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?)
That would be spitting out, not up. In any case, what I mean is that I'm eating it for a minute or two before I suddenly have the distinct feeling that something is wrong with what I'm eating, and gently cough it back up.
There's a huge difference between vomiting and spitting something up. The latter feels entirely different; for one thing. It feels almost like you never swallowed it at all, it just comes back up like "bzzt... rejected by quality control".
To put it another way, it feels exactly like wanting to spit something out that tastes really bad... except that it just pops back out of your throat instead of merely out of your mouth. There is no unpleasantness to the expulsion; instead it feels like the unpleasantness is contained in the food itself.
I have heard parents use the phrase "spitting up" to describe what happens with babies rejecting a food, and it seems an apt description of the response here.
Believe me, if spitting up was anything like vomiting, it would've put me off of raw foods mighty quickly. The very distinct sensation was actually very convincing that our bodies do indeed have layered defenses against ancestrally relevant forms of food contamination, and specifically that there's a layer of protection that kicks in before hardly any digestion has occurred, but after you've tasted/smelled/swallowed the food.
Believe me, it is a world of difference from cooked-food poisoning, where you're doubled over heaving your intestines out hours after eating. Imagine a linear reduction in discomfort proportional to the time the food spends in your body, with spitting out something nasty at the other end of the spectrum. Spitting up is only slightly more distasteful than spitting something out, and if you have a decent sense of smell, you won't even put it in your mouth to begin with.
Eggs and chicken, however, lose most of their smell when cold (which is why I avoid refrigerating eggs I intend to eat raw). Fish and beef lose less of their odor (and especially, less of their decay odors) when cold, which is probably why people think they're safer to eat raw. (i.e., because when they're not safe, you'll notice this sooner and with less discomfort.)
Informative, thanks. Do you stay away from steak tartare and kitfo, since the raw beef is seasoned?