I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
Conventional wisdom is that quite a few things discussed on this site are crazy.
If you are cooking your chicken, then you should indeed make sure it is fully cooked! Partially cooking chicken is in fact a good way to get food poisioning.
This does NOT imply, however, that eating the chicken raw is maximally unsafe!
The first hidden assumption in this conventional wisdom is that the contaminated chicken will in fact reach your intestines with the bacteria intact. But this assumption is further predicated on an even bigger assumption:
Namely, that you are cooking the food in the first place.
If you are cooking it, then you are bypassing your body's safety mechanisms, by destroying whatever chemical composition our evolved bacteria detection machinery relies upon, making it impossible to smell, taste, or otherwise detect the contamination before it's too late.
However, if you're not cooking it, then it's straightforward to rely on your evolutionary heritage to detect and defend against this natural ancestral hazard.
IOW, the presence of a bacteria detection and eviction system keyed to chemical reactions in raw (but not cooked) foods explains both phenomena: why partially cooked foods and mixing raw+cooked foods are dangerous, while raw foods by themselves are quite safe in comparison.
Both will cause problems if they get to your gut -- but the raw food is extremely unlikely to actually make it to your gut, or stay there long enough to be a problem.
Hey, no insults necessary. ;-)
If salmonella was present as a food contaminant danger for enough of our ancestors, we would expect to have such detection and protection machinery, yes.
That I have experienced this machinery in operation with contaminated raw foods but not with contaminated cooked ones (i.e., the cooked foods that I have gotten food poisoning symptoms from), it seems strongly in support of that hypothesis.
Do you have an alternative hypothesis that fits this combination of evidence, and reasonable evolutionary priors? Or are you just regurgitating your gut reactions to the ideas you've been fed in the past? (puns intended ;-) )
I do value your experience report.
Yes, I'm regurgitating my summary of the way that I've seen other people react to the idea of undercooked or uncooked chicken flesh (like it has near-magical powers to contaminate with a powerful poison anything it touches). For an amusing example, see any Gordon Ramsey cooking show (which I cannot generally recommend). Undercooked chicken is the cardinal restaurant sin. But the fear definitely fully extends to never cooked chicken (cutting boards, knives).
Kindly notice I didn't say that you're definitely wrong. I was aw... (read more)