Shuffle meme

[jack]

Rules: http://liv.dreamwidth.org/459251.html

List of things in the order I like them, with one removed, and with three more added at the top, middle and bottom:

Maths
Twitter
Stuffed Dinosaurs
Nessie Ladle
Undercooked Aubergine

I'm sad the Nessie Ladle is so low down! It's totally awesome. But I decided Stuffed Dinosaurs were even better :)

I also took the liberty of mutating the rules, which wasn't explicitly asked for, but is implicitly in the rules by virtue of how humanity works :) And because I thought it might get ugly if I had to play "think of something worse than gender essentialism, think of something worse than that, ok, now worse than that..." Even if other people can make that an interesting conversation!

Comments

[liv]

Thank you for playing :-) Throwing out gender essentialism was probably a good idea, now I think about it. And I love how you found three things more awesome than the Nessie ladle.

[jack]

I'm not sure, I think it was an interesting idea, but I wasn't sure I could sensibly list things worse than it without descending into gratuitously shocking. Maybe someone else will, I don't know.

And yes, I felt sad about beating the nessie ladle. It was lovely. But honestly, there are lots of little bit of consumer things that are SOOOOO cute, I survived yesterday without it. But twitter is actually really useful for my life (I think).

[liv]

I love how you think through the silly meme really carefully :-)

[jack]

I had to, that's what the instructions said! :)

[simont]

I wonder what one is supposed to do if one vigorously disagrees with the existing order (and can't fix it by removing just one problematic element). Perhaps there's some cunning method involving adding a buffering entry in between the two tricky ones, along the lines of

• A ham sandwich
• Nothing
• Eternal bliss

[jack]

I am eternally impressed with your monotinicity-busting hack! But I think the easier solution is, you know, change the order :)

(Liv's detailed instructions say to change the order if you disagree, but I forgot that in my abbreviated version, sorry. Except it produced your marvellous work-around, so I'm somewhat glad I did :))

[simont]

Regrettably I can't claim credit for the actual example involving ham sandwiches and eternal bliss – it's a well known joke (by which I mean there is evidence of at least one person having known it before me :-).

[jack]

I didn't mean you originally invented that apparent paradox, but I was highly amused you used it as a solution to the list-ordering problem :)

I wonder if you could do something similar with sorting algorithms. If you have "6,7,8,9,10,1,2,3,4,5", can you insert NAN half way through and make the list ordered? :) (Well, only if you do the comparisons the way round expecting the result false :))

[simont]

But yes, now I see that it says 'List of things in the order I like them', which does suggest liv's rule now I think about it :-)

[liv]

Oh, you're supposed to disagree with the existing order and reorder it, that's part of why this meme is interesting. I remember when we played before, one of the items was "lungs" and about half the people put it way at the top cos you need lungs to breathe and they like being alive, and about half put it way at the bottom because eww gross body parts. But I like your method too :-) It'll be interesting to see what happens if someone sneaks nothing into the list.

[simont]

This reminds me of the old LJ community 'best_thing_ever' (subtitle: 'determining reality through majority vote'), which ran an annual giant knockout tournament to determine the Best Thing Ever (reasons for needing to run it again the next year were unclear) in which the 'matches' were all LJ polls asking which is the best out of some small set of wildly mismatched things, with utterly silly forms of spurious reasoning thoroughly encouraged. So you ended up with votes on totally daft questions such as whether oxygen is better or worse than dinosaurs, or suchlike. Questions of whether lungs are awesome or icky sound as if they'd have fitted right in there :-)

[jack]

:)

[spaceoperadiva]

Am I supposed to play in your list as well, making for an ever-growing list somewhere?

Public Library eBook Lending
Nessie Ladle
Coco Berlin's Belly Dance Drills
Stuffed Dinosaurs
Maths
Twitter
Undercooked Aubergine (I think this actually might be a tie with the trolls)
Ever-present trolling in every news article comment section ever