Posts made by Groth

I think there exists a certain irony in that the person responsible for the most bans in the history of the forum and managing to squeeze that into a single day talks about being against ostrazisation on loose grounds.

I think comparing exclusion from online communities to physical abuse or the justice system is inherently misguided. Being part of an online community is not a right, it's a privilege and the primary goal of anyone managing a community is to do what is best for that community.

Waiting beyond all reasonable doubt to verify that someone is a bad actor often leads to that bad actor having plenty of time to poison your community, just like a gardener can't afford to wait until the blooms wilt to do something about the weeds, so does a the manager of a community have to be pro-active. They need to encourage the behaviors they want to see and they need to root out what looks to be a weed even at the risk of it sometimes not being one.

This is no great injustice, there's countless of other online spaces out there for anyone to join or even create their own ones.

@zombiegenesis

I will agree that MSB has had a dogpiling problem for a long time, it's part of the reason the downvote button had to be removed (the other part of the reason was people going through other peoples history and downvoting every post they've ever made).

Dealing with that sort of thing would require a lot more pro-active community management then we've had so far.

I agree with lordbelh that the call for silence was misguided and doomed to fail and it follows that all bans related to that call for silence are poorly justified.

That said, this is a community not a court. I think it's much too common of a mistake for people in the hobby to consider themselves arbiters of justice rather then caretakers of the community. What matters isn't the rules or procedure or any such nonsense but what kind of community you want to build.

Right now this isn't much of a community, there's like 3 people posting outside of the ban drama but that doesn't mean it can't grow into a community again. However that requires you to sell people on what this is supposed to become.

@kk

My expectation would be that rapid weather changes will harm crops that reliant on particular weather conditions whether that's hot or cold but if you have space and time, best way to find out is to just plant them and find out.

I just got strawberries going - but considering getting some berry bushes, but I need to dig out spaces for them!

I used to have blackcurrant, redcurrant and raspberry bushes. They were pretty nice since they required essentially 0 maintenance and all you needed to do was collect the ripe berries during the summer which you could then make into jam or juice.

@mietze

I don't think anyone reasonable would ever object to you taking a well deserved break. Whatever happens on the board, your health comes first.

My general feeling on perfume and cologne is that if I can smell you in public, it's always an extremely unpleasant sensation.

If you are going to spread a scent around, one of the nicest ones is probably fresh bread.

I've always liked the idea of Exalted a lot more then how it feels in actual play and for MU* especially the 'grandness' of many of the rules create tons of headaches.

I think the best way to run an Exalted MU* may just be to take the theme of Exalted but implement entirely custom rules designed for MU*.

@ganymede said in The Work Thread:

I have read articles similar to the ones you posted. I understand what is being said. In many ways, my suggestions follow; in others, they don't. Norm criticism is no different than what I would call "regularly checking in with people" or "keeping my eyes and ears open." And master suppression techniques are what I consider "being a fucking asshole."

Norm Criticism is distinct from "regularly checking in with people" or "keeping my eyes and ears open." in that rather then specific actions it's a framework of thought that encourages you to question things you take for granted. The nature of norms is that you normally don't think about them because they're the social default in your social group and that creates a burden on those who don't comply with the norm.

And master suppression techniques are what I consider "being a fucking asshole."

They are being a fucking asshole but the reason they're being widely taught about is that people in groups have a tendency to be blind to many kinds of asshole behavior. For instance even though countless studies have shown women on average talk less then men in meetings, the pervasive perception is still that women talk more.

The general idea is that by identifying and calling out asshole behaviors, you can make them less prevalent and by having them explicitly described you can counteract attempts to gaslight you into thinking they're not asshole behaviors.

@ganymede said in The Work Thread:

I don't recall Juniper saying anything about discrimination.

I think being assigned tasks outside of your job description solely based on your gender is discrimination.

I can attest that what happened to her can and does happen everywhere regardless of the race, gender, and lifestyle of the "boss."

This is the reason for "Norm Criticism" as the appropriate tool for doing something about it. Norms are not created by the "boss" which is why they tend to be enforced regardless of what kind of person is the "boss". Norms are created by social groups but they're not fixed and can be changed.

I'm not very good at explaining it which is why I tried to link to resources that do but I was surprised how few English resources there are dedicated to the concept, where I live it's been one of the most popular tools for addressing things like workplace inequality for the past 20 years.

Only slightly related, another social theory that's popular in Scandinavia and I have not seen much in the anglosphere is master suppression techniques. They're a study of the ways women in the workplace are commonly socially punished and by being aware of them, you can try to counteract them.

@misadventure said in The Work Thread:

@ganymede how do we all work to change that dynamic?

http://www.equalityjourney.eu/blog2/2019/4/3/norm-criticism-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-necessary

https://www.includegender.org/facts/norm-criticism/

By making social expectations explicit and evaluating them critically it's possible to have good conversations about if they bring any value or should be abandoned. Most discrimination of this type is done for no other reason then 'this is the way things are' so the solution is to force explicit justification and evaluation.

@juniper

I think by doing tasks outside your job description you risk perpetuating the idea those tasks are your job.

If you want that to stop, it may be worthwhile to draw a hard line and insist the people who's job it is to do those things do them rather than pick up their slack. They may accuse you of being uncooperative/"not a team player" but unless they're arranging milk and setting up workspaces etc they don't have much ground to stand on.

