The ‘cold plunge’ fallacy

From the time we are children, we are often told that we need to do something that we do not want to because it is good for us. The most obvious things are taking medicines and eating vegetables. That advice is undoubtedly correct. But that may subtly breed the erroneous idea that the fact that something is distasteful to eat or do may in iitself be an indicator that it is good for us. Often these things involve actions that people we know tell us about or that we read about famous and successful people doing.

Jonny Thomson spoke with neuroscientist Rachel Barr about this ‘cold plunge fallacy’ that has led to many fads that may be merely making life unpleasant for us without any benefits, or where the benefits may be outweighed by the negatives of the experience, or that may even be harmful.
[Read more…]

Great moments in sports fandom

Once again we have a story about an adult at a sporting event snatching a souvenir out of the hands of a child who had been given it by an athlete. In this case, the villain becomes even more villainous when it turns out that he is a millionaire.

Moments after the tennis player Kamil Majchrzak celebrated the biggest win of his career at the US Open last week, he handed his cap to a beaming young boy. What happened next sparked tears, outrage, a detective hunt across social media and, finally, a grovelling apology.

It came from Piotr Szczerek, a millionaire businessman from Poland, who had snatched the cap out of the boy’s hand and stuffed it into his bag. Videos of the incident showed the youngster looking deeply upset and asking: “What are you doing?” while Majchrzak – who was oblivious to the situation after his five-set victory against the ninth seed, Karen Khachanov – walked away.

You can see the incident here.


[Read more…]

Ordering delivery of small items

When surfing the web, one invariably comes across instances where there is a heated discussion over what one might consider a trivial issue. This then leads to thumb-sucking articles (such as this blog post) about What It All Means and What It Says About Our Society. One has to be a little wary of this tendency because it is always possible to find some extreme behavior on the internet and then treat it as if it were more common than it actually is and then draw Deep Conclusions.

I find such brouhahas faintly amusing and even a welcome distraction from the depressing major news that seems to now be part of our daily lives. One such case was the one I linked to recently about a DoorDash driver who was angry at the size of the tip given for delivery of one cup of coffee. Apart from the issue of the tip, I was bemused by someone actually ordering delivery of a single cup of coffee. Whether you like your coffee hot or ice-cold, surely by the time it reaches you, its temperature would have changed somewhat from its initial value to make it less pleasurable?
[Read more…]

Great moments in driving

New cars have many features that seek to prevent you from causing an accident due to a momentary lapse in concentration. Many of the most recent ones I do not have since my car is 12 years old and even then was not a top-of-the-line model. But it does have one feature that I really like and that is the rear view camera, which is of great help especially when parallel parking into tight spaces. There are other features that I have seen on other cars, such as giving an alert when you seem to be drifting into the next lane and another that alerts you when you are getting too close to a stationary obstacle or the moving car ahead and even triggers the brakes to slow you down.

But what these things cannot take into account is other idiot drivers on the road. Someone was telling me the other days that she was stuck on the highway where traffic was crawling along at about two miles per hour when the man behind her started honking. Puzzled, she looked in the mirror and he was angrily gesturing to her to close the small gap between her and the car in front. But the sufficiency of the size of the gap between her car and the one in front for the speed at which they were traveling had been determined by her car’s computer and sensors and it had determined that her car was close enough. To get closer would have made the alarm system keep beeping.
[Read more…]

Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
[Read more…]

The dangerous practice of subway surfing

Just when I thought that the needless risks that some people take for thrills could not get any crazier, along comes news of something called ‘subway surfing’. This is a phenomenon spurred by social media, where people climb onto to the roofs of subway cars and stand while the cars move. As you can imagine, this can, and does, sometimes end in tragedy when they fall off.

Jaida Rivera’s 11-year son, Cayden, was supposed to be in school at Brooklyn’s Fort Greene preparatory academy on the morning of 16 September last year. Staff saw him in the cafeteria after his grandmother dropped him off at 7.45am.

But 30 minutes later he was marked as absent. Cayden had somehow slipped out, boarded a G subway train traveling south and was riding on top of one of its carriages when he fell on to the tracks at the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station just after 10.00am. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The boy was the youngest of six to die subway surfing in New York City last year – a highly dangerous practice of balancing on top of the swift-moving subway trains as they rattle through the city. It is typically attempted in Brooklyn and Queens, where New York’s subways often run aboveground, and typically in warmer months when schools are in session – suggesting that it has become a dangerous type of after-school activity often spurred by social media cachet.

[Read more…]

A theory of jerks and jerk behavior

Back in 2017, I had a post arguing that a good personal motto to live by is ‘Don’t Be a Jerk’. While it does not have the high-minded elegance of other axioms to live by like the Golden Rule that one should behave towards others as one would like them to behave towards you or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, those need to be unpacked more and it is not always clear how to apply them in specific situations. I did not even try to define who a jerk is. I assumed that all of us have an intuitive sense of what constitutes jerk behavior and and can recognize it when we see it, and that a jerk is someone who routinely exhibits such behavior.

But while my post was a superficial take on this topic, I was amused to find that Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy, has gone into this much more closely and published an essay A theory of jerks. He says that the older use of the term was to label a fool or a chump, like the naive Steve Martin character, seen here at the beginning of the 1979 film The Jerk.


[Read more…]