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palladias comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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A simple reframe that helped jumpstart my creativity:
My cookie dough froze in the fridge, so I couldn't pry it out of the bowl to carry with me to bake at a party. I tried to get it out, but didn't succeed, and had basically resigned myself to schlepping the bowl on the metro.
But then I paused and posed the question to myself: "If something important depended on me getting this dough out, what would I try?"
I immediately covered the top of the bowl, ran the base under lukewarm to warm water, popped it out, wrapped it up, and went on my way.
After reading the third paragraph, I had already decided to post the following similar story:
It snowed a few weeks ago and my car was stuck in the driveway. Parts of the wheels had gotten ice/snow kind of frozen/compacted around them. I was breaking up the ice with one of those things you use to break up ice, but a lot of it was too hard and a lot of it was underneath the car and I couldn't get to it. I was pretty close to being late to work. So I thought "I need to make some kind of desperate rationalist effort here, what would HPJEV do?". And I sat and thought about it for five minutes, and I got a big tub, filled it with hot water, and poured it around the wheels. This melted/softened enough of the compacted ice that I was able to break up the rest and make it to work on time.
Then I read your fourth paragraph and saw your story was also about hot water.
I don't know if there's some kind of moral to this episode, like that the most rational solution to a problem always involves hot water, but I guess I'll raise it a little higher on my list of things to think about in various situations.
Well, Hufflepuff bones aren't always available.
But if they were, you could try using them as levers.
Duh, hot water helps when something's frozen.
A little water holds a lot of heat, comparitively.
This made me laugh out loud a lot. I never expect that in a thread on Less Wrong. It was charming.