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I heard this was one of the social functions filled by the Japanese postal workers. Their official job was to deliver the mail, sure, but they were also encouraged to spend a few minutes talking with everyone as they delivered the mail.

That's a much less efficient way to get mail delivered, because each stop takes 5-10 minutes, and thus it became discouraged.

Efficiency. Short term optimization for the wrong output.


One memorable instance of this sort of thing from back when I was an EMT in Virginia --- rural mailman noticed that an elderly gentleman hadn't picked up their mail from the previous day, so prevailed upon the folks at the next house to allow him to use their phone to call the County Sheriff's Department --- when the Deputy arrived, it was found that the unfortunate had had the seat in their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.


> elderly gentleman

> their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.

You lost me. Were there multiple people trapped in the seat?


I don't blame you for the downvotes. The gentleman's gender was clear, there was no logical need to neutralize the following sentence. Even more confusing if you're learning English, its language rules are hard enough without additional ideology rules.


It was perfectly ordinary English, the ideology exists only through your own lens.


> It was perfectly ordinary English

Except that it was not


https://oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they

Singular they has existed for hundreds of years, it has nothing to do with ideology.


one day ? sounds like nosy rural people justification urban legend, more like it


If an older person doesn’t have a whole lot going on, they often look forward to these sorts of routine daily interactions. Missing one could easily be a red flag.


if the older person wants it, yes. On the other hand "welfare check" in lots of areas is a justification to break rules of privacy and it is increasing.

This article starts with an obviously disturbing topic - dying alone as an elderly person. Yet the Japanese are super nosy people with very little privacy in my experience there. Somehow, there are customs that are deeper around privacy that are not obvious.. and perhaps a growing society that is not changing well.

Expectation of privacy, territory and associated manners and legal actions.. are being examined here. The wildly-downvoted comment stands.


Driving along the (not gated) driveway of a home, walking around the perimeter of the property (which did not have a privacy fence, the legal terms here are "curtilage", public right of way, and easement) and hearing a cry for help and acting on it are not an invasion of privacy.

All of this was of course, a long time ago, and a further consideration was that the family whose phone was used were on a party line with the neighbor in question and specifically mentioned that a phone call for that neighbor went unanswered the previous evening which added some urgency to the matter.

If anything, Japan has a culture of privacy and respect of individuals which make this originally noted societal problem more likely.


An important detail that makes this possible: in Japan, the postal worker is allowed to enter your house.

Every Japanese home has a little square area near the front door called a "genkan", where guests are supposed to remove their shoes when entering. Postal workers also occupy this area when delivering mail.


How does that work with work shifts? Postal workers here in the US deliver when many people are at work


I guess if you're outside, the postman can leave your mail in your mailbox and have the peace of mind that you can die in someone else's arms.


Elderly people usually don't work shifts anymore.


wouldn't a few seconds of conversation suffice to verify that the person is still alive?


If you are in a bubble, stay there. It is a happier place.

Yes, young adults today are more willing to "cancel" their parents. Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person.

Parenting is hard.


>Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person.

Can you give me a specific example of this?


My sperm provider literally said that his dad treated him like shit, so he gets to treat me like shit, and that as a reward some day I'd get to treat my own son like shit.

I fired both of them 8 years ago and haven't missed them even one time. They were always an emotional cost center. Whenever I had one problem, if they found out, I'd have two: the original problem and providing emotional support to them for having upset them.

When I first moved to uni, I was utterly confused by everybody saying they were looking forward to going home for Christmas - why on earth would you want to go back to that? I remained baffled for another 12 years until I finally realised what had happened. I drew a poor hand.


Before they reply, I would be willing to put money on it being something to do with "coming out".


Putting in a plug for Open BCI

https://shop.openbci.com/collections/openbci-products

which has been making EEG equipment for DIY use for years, and has some scientific validity claims.

Including their https://shop.openbci.com/products/ultracortex-mark-iv for the same price as the article's

No affiliation, just a fan.


Oh, but they can put blinky video ads all over the page so no matter where you look there are things to distract you.

yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.


Just imagine how much more efficient you would be if you were using R's DataTable.

Look, I applaud your skill, but at some point even a master craftsman realizes that the swiss army knife may not be the best tool, and a leatherman offers certain advantages.


I really like R’s library and I’ll use them any chance I get (libraries like lmer are still orders of magnitude more efficient than the same model in Statsmodels).

From my experience the biggest impediment to using R in production is many orgs don’t have a blessed way to run it.

R is my favourite language for data processing, the manual section Computing on the Language[1]is why R is such an ergonomic tool. I had hoped Julia would catch up, but Julia’s macros are not comparable in their depth.

