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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2565 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a cloistered group of scientist-monks had a unique form of punishment, as an alternative to outright banishment.

They would have a person memorize excerpts from books of nonsense. Not just any nonsense, pernicious nonsense, doggerel with just enough internal coherence and structure that you would feel like you could grokk it, only for that sense of complacency to collapse around you. The worse the offense, the larger the volume you'd have to memorize perfectly, by rote.

You could never lower your perplexity, never understand material in which there was nothing to be understood, and you might come out of the whole ordeal with lasting psychological harm.

It is my opinion that the Royal College of Psychiatrists took inspiration from this in their setting of the syllabus for the MRCPsych Paper A. They might even be trying to skin two cats with one sharp stone by framing the whole thing as a horrible experiment that would never pass an IRB.

There is just so much junk to memorize. Obsolete psychological theories that not only don't hold water today, but are so absurd that they should have been laughed out of the room even in the 1930s. Ideas that are not even wrong.

And then there's the groan-worthy. A gent named Bandura has the honor of having something called Bandura's Social Learning Theory named after him.

The gist of it is the ground-shaking revelation that children can learn to do things by observing others doing it. Yup. That's it.

I was moaning to a fellow psych trainee, one from the other side of the Indian subcontinent. Bandar means a monkey in both Hindi, Urdu and other related languages. Monkey see, monkey do, in unrelated news.

The only way Mr. Bandura's discovery would be noteworthy is if a literal monkey wrote up its theories in his stead. I would weep, the arcane pharmacology and chemistry at least has purpose. This only prolongs suffering and increases SSRI sales.

trying to skin two cats with one sharp stone

Wait, why would you want to have more than one sharp stone, if you're skinning cats one at a time?

You have conflated two separate proverbs: "Kill two birds with one stone" and "There are more than one way to skin a cat".

If you're hunting birds with a sling, it's hard enough to hit one bird, let alone two, let alone actually manage to kill them. So "kill two birds with one stone" implies something highly improbable.

If you are skinning an animal, you may have your preferred method, and someone else may have a different approach. And if your method isn't getting the job done, maybe another method will. So "there are more than one way to skin a cat" is a reminder to focus on the goal and not get hung up on a method.

If you're hunting birds with a sling, it's hard enough to hit one bird, let alone two, let alone actually manage to kill them. So "kill two birds with one stone" implies something highly improbable.

I believe it's actually meant to imply something that's highly efficient, not improbable. You are killing two targets with one shot. From what I understand, slings can be very accurate and hitting a bird might not be that difficult.

But how would that even work, with a single stone in one throw? Does the stone ricochet off of the first-hit bird to the second-hit bird? Or does the stone go bullet-like through the first bird and hit the bird behind it?

I believe the term would be a joke, an intentional mixing of metaphors at the very least.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to want to do look more like? I do not think it is possible to look more like insofar as having to decide even how to look, the being so far is not even decided by the looking more like, but rather a sense of deciding while looking more like would go so far as a whole. A good example of this is when the man for the McDonalds asked and had the mayonnaise and the employee when and the put on the side burger and not when how when the picture was taken it was mayonnaise and the McDonald's.

Prisencolinensinainciusol!

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