(joke) We don't mollycoddle our kids, we're testing how to not tolerate preventable failure which we shall need to colonize space.

I think I would prefer 'tact' in most cases, with 'I wave shifgrethor' as a notion / conversational signal (instead of just the 'shifgrethor' as a notion).

(making toys for people is an example that works for me.)

(I don't think all silliness is fun. I have been hearing lame jokes of the same kind for months and they drive me up the wall.)

I know a guy.

The first thing I thought about him was that he had to be a hitman, judging by his freezers. Yet he was helping my family - practically saving my family, at the moment, I was simply scared out of my mind. We are friends.

And one day, a bit later, he said over tea: I paid for a Ukraine soldier to be "made a hero" (sent to the front lines) because he was blackmailing my woman, who used to be his woman.

I said nothing. It could be that the soldier lived, and I have a thing about blackmailing.

And one day, much later, he said over wine: years ago, I killed a homeless man who was refusing to leave. People here know about it. Nobody ever gives me any trouble.

It took some swallowing. But I managed. Now, though, I really dread to hear confidences, for all that I have only two friends.

(this is completely sideways, but recently I found myself thinking that other exams should not be testing intelligence instead of their stated purpose. When an English test requires you to hold in your head facts, ..., it starts to be less about English and more about "something else".)

Joke, take photos, and invent stories.

---

Once upon a time I bought a camera and started taking pictures. And I compounded it by making up meanings for the objects on the other side of the lense.

I kinda played at science.

People see... some sciencey thing, like a bacterial culture or an ionogram, and they make up meanings for it. It's so much easier to do for an ionogram! You understand at once that it's an abstraction (a number), and so has to be deciphered in a specific way. You may play around with different sets of them, with different software settings, but in the end, the knowledge you derive from it all has to obey a convention of understanding.

A bacterial culture is not an abstraction. It is a physical object, free from conventions. There are many ways to take abstractions out of it, and every one of them requires that a story be invented first (a causal structure). There are also many ways to make it a different physical object; for example, it can be overgrown by a fungus. Dr. Fleming saw it happen. He refused to invent that it had been spoiled (although he could not very well deny it), and that's how we got antibiotics. After Dr. Fleming went with his outrageous new story instead, and got some abstractions out of it, and fitted to them some specific analytical tools.

I mostly can't invent new stories. I like to do... what I like to do, a subset of that which I already know. And those new things aren't here yet, to know them.

But my preferences are. I like to laugh. To not have to defend myself. To get awed. To be proved right. To meet friends as friends.

...Which was how I ended up taking pictures of our geese. But it started with a name.

Or rather, with two. Two very special characters, who had been "them big white birds" a day before. But now, they became photographable, and then, suddenly, visible.

I saw their shapes and colors. Ways they move. Things they do. Foods they love. I heard the sounds they make. All of it had been there before, we had "seen" it, we had to have observed it on some level to even come up with the names... but it had been big white birds'.

Not theirs. Not mine.

And now it was. After I had aimed my camera at them, and my husband aimed his.

Of course, we immediately antropomorphized them to hell and back. They had Views, like Granny Weatherwax. Fears. Mannerisms. Tropes. They started grumbling. Writing songs. Wishing people happy birthdays. Going through their old photo albums!

Other geese wanted in on the fun, which is how they behave anyway. They told stories about the cat, the ducks (including the Lady Duck, a wild bird who brought her babies to swim in our pond), the chickens, the dog, and the goats. We had a young rooster who used to fly over to the neighbors; it did not bode well for his life expectancy, at the hands of my father-in-law. But we named him Columbus, and suddenly, he was opening the New World. Twice a day. (He is now in his prime and a very fine chicken man).

...All of this would not let me discover antibiotics.

But I learned something from it.

To tell a story, you can start with taking a picture

...of something you might have named but not yet seen.

I think of expertise as a network of competent people with some nodes having more weight and some nodes being necessary for the whole thing to be a "-work".

For instance, take nature conservation. It always deals with very specific things (plants, bird migrations, fossil fuels, roads, treaties, whatever.). It's a hodgepodge. You might need many specific experts. But in the center, there is always the need to balance the needs of man and the needs of nature; and this is usually the work of a few.

And it is these few that you most hope to be "real".

It kinda seems to me that we should then also add the duration parameter or the range-of-context parameter. The no-shoes-in-the-temple taboo hardly governs your behaviour when you aren't doing temple-related things. The no-inbreeding taboo seems different?

And I still maintain that people use taboos to focus people's attention to the 'safe' forbidden things.

We Need a Taboo Theory (or I need to get out from under a stone and read about what we already have)

In practice, the word 'taboo' can mean two different things: 'you must not do it' or 'you must not have your own opinion about it, are you even listening'. Could be both at once. (Are there more?)

The second meaning allows to direct attention to things which otherwise, perhaps, would not be considered so interesting, and to force an agreement. It doesn't have to be some agreement about what is the right attitude towards something; it is enough if people agree that they should have some attitude at all. Who knows what they would have thought about otherwise.

Taboos degrade with time, but you can still use them. First, you have a must-not-do taboo. It gradually fails. Now, you can have a great revelation about what it meant for you and your culture. You can demilitarize, for example; you learn about informed consent. You move forward, towards the must-not-have-your-own-opinion-about-exactly-this-thing taboo.

And it never occurs to you that you just don't have to do that.