srf0638
3d ago
The specific example is interesting. I don't notice a damn thing from NSAIDs for pain that can reasonably be assumed to be inflammatory, and IIRC they're indistinguishable from placebo for osteoarthritis pain.
srf0638
7d ago
obtaining military experience
I won't commit myself to the project of enumerating counterexamples to all of these, but this specifically reminded me of the entertaining story of Paul Douglas, best known as Cobb's opposite number in the eponymous production function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Douglas_(Illinois_politician)
srf0638
14d ago
It doesn't matter how big the earnings premium is if you're not gonna do it.
Picking apples in autumn and a part-time gig at the butcher's shop she worked at for the rest of the year, mostly. I didn't have trouble with showing up to these jobs for some reason.
It sounds like you don't really need advice anymore, and I never had as bad of a problem as you or OP did, but there are outdoor manual labor jobs that pay better and have more of a pathway to retirement than those two. (I guess butchering isn't outdoors, which opens up even more opportunities.). May be worth exploring--not everyone has to be a programmer, and tasks involving trees are supposedly going to be difficult to automate.
srf0638
21d ago
Low trait agreeability.
I've worked on some high-and-tight outfits and get fed up with their Mickey Mouse bullshit, worked with some chillers and get fed up with the slackness and lack of respect for tradition, sometimes going both directions on exactly the same issue. Is what it is at this point, I guess.
srf0638
21d ago
In France this is a Monsieur Je-Sais-Tout, here in Quebec we call a Ti-Joe Connaissant.
I chuckled audibly, thank you.
srf0638
26d ago
Yeah, this is all pretty fair. I might argue that in a modern educational and hiring environment most credentials and experience are pretty much as susceptible to manipulation as headshots, and not all that much more reliable. It's not something I believe with a great deal of confidence, and in this specific context I think it more or less assumes the consequent, but it's worth considering.
Really, do you think you could pick Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower out of that West Point photo without being told who they are?
No, but I'm probably <1st percentile at facial recognition in general, and I'm reasonably willing to believe that normies would do better than chance (and that the entire West Point football team was already pretty strongly selected for Chadly leadership ability.).
phrenology. "You can just tell by looking at the strong-jawed white chad that he's a superior New Soviet Manalpha male
I mean, yeah, pretty much. I'm seeing a lot of pointing and sputtering at the idea that facial features and appearance are correlated with personality and aptitudes in unsurprising ways, without much actual convincing evidence to the contrary.
srf0638
26d ago
They look like every person I see with a professional headshot on LinkedIn, from sales managers to software engineers.
Tomayto, tomahto. It's not a pure demographics thing: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/prima-facie-leadership
I'm autistic enough to dislike this observation and to not be particularly acute at picking it up myself, but not autistic enough to pretend it isn't real.
srf0638
1mo ago
Some of your bullet points reminded me that quality home gym stuff is way easier to get and probably cheaper when adjusted for inflation than it was.
srf0638
1mo ago
Yeah this has also been my experience. I don't think discipline or willpower have ever been helpful frameworks for me (as opposed to, e.g., making sure I was doing something I actually wanted to do.).
srf0638
1mo ago
That’s about the minimum speed a car can possibly do without constantly braking.
In addition to what everyone else has said, this is clearly not so. Idling in D is under 5mph in everything I've ever driven, same with giving it just enough gas to not stall in 1st in a manual (I can actually idle in 1st in my truck, which has a torquey diesel and a low first gear, but generally not in passenger cars).
srf0638
1mo ago
Even country roads can be bad, because people fly on them without regard for other traffic, let alone bicycles.
i'd endorse most of this post, but ime the rural roads around me are actually pretty friendly because it's easy to pass in the oncoming lane and people are used to passing tractors going from field to field, and honestly if you're in a hurry there are state highways and interstates to take instead. obviously not universal.
srf0638
1mo ago
Wouldn't you normally expect them to be in the road, like right in front of you in the easiest possible place to see?
Yeah, this is a fairly significant component of practical vehicular cycling advice.
srf0638
1mo ago
"one mistake and I get raped in prison"
Quoted from Effective Cycling, not necessarily endorsed:
Americans have been raised to believe that the greatest danger to cyclists is same-direction motor traffic. Therefore, the motorist who sees a cyclist on the road ahead of him believes that this is a moment of great peril. The motorist thinks that some strange event is likely to occur that will cause him to hit the cyclist. Because whatever it is that is likely to occur, it won’t be my fault. The typical person sees himself as driving along, minding his own business, when there is a loud crash and—“Oh my God, I’ve hit a bicycle!” That is how they have been taught that these accidents happen: an act of God or an evil magic at work. Therefore, in this type of event the cyclist is seen to be more at fault than the motorist.
Forester would dispute the factual truth of the bold based mostly on the Kenneth Cross study. Of course, equilibrium effects and so on....
srf0638
1mo ago
Yeah, this is a solid summary. Always interesting how these things shift over time.
srf0638
1mo ago
This is true, but enforcement in the US is quite a bit more notional than real, ime. I wonder what the equilibrium effects of a stricter norm around this would be--maybe slower traffic would be less disruptive if the left lane was consistently open for passing.
srf0638
1mo ago
speed, and that's also the main difference between different types of roadways
I'm not at all sure about this (lots of main roads move pretty damn slow through town, lots of country two-lanes with driveways entering them where everyone does 70 in good weather, classification by density of access points or something like that seems a good deal more rigorous), and I don't think your conclusion makes sense either. How well slower vehicles mesh with everything else is going to depend much more on how much of everything else there is, how many lanes there are, what the shoulder looks like, and infrastructure for overtaking (passing lanes, sight lines, etc) than it will on speed alone.