Replacing my winter boots with these are one of the biggest quality of life upgrades I have ever done.

My slip on sneakers are almost as nice but do require a shoe horn to get into comfortably.

@too-old-for-this said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@boneghazi Just as a thought, if you can, you may want to see if his issues with writing and shoelace-tying are fully a focus thing. My youngest still won't get 'lace up' shoes because he has fine motor control issues as part of his suite of diagnoses. When he was younger he would patently refuse to write by hand, and even today his handwriting is considered 'childish'.

When I was in school I was assigned an extra 2 hours a week of handwriting class and given special tools to help with handwriting and it did absolutely nothing for me.

It also became routine for most of my time in school for the girls in my class to fix my shoelaces for me because I never managed to tie them properly.

Now I buy shoes without shoelaces and never write anything by hand if I can help it. If technology hadnt caught up and allowed homework to be done on computer and printed by the time I hit high school I have no idea how I would have managed. Writing a single page gave me cramp.

@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:

• Aes Sedai PCs used loopholes they didn't in the books. "I can't burn you alive but I can immobilize and gut you with this here sword", "I'll use magic to throw a boulder at your head, how's that?"

That looks more like blatant oath breaking then loophole to me.

I think that given the current state of academic journals, no education is going to give anyone outside the specific field a reasonable chance to gauge which conclusions are well supported and which are not.

Unless you are active in that field, how are you supposed to tell how reputable the journal is, how well designed the study was, to which extent the data was massaged to reach the 'right' conclusion.

In theory, that is where science reporting is supposed to come in. Problem is as mentioned by previous posters that their financial incentive isn't accuracy, it is eyeballs. Science reporting is almost exclusively geared towards writing about 'exciting' or 'ground breaking' discoveries which you almost never hear about again because they turned out to be non-replicable.

That is why it is a good thing most countries have agencies like the CDC where experts in the field try to maintain a knowledge base of the current state of the art.

@il-volpe
I love the idea of formally studying philosophy, trouble is I can't write an essay to save my life.

I actually have one big mental hangup that isn't IK nor IP which I don't know the proper name for, it's this.

I really struggle with the idea that after being presented with the same statements/facts, someone else can come to a different conclusion then me. I sometimes watch these people solve puzzles and it's fascinating to me how often it happens that they'll quickly solve something I can't see the solution for at all and then struggle for minutes with something I saw instantly.

It comes up in discussions in the form that I don't understand why someone else doesn't have the same understanding as me. Actually this is one of the reasons I don't do well writing essays because I struggle with determining the difference between which assumptions need to be stated/cited explicitly and which do not.

@silverfox
Worked would be more accurate, obsessively measuring everything you eat every day requires a headspace I haven't really been in since.

@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

In a recent article in Men's Health, they talked about a new diet which was essentially a calorie-dropping diet and debunked it as unsupported by data or now-embraced theories on how to best lose weight. They point out, rightfully, that if you drop your caloric count you are more likely to lose muscle than fat unless you are also working out fastidiously; and, even if you are exercising, not having the right nutrients in your body will lead to tissue destruction in a calorie-deficient environment.

At one point in my life I followed a strict calorie-deficient diet for about a year and during that year I lost something like 35kg total. In terms of losing weight it works and I can vouch for it working.

The trouble is that losing weight is the easy part. The hard part is that whatever strategy you employ is something you can maintain every day for the rest of your life. If you rely on something like calorie counting and ever stop, you'll bounce right back up to where you were.

Right now I'm trying to practice spreading my eating out more throughout the day, eating smaller individual meals more often and trying to regularly eat very small non-carb snacks like nuts every couple of hours between meals and I'm looking into playing Badminton again now that restrictions are starting to lift where I live.

@tinuviel said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

This runs the risk of having one's self being misunderstood as cowardly, or plagued with indecision. When one has a fact at one's disposal and has researched it properly, confidence in delivery is as much a part of overcoming imposter syndrome as actually knowing the fact (Wilkinson, 2020).

For me things generally break down in two categories.

1. Things I can veritably prove to myself. For instance I can run the calculation for 2+4=6 or write a program to solve the problem at hand and have high confidence that the result is provably correct.

2. Things where I can only have have a probabilistic estimate for how true they are. For instance what color is the sky? How far away is the moon? Does my country qualify as a democracy? These are not things I'm in a position to test myself so I rely on my understanding of my sources, my ability to remember those sources and the accuracy of those sources to begin with.

In the vast majority of circumstances something is discussed online, it'll be something falling under the second bucket. It's usually only when someone is being dumb about something that's easily mathematically proven or trivially sourced that the first one is applicable.

@tinuviel said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

I disagree... to a point. Assuming that you can be wrong is important. Generally assuming that anything you know/say/think/feel/believe is wrong can destroy your self-confidence. Be open to the potential to being corrected, and check up on what you think is true before you say it to a large room of people, but try to avoid constant self-doubt when you're able.

The way I see it used is not so much as a means to throw yourself into a cascade of self-doubt but rather as a way to frame a conversation in a way that makes it more likely to get a constructive response.

For instance instead of asserting that X is the case. You can frame it something along the lines of "My interpretation of this is X, please let me know what you think."

That way there's less of an implication your interpretation is inherently better then theirs.