Interesting Links for 06-02-2022

[andrewducker]

'Clients say it feels like we've always known each other': the mental health experts who believe their autism has turbocharged their work

(tags:mentalhealth autism counselling )

Black civil servant handed six-figure payout amid systematic racism in the heart of British government

(tags:racism government uk )

The case for and against analogies

(tags:communication )

NI Protocol: How Britain is causing chaos to avoid dealing with the issues

(tags:UK NorthernIreland Europe Ireland borders trade regulation )

Cerebrospinal fluid washing in and out of the brain during sleep

(tags:sleep brains )

Mapping the celebrity NFT complex

(tags:celebrity blockchain )

Worldle - Can you guess the country? (guesses give you a direction and a distance you were wrong by)

(tags:countries game )

Girl who followed party rules asks Boris Johnson for apology

(tags:BorisJohnson party Pandemic )

15 EU states subsidise fossil-fuels more than renewables

(tags:Europe subsidies globalwarming OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

That analogies thing is interesting, in that I'm always interested in how people who sound like they're from a more traditional STEM-y background try to reinvent like linguistics or sociology stuff from first principles. :)

[andrewducker]

Maybe if academic linguists and sociologists were better at explaining themselves in plain English :-)

(If you know of any articles like this by one then I'd be delighted to share.)

The case for and against analogies

[jack]

I think "does it explain significant details in a manner you find intuitive" is a good standard, but I also think a big difference between analogies and not-analogies is that if the explainer and the explainee already trust each other, an analogy can be very useful, but if they're arguing, or the explainer is trying to explain a concept the explainee isn't automatically trusting that they understand well, then I think an analogy, however good, will just derail things because the listener will need to ask which bits hold true and which don't and it will almost always devolve into a debate about whether the analogy is good, which would be more simply addressed by talking about the subject directly.

Sometimes it might help to have an explicit list of comparison, like "here's 10 properties of electricity, here's ones shared by water, here's ones that aren't", so you can grok how far the analogy goes, and test out your intuition against a known comparison. Although that makes more sense in an article than a casual conversation. But without it, if you're explaining something complicated, it's easy to remember a few details but lose track completely of what actually matches up and what doesn't.

Of course, another use is incidental but valuable: a colorful analogy can help you remember a particular point, even if it doesn't help you understand it :)

Worldle.

[ironyoxide]

The first one it gave me was [...]

[Edit: Just realized it's daily, and everyone gets the same country. Answer redacted.

But yeah, about the last country you'd expect people to recognize on sight.]

Re: Worldle.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I didn't get it, but I did get to the country next door

Re: Worldle.

[jack]

I was very bad at guessing from the outline. I thought I'd be able to guess continent, size, coast vs border, but I couldn't really. Hopefully I get better with practice :)

Re: Worldle.

[darkoshi]

I got it on my 3rd try, and without realizing the little icons were directional arrows (from a distance, they looked like checkmarks to me). But I was a geography buff as a kid and still remember some of it :)

[calimac]

I liked that Worldle. Not only does it play to my strength (I'm much better at geography than at letter-level manipulation), but this one displays properly on my computer which the original Wordle doesn't.