Chore Wars? http://www.chorewars.com/
Worked for a while in my family - the kids were arguing over who got to clean the toilet for the XP bonus :-)
It is the sterotypical thing to talk about, but the point is not the actual weather. It is signal that they would rather be talking to you than be silent. It's an invitation to start a conversation, since people don't routinely come up to you and say 'I would like to being a conversation with you - please suggest a topic'. They say 'Raining again!' instead.
'Chore Wars' (http://www.chorewars.com/) is designed to motivate you do get chores done by providing XP / Gold / Treasure for completing chores, and tracking it to induce competition amongst your housemates.
It works for me as a more interesting to-do list, and has caused my kids to argue about who gets to clean the toilet and level up.
I scored 36 on the test, which was way higher than I was expecting. I think I can do a pretty decent impression of a normally social person. Perhaps my responses are skewed by my having programmed for the last 7 hours. Maybe I should take the test again after spending a couple of hours interacting with my wife and kids.
I have a recent example - discussing cryonics with my father-in-law. He supported my choice to do it, but is convinced that when I reach his age I will feel differently about it.
Personally, I would have thought that adding on another 25 years of precious experience and accumulated physical damage would make me more likely to want to preserve/fix myself.
I'm kind of the opposite. My 'gut' feelings tend to rate most things as being dangerous, and I rely on my awareness of actual risk to be able to do pretty much anything.
I don't think I obsess over risk either - but that's maybe because I have been doing this all my life :-). I also don't think my life has not been worth worth living - quite the opposite, or I wouldn't have signed up for Cryonics!
I haven't significantly changed my willingness to take risks, but then again I have always been very risk averse.
I would never ride a motorbike or go mountaineering etc. I eat well, don't smoke, try to avoid stress and exercise regularly.
I did all these things even before I took cryonics seriously . This is because it was obvious that being alive is better than being dead, and these things seemed like obvious ways in which to preserve my life as long as possible.
If I found out tomorrow that cryonics was proven to NOT work, I'd still continue crossing the road very carefully.
If you were hit by a car tomorrow, would you be lying there thinking, 'well, I've had a good life, and being dead's not so bad, so I'll call the funeral service' or would you be calling an ambulance?
Ambulances are expensive, and doctors are not guaranteed to be able to fix you, and there is chance you might be in for some suffering, and you may be out of society for a while until you recover - but you call them anyway. You do this because you know that being alive is better than being dead.
Cryonics is just taking this one step further., and booking your ambulance ahead of time.
As a parent you make a great many decisions for your children that effect their lives in ways great and small. This is not simply your right, but your duty. Cryonics is just one of the many choices you will have to make.
Not pushing your parents towards it is another issue, but have you even discussed the possibility of it with them? My parents were surprisingly positive of the idea when I discussed it with them, and are now actively researching it. Previously, they were not aware that it was even a serious option.
I have two kids. If left to their own devices, they would eat the tastiest things on their plate, then stop (then complain about being hungry an hour later). They would never eat anything remotely healthy, and subsist entirely on chocolate if given the choice.
Since we have evolved to value fat and sugar as being the tastiest substances, children do have to be taught/persuaded to eat healthy food.
They also do need to be told when to go to bed. The times at which we have tried to let them set their own bed times have resulted in them trying to stay awake as ...
Well, the future will certainly be full of mostly strangers. If you can't convince any of your current friends/family to sign up, you might be better of making friends with those that have already signed up. There are bound to some you would get along with (I've read OOTS since it started :-) )
If I ever have any success in convincing anyone else to sign up for cryonics, I'll let you know how I did it (in the unlikely event that this will help!).
Do it anyway. Lead by example. Over time, you might find they become more used to the idea, particularly if they have someone who can help them with the paperwork and organisational side of things. If you can help them financially, so much the better.
