That response article (whether intentional or not, I can't say) horribly misunderstands and misrepresents the POSIWID axiom.
It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.
So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:
* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.
While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.
In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:
ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.
Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.
Lol, in your example you're conflating a side effect with the main purpose of a system (double fallacy I guess - cherry picking AND hasty generalization)
"Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom."
So, in your (faulty) interpretation, the axiom applies perfectly to the fact that cars kill pedestrians
This response fails to deal with what I explicitly called out: actual evidence that the outcome is not accidental.
And it also fails to address that if a system is continually failing to achieve an acceptable outcome, even if the people operating it are attempting earnestly to do something correct, the people who can and would make the call to discontinue a program that fails to meet their expectations continually (especially when they are doing so to other programs that fail to meet their expectations) are clearly showing that they either have divergent standards, or have a different set of expectations than the operator believes.
I love not socializing. I've never enjoyed a party in my life, I hate dating, I don't want to lose any time in the day to hanging out with anyone. But what I wonder is if am I fundamentally an antisocial person, or am I a product of my cursed environment and trapped in the momentum of the antisocial tidal wave that has been happening since before I was born?
I think it’s also a comfort or maybe risk/reward analysis thing.
I think staying at home basically rotting is more comfortable, sure. No judgment here, I’ve done that for months at a time. But the payoff is also… underwhelming. I mean you get basically nothing, just monotony and silence.
The more risky things, like dating or going to a party, are much more uncomfortable. But the potential payoff is a lot more. I mean you can really strike it up with someone, find someone on your wavelength. It can be exciting, exhilarating.
But it lacks the certainty. The reward is higher, but so is the drawback. If I stay inside and do nothing, at least I know the outcome. It’s more enticing in that way. But I also know I won’t make any memories that way. There won’t be some moment or some person I’ll look back on fondly.
I have an abundance of positive social experiences that remind me that the highs are high and the low are low and I just need to push through it to find that next great experience.
I can definitely see how someone who doesn't have many positive reference experiences would prefer to just be alone and avoid the lows all together.
Not that you asked, but I'd encourage you to not define yourself as antisocial. You just haven't found your kin yet, and if you keep looking you can find it.
Not really satisfied, but the alternatives seem like an uphill battle for myself. Most of my friends have moved on to their marriages, kids, etc. Certainly entering childless uncle phase of my life.
You don't have to live this way. To begin with, drinking a six pack at night on a regular basis is absolutely terrible for your health. It disrupts your sleep and so you will always be operating well below what you could be. The social problems are harder to solve because they are society-wide and not individual, but at your age a lot can change, and I think it's really important that you don't start to give up and think of your situation as inevitable, lest you ossify.
I'm 32 now and met some of my current best friends when I was 26. My parents are 60 and just moved to a new country and within a year they met a dozen new people they now hang out with all the time.
It sounds cliche but it's literally true that there's always time to meet new people no matter what phase of life you're in.
Related: when I was 25 I had a depressive existential crisis and felt like my life was basically over. It's common, and therapy was a lifesaver. If you feel like you might be depressed then talking to someone can really help. Take care of yourself as best you can!
Friend, I'm in my 50s now and I can tell you that you really are only just getting started. I highly recommend finding a new activity or social group and without making massive changes, as those can feel daunting, just make a small change to involve yourself with that. Even just once a month being part of a park run club, or getting to know people in your local art scene, or doing a cooking course, can start you down a path that will enrich your life.
The flip side is that you have time for hobbies, regular workouts instead of beer belly dad bod, you can play sports, bike or skateboard (including socializing), play chess, whatever you like, go to concerts, walk around town photographing.
Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.
Mate you are only 25, those people getting married and having kids are doing it early. You have another 10+ years before you could even think about the childless uncle phase as a construct.
Relationships don't fall in your lap, you need to work on it. Fail, repeat, maintain. Yes, it is an uphill battle in many cases, for few it never ends well, but many reaches the hilltop. Those not 'fighting' uphill will not get up there, ever.
"Nothing in this world worth having comes easy"
And we always can try finding the gentle slopes, going around on the longer track, less crowded. The journey is what counts not the destination here.
I am the childless aunt. I'm in my late 40s, never desired children, so that won't change.
That said, I met my spouse in my early 30s. Was worth switching countries for and that was 13 years ago. We met playing the same silly text-based MMORPG some years ago. I have never been very social, but not being social doesn't mean that you won't meet people in non-traditional ways.
