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SketchUp makes it where creating these sort of drawings is pretty easy!  It's a great tool for ideation.

I live/work in a fairly rural area where there are 7 towns with the biggest having a population of ~10k and the smallest ~2k and they all have varying requirements.  I've had conversations with the single code enforcement officer or director in each of them and we all agree how aggravating it is that the requirements vary from town to town.  Three of these towns butt right up next to each other so the code requirements can vary from one side of the street to the next!

Contrary to what I would expect, the biggest town, and the county seat, has by far the fewest regulations on homes of them all.

Anyway, of the two which enforce anything about bedroom dimensions it's 9' for smallest allowable dimension.  I think only one of them requires closets, but I can't recall for sure.

Your parenthetical requirement reminded me of two things:

  1. I think more people should be thinking about resale when building/remodeling their home.  You never know what the future holds!  
  2. Since we rent out houses as well, I always aim for HUD compliance. HUD requires closets in bedrooms.  While HUD doesn't require 10x10, I know the three people at HUD who handle the surrounding 3 counties worth of HUD voucher recipients and they all strongly recommend it and steer clients towards such properties. (though currently they're hurting for properties, so they're more likely to not turn their nose up at <10' dimensions)

Yeah, I flip houses fairly often and it's something I have to be aware of when remodeling stuff.

I'm sure it's different in different areas.

Interestingly, and ridiculously, this bedroom would not pass city code where I live for two reasons:

 

  1. 7ft dimension
  2. No built-in closet.

I'm not exactly claiming that it is or is not useful in improving outcomes, I'm just wondering if any "hard, sterilized" data exists. 

Anyway...

Your comment does make me wonder some things. Take the following more as me exploring my state of mind on a lazy Sunday afternoon and less as a retort or rebuttal.

I'm not sure that we actually disagree...it's hard to quantify the amount of skepticism we're both talking about.  You can't say "you should be skeptical level 3" and I can't say "no you should be skeptical level 4.3".  For all either of us knows from the conversation so far is that I'm less skeptical than you!

Be careful not to cargo-cult skepticism

Yes, I think this is a dangerous failure mode...but I think it's likely that the flipside is a more common failure out there in the real world.

dealing with a set of hundreds of people ... the most reasonable hypothesis is that it was useful.

Maybe? I'd have to think about that more. However, being the most reasonable doesn't mean there are no other reasonable hypotheses. We should work hard to increase the "reasonableness delta" so that we can increase our confidence.

There's millions of otherwise reasonable and successful people (often people I respect) telling me that they talk to ghosts or that loading up on Vitamin Omega Delta Seventeen Power Plus is the key to perfect health.

Combine that with the fact that this intervention seems pretty susceptible to not being able to distinguish between "feels useful" and "is useful" and this is the largest item raising my skepticism level. Whether this is true could be an interesting line of inquiry.

We just have to use other things like "does not conflict with how I think the world works" and "these people are generally (in)correct about subjects in this area" and "how likely is it that they tricked themselves" to weight the evidence of "these people say this is useful" to adjust our skepticism level towards the appropriate amount.

Millions of people tell me lots of things like "statins work" and "drunk driving increases risk of bad things". I'm less skeptical of those things because of the same sort of things mentioned in the previous paragraph.

To me, by far the strongest point in reducing the skepticism level is the studies backing up TAP. In fact, it seems like this point is so strong that I'm a little confused by the proportion of your comment directed towards "believing people" vs "TAP studies".  

I'm not interested enough in the subject to dive into the studies, but if I was I'd really be looking into whatever delta existed between CFAR's practices and the literature. (Besides trying to generate the hard, sterilized data, of course)

All that being said, I'm still not sure if I'm more or less skeptical than you on the subject.

I guess I should've also stressed the difference between alumni thinking it's proven useful (which is easy to determine) and it actually being useful in accomplishing stuff (which is the more interesting and harder to determine part).

None of the things you mention seem like fool-proof methods of determining the second case.

has proven useful to the majority of our alumni

 

Curious as to how this was established. I can see lots of ways for confirmation bias to creep into this.

What about something like text buttons?  

When I'm designing a UI, I try to use text if there is not a good iconographic way of representing a concept.

Something like:

AGREE (-12) DISAGREE

I'm not sure how that would look with the current karma widget. Would require some experimentation.

First of all, I agree with the gist of your comment.

That is uncomfortably hot.

I...do not agree.  I keep my room temperature 72-74.

keep my room temperature around 68-70 F ish. The internet tells me that this is actually the definition of a "comfortable room temperature"

Going from first four google results for "what is comfortable room temperature":

WHO according to wikipedia: 64-75

www.cielowigle.com: 68-72

www.vivint.com: 68-76

www.provicincialheating.ca: 68-76

 

Seems like both of our preferred temperatures are consistent with "normal human being".

Your comment describes me.

I'm not confident that this is an inherent thing about me rather than luck.

I wonder if it's just that I've lucked out and mostly avoided the bad type of situations wherein my more analytical side is seemingly suppressed to the degree Kaj describes in his post. I've had a pretty good life so far.

That's not to say I haven't had bad things happen to me. (possibly uncomfortable TMI about bad things happening in following spoiler-ed text) 

Probably the worst thing that has happened to me is that we had a child die during childbirth.  That was really bad and it causes me some amount of sadness when I think about it even 15 years later. It just never was a thing that caused anything like what is described in this post. It was sadness that lasted longer and was more intense than previous things that made me sad, but it wasn't a fundamentally different sort of sadness.

I think it's possible that I've just been lucky in that I've not had the life events whose exact characteristics mesh with the exact characteristics of my mind to lead to the sort of feeling described in this post or really most (all?) of the types of things I read about when people talk about trauma of various sorts. 

On the other hand, there are things about me that make me think maybe I have innate characteristics which lead me to not feel the way the post describes.  I'm a happy person. Things don't keep me down. I think positively about myself and others. I'm analytical. I'm pragmatic. I'm a bunch of things that fit into a cluster that would probably include "doesn't hold incoherent emotional beliefs so tightly as to need it's own word".

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