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Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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What a frustrating quiz. Is there some reason these are always left so ambiguous? Does Marl give up and close the tab the second he's forced to read more than 50 words in a row? Eg.

  • "Scott is hosting a dinner party. For dessert, he serves chocolate cake, shaped to look like dog poop." - I'm supposed to make a call about whether this is "morally okay or not" given no other information. Does this not obviously depend on who's at the dinner party, and their preferences, temperaments, etc? Scott is hosting a dinner party for his football buds who find it hilarious. Laughs are had, poop-cake enjoyed, etc. Fine, yeah, morally okay! Good even. Scott is hosting a dinner party for his in-laws, who he knows don't appreciate his twisted sense of humour. They are disgusted. Scott knew they would be disgusted, and did it anyway just to see the looks on their faces. That's bad.
  • "Some men have a private, all-male club and feminists take them to court, demanding that they open it up to women." - What is even being tested here? Is it having a private all-male club in the first place or taking the club to court to open it up? Presumably the latter. From the perspective of the feminists, they likely have a sincere belief they are doing the right thing. I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to say about this. I personally think people should be able to have exclusive clubs, but also think you should be able to oppose exclusive clubs if you feel that way. I guess I'm neutral? Again, if the question was more specific, I could come down stronger on one side or the other.
  • "A group of parents, concerned about their children's risk of obesity, demand that the local store stops selling XL sized candy bars and soft drinks." - Again, what is being tested? The parents have a reasonable concern, make an unreasonable demand, which they are entitled to make, and the store is entitled to reject. "Is this morally okay?". Is what morally okay?
  • "Sarah's dog has four puppies. She can only find a home for two of them, so she kills the other two with a stone to the head." - a little more information please? Could Sarah not afford to house the puppies herself, or does she simply not want them? Does she have any other options? Is that the most humane way she could have killed them, or is she just trying to avoid a vet bill?

I don't think I'm being pedantic here.

This is a flaw of pretty much any poll or quiz, regardless of the nominal goal it seeks, the average person is an attention deficient idiot whose eyes glaze over the moment they spot a caveat in the wild, so everyone is forced to sacrifice clarity for the sake of just getting more responses.

I'm a Bayesian, and I implicitly consider what I think is the most likely/representative scenario. I think the odds of someone serving a shit-cake is far higher if they know they're in an environment where it's not going to make someone puke, and that informed my answer (a solid triple upvote because I'd be mildly tickled at the idea myself, combined with not considering it offensive or worthy of condemnation).

Similarly, I assume the woman euthanizing the puppies isn't being actively malicious, and if they ended up un-adopted in a shelter, most of them would be put down by other means. I imagine the researchers who made the poll were more curious about the visceral gut reaction to the idea of poor little puppies being stoned to death as opposed to trying to tease out more subtle moral considerations, and while I'm a fan of dogs in general, I don't think the scenario I envisioned is condemnable.