srf0638
1mo ago
Some notes on John Forester and Vehicular Cycling
After the discussion on last week's cycling CW post had waned a bit, it occurred to me that the name of John Forester had never come up. Indeed, in the context of the two broadly defined "sides" in the discussion we had then, Forester stands out in a manner analogous to the early 20th century eugenicists and imperialists who essentially founded the US National Park system and comservation movement. Some of their ideas pop up uncredited in our discourse to this day, but they dramatically fail to be on either side of the current CW and probably as a result are not widely remembered by name. I am a lifelong cyclist and reasonably knowledgeable about bicycle history and had never heard of Forester until a recent troll thread on 4chan, though some of the advice my dad (also a lifelong cyclist) gave me when I first started riding for transport is pretty clearly Forester in the intellectual water supply--don't be scared of the streets, claiming the lane, staying out of thendoor zone, setting up for left turns, and so on.
John Forester was an engineer by trade and lifelong avid cyclist. The main thrust of his cycling-related advocacy was that "bicycles should be operated like any other vehicle — ridden in the same lanes and manner as cars and trucks rather than in bike lanes or separated infrastructure", a philosophical position which he called Vehicular Cycling. So far, so recognizable, you may well think. However, Forester made himself notorious for actively arguing against the construction of separated bike lanes and bike paths, often in fairly acrimonious terms. His general argument was that the very existence of a designated bikeway, even a hilariously inadequate one (in the door zone, frequently blocked, full of debris, disappearing, located in the right-turn lane but intended for through traffic, etc), would be used to force cyclists into more dangerous and less effective riding strategies, and even a bikeway that avoids these obvious pitfalls exposes cyclists to significant collision risk when it inevitably intersects with a road. Indeed, it sounds like there were a few legal battles along these lines in Forester's area of operations in the 70s. If this all sounds rather baffling to you, it may help to consider the question of whether it's safer to drive on interstates or surface streets. Kinetic energies are much higher on the interstate and it's much harder to just pull over and stop than it is on most surface streets, but interstates are well known to be safer than surface streets (see e.g. https://www.thewisedrive.com/side-streets-vs-interstate-which-is-safer/). Now imagine that, in order to make life easier for commercial trucks and keep passenger cars safe from vehicles much larger than them, it was proposed to legally limit passenger traffic to surface streets. You might, of course, dispute the analogy to cycling on roads vs bikeways, but perhaps it helps clarify the point.
As far as I can tell, nobody in the conversation uses scientific research in what those of us who are familiar with old SSC review articles would consider a convincing and intellectually honest manner, so I'm not going to bother engaging either Forester's studies (he likes to cite Kenneth Cross) or the Marshall paper from the Chi Streets link below. This being the Motte, I'll note that nobody in the conversation seems to have considered the likely impacts of 13/50 on either motorist or cyclist behavior.
Forester claims pretty plainly in his book Effective Cycling that an actually existing credible threat of severe punishment effectively deters truly negligent and malicious driving, which I dunno about. Every so often a motorist kills a cyclist and gets off remarkably easy. (I have been in online conversations about this where someone pipes up to say, well, what about cyclists who kill pedestrians? Sure, them too.). Forester actually cites a number of these cases in his book, but seems to regard them as an advocacy issue more than anything. "Other people should behave differently" would be nice in a lot of cases but is generally not a viable solution to your problem.
On the other hand, in Forester's favor, a lot of actually-existing bikeways in the US do in fact suck in one or another of the ways I've described and my experiences riding in them versus acting like a car generally agree with his. Forester himself was by all accounts an outstandingly disagreeable nerd and a pretty strong recreational cyclist; a good deal of his book is concerned with going faster, though I don't believe that part has been updated since the widespread adoption of the power meter so it's a bit of a 70s endurance broscience time capsule. His interlocutors (e.g. in my links below) seemingly all say things like "don't you know the population that's scared to ride in traffic is more Diverse?", a point which he essentially ignores when the interviewer brings it up. I suppose I take these as indicators of which side I should be on. From a more substantive standpoint, the problem of people who are too slow to ride effectively in traffic is at least somewhat mitigated by e-bikes, though I guess that's a whole different Culture War battle of its own.
Some further reading
Long interview with Forester: https://archive.is/5GwSs
FAQ from the training and advocacy organization that succeeded Forester's Effective Cycling courses: https://cyclingsavvy.org/road-cycling/
Unsympathetic from Strong Towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/28/why-john-forester-was-wrong-design-streets-for-the-humans-you-have-not-the-humans-you-wish-you-had
And from Chi Streets: https://chi.streetsblog.org/2020/04/24/r-i-p-john-forester-a-worthy-adversary-in-the-battle-for-safe-biking
srf0638
2mo ago
Something something competing access needs.
Many cogent observations already posted. I'll just add that 1) my only really adversarial encounters with drivers were in Glendale and the drivers in my ag-dominated rural home area seem remarkably polite in their overtaking, and 2) everyone seems a lot nicer when I run a bright blinking red taillight during the day.
srf0638
2mo ago
twice
can't have worked that well eyy
No but for real that's something I never considered. Thanks. My first reaction was "damn, I'd feel like a loser showing up alone" and then I thought about it for like three more seconds.
srf0638
2mo ago
I could do that logistically, now I think about it, but I don't like the bar environment very much. But maybe I should. Glad it's working for you, anyhow.
Being able to spin fast without spazzing out is a learnable skill especially on flat pedals, one-leg drills and so on, but outside of some fairly specific applications I endorse all this.
For the viewing amusement of the board, here's a trackie hitting some high revs on rollers: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZiVa0zTRHJk&pp=ygUOMjUwcnBtIHJvbGxlcnM%3D
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