15 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
  2. Nov 2022
    1. Nobody ever says rubber ducky debugging involves writing memos to your preferred duck, after all.

      Seemingly both rubber duck debugging and casual conversations with acquaintances would seem to be soft forms of diffuse thinking which may help one come to a heuristic-based decision or realization.

      These may be useful, but should also be used in combination with more logical, system two forms of decision making. (At least not in the quick, notice the problem sort of issues in which one may be debugging.)

  3. Sep 2022
    1. McConnell said it’s up to the Republican candidates in various Senate battleground races to explain how they view the hot-button issue.   (function () { try { var event = new CustomEvent( "nsDfpSlotRendered", { detail: { id: 'acm-ad-tag-mr2_ab-mr2_ab' } } ); window.dispatchEvent(event); } catch (err) {} })(); “I think every Republican senator running this year in these contested races has an answer as to how they feel about the issue and it may be different in different states. So I leave it up to our candidates who are quite capable of handling this issue to determine for them what their response is,” he said.

      Context: Lindsey Graham had just proposed a bill for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

      McConnell's position seems to be one that choice about abolition is an option, but one which is reserved for white men of power over others. This is painful because that choice is being left to people without any of the information and nuance about specific circumstances versus the pregnant women themselves potentially in consultation with their doctors who have broad specific training and experience in the topics and issues at hand. Why are these leaders attempting to make decisions based on possibilities rather than realities, particularly when they've not properly studied or are generally aware of any of the realities?

      If this is McConnell's true position, then why not punt the decision and choices down to the people directly impacted? And isn't this a long running tenet of the Republican Party to allow greater individual freedoms? Isn't their broad philosophy: individual > state government > national government? (At least with respect to internal, domestic matters; in international matters the opposite relationships seem to dominate.)

      tl;dr:<br /> Mitch McConnell believes in choice, just not in your choice.

      Here's the actual audio from a similar NPR story:<br /> https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2022/09/20220914_me_gop_sen_lindsey_graham_introduces_15-week_abortion_ban_in_the_senate.mp3#t=206


      McConnell is also practicing the Republican party game of "do as I say and not as I do" on Graham directly. He's practicing this sort of hypocrisy because as leadership, he's desperately worried that this move will decimate the Republican Party in the midterm elections.

      There's also another reading of McConnell's statement. Viewed as a statement from leadership, there's a form of omerta or silent threat being communicated here to the general Republican Party membership: you better fall in line on the party line here because otherwise we run the risk of losing power. He's saying he's leaving it up to them individually, but in reality, as the owner of the purse strings, he's not.


      Thesis:<br /> The broadest distinction between American political parties right now seems to be that the Republican Party wants to practice fascistic forms of "power over" while the Democratic Party wants to practice more democratic forms of "power with".

    2. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3641225-mcconnell-throws-shade-on-grahams-proposed-national-abortion-ban/

      I've recently run across a few examples of a pattern that should have a name because it would appear to dramatically change the outcomes. I'm going to term it "decisions based on possibilities rather than realities". It's seen frequently in economics and politics and seems to be a form of cognitive bias. People make choices (or votes) about uncertain futures, often when there is a confluence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these choices are dramatically different than when they're presented with the actual circumstances in practice.

      A recent example was a story about a woman who was virulently pro-life who when presented with a situation required her to switch her position to pro-choice.

      Another relates to choices that people want to make about where their children might go to school versus where they actually send them, and the damage this does to public education.

      Let's start collecting examples of these quandaries at all levels of making choices in the real world.


      What is the relationship to this with the mental exercise of "descending into the particular"?

      Does this also potentially cause decision fatigue in cases of voting spaces when constituents are forced to vote for candidates on thousands of axes which they may or may not agree with?

  4. May 2019
  5. Jan 2019
    1. (to name only a few possibilities).

      Further supports Muckelbauer point as to why rhetoric is so difficult to precisely define. Because there are many possibilities, areas of study for rhetoric this understandably causes some hesitation when asked to define the word.

  6. Oct 2017
    1. evenNorthanger Abbey’sCatherine Morland can be persuaded to recognize the geographic and temporalboundaries of the Gothic novels she loves

      Another test to run with R!

    2. The catalyst forthe novel, however, seems to have been a straightforward reaction to a newwork by an author Austen considered her competition*the Scottish MaryBrunton’sDiscipline(1814).Disciplineis a fictional autobiography with the strong religious themes ofsin, repentance and redemption.

      The author claims here that Emma was inspired by the 1814 novel Discipline by Mary Brunton, which surely is not part of the male literary canon laid out earlier in the article. The author outlines the main themes of Discipline and explains the relationship between the two authors.

      I feel like a broken record here, but again, this seems to be a very tenuous point without computational analysis. The author's own language belies this tenuousness as she says that the novel's inspiration "seems to have been a straightforward reaction" to another novel. The word "seems" does not inspire confidence.

    3. The figure of the Quixote*from the seventeenth-century Don Quixote of la Mancha to Emma’s namesake Emma Bovary*isessential to the development and evolution of the novel as a genre, promotingthe self-reflexivity, promiscuous intergeneric and intrageneric allusion, andmeditations on realism and reality that are the genre’s hallmarks

      Another test to run - Emma as compared to other quixotic novels, especially The Female Quixote!

    4. Inthe first, Emma uses the fact of Harriet Smith’s illegitimacy as a springboardfor the birth-mystery plot beloved of sentimental novelists.

      Another possible tie for DH work - running comparisons on these sentimental novels and Emma.

    5. Charlotte Lennox’sTheFemale Quixote(1752) and even Eaton Stannard Barrett’sThe Heroine(1813) arecases in point.

      I would like to perform quantitative analysis on Emma and these texts, in addition to other 18th century texts such as Evelina.

    6. Emmais unique in Austen’s adult oeuvre in its obsession not only withother texts, but with the unspecific stock elements of the eighteenth-centuryand Romantic-era novel.

      Once again, here is another point that I believe it could almost be irresponsible to make without quantitative analysis. I don't know that it is empirically true that Emma is "unique" in its "obsession" with other texts and "stock elements of the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era novel."

    7. The Romantic concept of literary influence, articulated in its present-dayincarnation by Harold Bloom, must expand to encompass not only the work ofwomen, but also the work of both canonical and extra-canonical writers, if itis to be of any help in assessing Jane Austen’s work as a critical reader, anda critical rewriter. ‘‘

      I believe that DH work could be instrumental in accomplishing this vision. Since the literature of this time is in the public domain, it is indeed possible to run tests of influence and similarity on all existing manuscripts.

  7. Oct 2013
    1. That if of two similar things one is possible, so is the other.

      everything is possible, sometimes unlikely but still possible.