I think pandas is probably the data equivalent of editing files using default vim or processing data with awk.

[1] https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-lang/Computing-on-the-...


As a joke, I wrote an Ibis backend (https://github.com/cpcloud/ibish) that processes expressions using shell commands strung together with named pipes. It supports joins using the coreutils join command, projections, filters and some aggregations with awk.

It's faster than pandas in some cases and folks should put it into production immediately!


Sometimes I write data analysis code in R to make myself aware of how it is occasionally possible to have nice things.


Work which exaggerates the blindness.

The people were told to focus very deeply on a certain aspect of the scene. Maintaining that focus means explicitly blocking things not related to that focus. Also, there is social pressure at the end to have peformed well at the task; evaluating them on a task which is intentionally completely different than the one explicitly given is going to bias people away from reporting gorillas.

And also, "notice anything unusual" is a pretty vague prompt. No-one in the video thought the gorillas were unusual, so if the PEOPLE IN THE SCENE thought gorillas were normal, why would I think they were strange? Look at any TV show, they are all full of things which are pretty crazy unusual in normal life, yet not unusual in terms of the plot.

Why would you think the gorillas were unusual?


I understand what you mean. I believe that the authors would contend that what you're describing is a typical attentional state for an awake/aware human: focused mostly on one thing, and with surprisingly little awareness of most other things (until/unless they are in turn attended).

Furthermore, even what we attend to isn't always represented with all that much detail. Simons has a whole series of cool demonstration experiments where they show that they can swap out someone you're speaking with (an unfamiliar conversational partner like a store clerk or someone asking for directions), and you may not even notice [0]. It's rather eerie.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ&t=5s


Does that work on autistic people? Having no filters or fewer filters, should allow them to be more efficient "on guard duty" looking for unexpected things.


> And I fail to see why our human brains couldn't be doing something very, very similar with our language capability.

Then you might want to read Cormac McCarthy's The Kekulé Problem https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

I'm not saying he is right, but he does point to a plausible reason why our human brains may be doing something very, very different.


Onus of proof fallacy (basically "find the idea I'm referring to yourself"). You might want to clarify or distill your point from that publication without requiring someone to read through it.


To defend the humans here, I could see myself thinking "Crap, if I don't say 1+1=3, these other humans will beat me up. I better lie to conform, and at the first opportunity I'm out of here"

So it is hard to conclude from the Asch experiment that the person who says 1+1=3 actually believes 1+1=3 or sees temporary conformity as an escape route.


That phrase was probably a bad choice of words; I believe the fuller intent was

"Let's fund initiatives which build our community, like teachers and school lunch so our kids aren't hungry. That's more important than funding police who come from outside our community and have a reputation for extortion and murder of our citizens instead of protecting us."

You may disagree with the read on the situation of the people involved, but I would be very surprised if you support the idea of you being taxed to support an armed force which was sent into your community and only ever acted in a hostile way towards you.

By the way, the DOJ seems also to feel that the Minneapolis Police was hostile to the citizens

Minneapolis Police Used Illegal, Abusive Practices for Years, DOJ Finds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917349

Minneapolis Police Use Force Against Black People at 7 Times the Rate of Whites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23403891

At urging of Minneapolis police, EMS workers subdued dozens with ketamine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17328770

And the slogan comes as part of a larger discussion of what the role of police should be in society, see i.e.

Minneapolis City Council looking into disbanding police department https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23398910

> We can totally reimagine what public safety means, what skills we’re recruiting for, what tools we do and don’t need. We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution.

> We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a weapon, or pulling out handcuffs.

> The whole world is watching, and we can declare policing as we know it a thing of the past, and create a compassionate, non-violent future. It will be hard. But so is managing a dysfunctional relationship with an unaccountable armed force in our city.


That phrase got so much traction precisely because it's a bad choice of words. It's easy to dismiss a movement if you latch onto the worst framing you can find, take it literally to the point of bad faith, and refuse to dig any deeper.


> a bad choice of words

I think you had ample chance to sell your ideas, and you lost:

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/02/1051617581/minneapolis-police...


It was probably a bad choice of words, but chosen for a reason. I'm guessing of course, but I think the people that picked those words knew what they were doing. They wanted to appeal to people who think the police do more harm than good.


>We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a weapon, or pulling out handcuffs.

In what world is trying to pay with a counterfeit bill "confusion over a grocery transaction?"


rowing is good, you're right about that. So is sandbags/rucking (goruck is the premier brand). So is kettlebells, but I have no idea who is good for training that.

Key thing is to find something you like doing.

And I'm with you, reducing activation energy makes a big difference in success probability.


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