@stueytheround @kel

👌🏻 Those are some quality bells, to get you started!

@kel @stueytheround

I guess that's one way to make sure St. Slack-Off-olas soon will be there. 👌🏻

@stueytheround @kel

Colombia welcomes you and your early Christmas fervour. ☺️

Looking forward to seeing your jingle 🔔🔔s, not 🥎🥎s!

@stueytheround @kel

Have you both hung your weekend stockings with care? 🧐

@LiseL @gemswinc @jenebene @Novels56

Beautiful! I didn't want to give up my grackle, but huzzah for solving today's puzzle so "frugally" - in three! 🥳

@gemswinc @jenebene @LiseL @Novels56

Happy day, Cindy! That's a fine Foxy Lady you've got there! I saw the category, but I leap on it as fast. :)

Connections
Puzzle #501
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦

Keyword | 7 guesses | 0:15
1️⃣2️⃣1️⃣1️⃣1️⃣1️⃣

Silly slip.

🚨 #HaikuAlert!
.
.
.
.
On a raucous gulf
a grackle finds its people--
earning treats with caws

Sometimes I think I've grown too grumpy and cynical around publishing...

And then a new bookstore opens in my nearest mall, and just like that, I'm gushing with the staff over all their press editions and thrilling over the works they have by authors I love. 🙃

Stories *mean* something.
Even/especially in awful times.

#CoSoBooks #KidInACandyStore

Who needs nightmare fuel?

Seen today on BlueSky. I don't like anything about this - not the children's eyes, or whoever thought it would be a good idea to show them licking #StarTrek characters.

And on THAT note... 🙃 #AmWriting

@WordsmithFL

Ah, the mirror universe of Twitter...

Infinite Dickishness in Infinite Combinations FTW! 🤦🏻‍♂️

#StarTrek, #SFF, & #CoSoTV! 🖖

Our @WordsmithFL is an absolute fount of info not only around Trek but also the nuances of TV production as they pertain to important eras of #ScienceFiction history.

Can we cheer on his latest project? It's a real treat: THE WRITTEN TREK will go step by step through show elements, but these are *not* mere fact dumps.

Give his latest post a gander to see what I mean. The connections he draws offer some choice thoughts for #Writers, too!

https://thewrittentrek.blogspot.com/2024/10/before-star-trek.html

@IrelandTorin

Splendid chat last night, Torin. Thanks for engaging in it with me. 👌🏻

Best wishes as you move through the messy fray of humanity today. 😉

@IrelandTorin

Indeed, and that's where it becomes critical to remember the material nature of thought, and to avoid stark binaries between reason and emotion.

The "higher reasoning" you reference is only feasible when one is acutely aware of the susceptibility all humans have to external stressors acting adversely on habituated biochemical responses.

But remaining alert is a full-time job, which leaves no time to boast of its fruits. You and I must always do that work: no resting on laurels!

@IrelandTorin

I'd reframe the issue as a consequentialist concern:

The claim to greater objectivity (however relative!) is not a neutral act, but rather, one that puts the host at greater risk of poorer reasoning going forward, from overconfidence in their "higher" reasoning at all.

We've seen this happen with great frequency when people are elevated *for* their critical thinking; they come to take for granted the quality of their thought, and this makes them more vulnerable to future error.

@IrelandTorin

That conclusion doesn't follow seamlessly from your premise, because we live in a culture that is teeming with people with a distorted sense of their capacity for "objective" thinking. (And also of other capabilities; most people assume they're higher than average for intellectual attributes.)

That's why I raise the warning about the declaration of one's superior capacity for higher reasoning. It's an overconfidence that can leave us more vulnerable to fallacy-ridden thought.

@IrelandTorin

If I've been a touch firm on this point, though, I should mention that it comes from having long ago been caught up in that whole misguided rhetoric of rationalism myself, back in the good ol' early 00s, when debate circuits were all the rage.

Moving into a more fully empirical mindset meant onboarding the fruits of human behaviour studies, and the wealth of insights they contain to belie the myth of "higher" reasoning.

But here's that Sheeple comic, for a wee laugh instead.

@IrelandTorin

I don't doubt that you might feel like you make decisions more calmly than those around you - I can't speak to the kinds of people you know - but I've seen some of your "civilization-scale" "objective" moral conclusions, and they're not even close to atypical for your subject-position and its common info silos.

It's like the classic XKCD comic, Sheeple: we tend to assume that we hold only carefully reasoned views, while everyone around us is simply a slave to convention/emotion.

@IrelandTorin

We are in firm disagreement on this one.

I'm just off to bed or I'd pull the research on this, but empirical thinking requires taking into consideration the knowledge our species has acquired about its neural processes.

While it is certainly a fundamental to critical thinking to engage in strategies to reduce the impact of kneejerk first reactions - the core of a humanities education - you keep claiming an
"objective" position can be achieved from a specific subject-position.