If you are successfully revived, you will have plenty of time to make new friends, and start a new family. I'm not meaning to sound callous, but its not unheard of for people to lose their families and eventually recover. I'm doing everything I can to persuade my family to sign up, but its up to them to make the final decision.
I'd give my life to save my family, but I wouldn't kill myself if I found myself alone.
I don't take the test. There are likely to be a LOT of rare diseases with similar cost/benefits, possibly enough so that you could spend every waking moment being tested for something.
I don't consider this decision to be equivalent to my 'inflicting' death on those that happen to get the disease(s).
A bird is a warm-blooded organism with circulatory lungs." How close did I come?
So if I removed the lungs of chicken, you would no longer consider it a bird? Or if I surgically modified some other creature (e.g. a pig) to have circulatory lungs, you would consider this to be a bird?
This kind of argument is why it is pretty difficult to come up with a comprehensive set of features for a broad category like 'bird'. Often the best you can do is produce a set of examples demonstrating the category. Humans are pretty good at such pattern recognition from a set of data.
Like a lot of things, it is hard to define, but you know it when you see it :-)
You think that there are people who read evolutionary psychology and were pleasantly surprised?
I was VERY pleasantly surprised. Suddenly an enormous set of previously baffling data (i.e. the behaviour of most of humanity) began to make sense :-)
It's hard to fix the root cause of a problem without understanding it.
Is this an expression of your prior about the size of the category, or your posterior? Have you updated your prior on learning (to your surprise) that people apparently do feel excluded/get distracted by this sort of thing?
Prior. I have updated very slightly towards Emily's position, but this is balanced by the responses from every female I have personally asked about this, all of whom fell into the a) or b) response. Of course, we all know that comparing two very small samples is far from ideal :-)
...As an aside, would it surprise you if people felt
But are "Women who would be annoyed by the statement 'Women are alluring'" a large potential audience?
I would think that the audience for this specific sentence would break down into (roughly):
a) Those it directly applies to (hetro males, bi females, etc.), who immediately agree 'Yes, women sure are alluring!' b) Those it does not apply to , but who regard it as complimentary (e.g. hetro females), 'Yes, I sure am alluring!' c) Those it does not apply to, but who understand its intention without feeling that it marginalises them. 'I don't get wha...
This certainly works for me. I find I can get a significant increase in performance at the gym when I use the machines that are facing towards the posters of attractive women, compared to the otherwise identical machines facing the windows. I know its a trick, and I know why it works, but that doesn't stop it from working :-)
Sorry, the rather harsh 'nitpicking' should really have been addressed to the top comment in the chain that started this line of discussion. I placed it as a comment after your contribution because I wanted to point out that even your attempts to give a more generic and widely applicable example will be doomed to failure, because you will always end up making some assumptions about the audience.
I find this type of nitpicking really annoying. Surely everyone (no matter their gender / sex / preferences) understands the sentence 'Women will be alluring' to be a generalised example and can easily convert this to include their own specific preferences without the author having to jump through hoops to provide examples that apply to everyone.
"The touch of another person's skin will still be wonderfully sensuous" - you can't say that - you are discriminating against those without a sense of touch!
"sunsets" - you can't say that, what ...
I'm genuinely puzzled by this sort of hostile reaction to what was really a pretty mild request for gender neutral language/examples. It seems utterly out of proportion to the original comment(s).
Clearly, any example one comes up with is probably capable of somehow excluding someone, and trying to screen off all possible objections seems unduly onerous given (a) it's damn near impossible; and (b) the benefits of not excluding left-handed hermaphrodite axylotl enthusiasts are, all things considered, rather small.
But that's not quite what we're talking abou...
Agreed. I was very surprised to find Zen was discussed so much in GEB. Although in context it did serve to (slightly) illustrate some points being discussed, it seemed rather out of place, and I found it very tiresome to read.
It looks like there is no chance of enlightenment for me, but as there is no consistent definition of it, I find it hard to care :-)
Survey done!