census people know this
In which case, I expect them to have a pretty good idea of the breakdown of the country whether people write-in Jedi or not. Apparently some people take it very seriously, and think you absolutely have to follow this silly meme. And some people take it very seriously, and think it's totally disrespectful to do so. But to me it seems like the meme's a bit dated, was funny at the time, and is still a bit funny and practically an anglophone tradition, so it really doesn't matter much.
If they had check boxes which gave a creditable attempt to distinguish between "atheist", "agnostic", "non-religious", etc, etc, then I'd assume they were trying to compile exact demographics for those[1]. But it seems (am I right?) they mainly care about named, widespread religions -- and everyone else.
[1] Eg. you can be atheist or agnostic, but it doesn't try to categorise people who might be one or the other, or both, or who are atheist but also follow a religion, supernatural or not. If they actually cared, it would as bad or worse as the problems with the "gender" box.