Callback to a post yesterday [1] regarding Google attempting to siphon a little heart-to-heart from a user’s search query. I actually think this is a fitting next-iteration of Doctorow’s term- even though the two cases here are entirely parallel, it does capture the general feeling of being chased all over the web and across multiple apps in attempt to just be a human capable of making decisions!
That's just the word we use for racism when the "other" isn't primarily a single visually distinct race. They're both low-quality words used mostly as insults rather than literally.
One thing worth noting is our popular notion of what a star seems to be is quite different from what astronomers have.
One example, Canis Majoris has a radius of about 1420 solar radii. But its mass is roughly
17±8 times the mass of the Sun and therefore an average density of 5.33 to 8.38 mg/m3. “It is over 100.000 times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level.”
The surface radius of a star is defined based on optical thickness. If you were there, the star would in fact look like a fairly well-defined opaque spheroid with the reported radius. The density of the photosphere plasma is near zero, but there’s a lot of it.
What’s particularly interesting to me is that for stars the size of our sun, regular old gas pressure dominates. The sun’s atmosphere is held up essentially just from the temperature (and therefore high kinetic energy) of the plasma.
Only once you get to 10+ solar masses does radiation (light) pressure begin to become significant, and at 50+ solar masses is when it dominates and the atmosphere is held up by the momentum of light.
To add on to the other response, think of it like the star “leaking” into space. It’ll be defined as a pretty radically different size at some point in the future, even as it’s still undergoing fusion.
I always wonder when do they stop considering the outer layers part of the star and not relatively dense solar wind soup. Nobody says Earth has 7000km radius, even tho there's traces of exosphere past 500km.
Depending what kind of reading material you're looking for (e.g. high level details or mathematically/jargon dense papers) look for things discussing "Rosseland optical depth" and "grey atmosphere approximation".
At a high level, the common convention is to define the radius by finding where the optical depth is 2/3 when using Rosselands clever way of calculating a weighted mean of the opacity from that layer in the star to space across different wavelengths of light. 2/3 being a clever derivation from Eddington where, in an idealized model of a star, that's when the actual temperature of the star should equal its blackbody equivalent temperature.
Pedantically, this distance to the point of equality is an ever so slightly different value than the "distance from the center where there is a 50% chance a photon traveling directly outward will escape the star without another interaction" rule of thumb (in the same idealized grey model). Practically, that the difference is so small is why it's a fantastic rule of thumb explanation.
The radius is based on visual observation. We have good theories and models about what's happening inside the star. We are quite sure that it's mostly empty space inside the radius. But that's not a good enough reason to say that the star's radius is anything other than what we see through our telescope.
Importantly, this works for stars relatively close to us (the farthest I can find is 16,000 light years for one hyper giant) but the majority of the stars catalogued in even our own galaxy have only been assigned a radius via taking the temperature (via color) and luminosity.
> therefore an average density of 5.33 to 8.38 mg/m3
That's nuts. How on earth does fusion happen at that density? Is there a denser core that actually fuses, and the outer fluffy bits just glow from the inner heat?
Averages are quite misleading. The core is obviously a lot denser. Our sun has an average energy output per cubic meter that is comparable to a compost heap.
Sure, but now I'm left wondering what the size of the body doing fusion is. If most of the star is glorified glowing atmosphere, I want to know the mass and radius of the fusing bits.
Depends on the class of the star. Our sun? About 1/4 radius and in is fusion reaction. But it gets weird in other stars. In red giants the fusion zone is a very small shell around a dead core. Maybe something like earths orbit in radius, but very very thin.
Astra says this claim is misleading. Sun's average energy output per cubic meter is three orders of magnitude smaller than that of a compost heap. The fusion core is comparable though.
The energy density of specific compost heaps varies by several orders of magnitude it’s not a single number. Volume, moisture content, internal temperature, external temperature, materials being composted, etc all play a significant role.
Average density for non-uniform objects is pretty useless, since the cubic volume scaling makes a mess of things.
As an example, I pulled the stats for an electric locomotive. 19x3x4.4 meters, mass 90 metric tonnes. That's an average density of about 1/3rd of water.
Locomotive itself? Probably not. If you turned its abstract bounding box into real box - thin, negligible mass, enough strength not to break up - and evacuated the air inside, then yes, the box with locomotive in it should float.
I worked for a financial org with over a trillion in assets, and they had a 100% acceptable variance on project length predictions. Made for a laid-back atmosphere at work but boy. How they ever swung that is beyond me.
“We predict a year, so it’ll take anywhere between 8 seconds and 24 months!” AND IT WORKED???
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