From cf4818d6a06b1f15c83be24e83010722877eda45 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2017 23:17:36 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] swap order of Reimer/Gage and "four lights" interludes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Maybe I shouldn't have established a convention of not titling these? Some might say that what is now "Interlude XI" is tasteless dark humor, but if you can't impulsively publish tasteless dark humor on your own blog— Well, impulsive writing and publishing, even of a tasteless diaglogue scrap, is better than the horror of not-writing, which we've had enough of. --- content/drafts/interlude-xi.md | 16 ++++++++++++---- content/drafts/interlude-xii.md | 14 +++----------- 2 files changed, 15 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/interlude-xi.md b/content/drafts/interlude-xi.md index d534aeb..b3d50a7 100644 --- a/content/drafts/interlude-xi.md +++ b/content/drafts/interlude-xi.md @@ -1,9 +1,17 @@ Title: Interlude XI -Date: 2018-01-01 +Date: 2017-12-27 23:25 Category: fiction -Tags: cathartic, interlude +Tags: interlude Status: draft -"I can understand why you might think that there are five lights—indeed, that would make a lot of things easier—but actually, [there are only four lights](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Chain_of_Command,_Part_II_(episode)). Yes, it's a little bit counterintuitive, and I know I got a little bit frustrated and said some things I now regret when I was trying to explain this earlier, such that some people might justifiably suspect that I am irrationally emotionally-attached to the four-lights hypothesis and guilty of motivated reasoning, and I totally agree that you should definitely take that possibility into account insofar as you are unable to count the lights yourself and are deciding how much you should update based on my report. +"I swear, if I read another _word_ about Phineas Gage—and this goes double for David Reimer—I am going to _scream_. Why do science writers always recount the _same_ illustrative case studies? Are they all just plagiarizing each other out of laziness, or could it really be that in the vast history of human inquiry, we've learned nothing more than can be gleaned from the same half-dozen anecdotes?" -"Nevertheless, there are, in fact, four lights. It's OK if you don't believe me, but I counted them, and I recounted them a few more times, and I'm not going to pretend to be confused about the number of lights unless I discover some specific reason to suspect that I miscounted in the same way every time." +"Illustrative case studies are hard to come by! It takes some incredibly rare coincidences for an accident to take out exactly enough of the brain to leave the patient alive but with deficits demonstrating the functionality of the frontal lobe, or for a boy _with an identical twin brother_ to be raised as girl after a botched circumcision—" + +"More like circum-_trans_-ion if you ask me!" + +"_I didn't_. Anyway, it's not like we could deliberately invent such horrors to inflict on human subjects, just to find out what would happen." + +"It's not?" + +"Well, it would be unthinkably unethi—I don't like that look on your face." diff --git a/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md b/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md index be77377..1a6ab05 100644 --- a/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md +++ b/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md @@ -1,17 +1,9 @@ Title: Interlude XII Date: 2018-01-01 Category: fiction -Tags: interlude +Tags: cathartic, interlude Status: draft -"I swear, if I read another _word_ about Phineas Gage—and this goes double for David Reimer—I am going to _scream_. Why do science writers always recount the _same_ illustrative case studies? Are they all just plagiarizing each other out of laziness, or could it really be that in the vast history of human inquiry, we've learned nothing more than can be gleaned from the same half-dozen anecdotes?" +"I can understand why you might think that there are five lights—indeed, that would make a lot of things easier—but actually, [there are only four lights](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Chain_of_Command,_Part_II_(episode)). Yes, it's a little bit counterintuitive, and I know I got a little bit frustrated and said some things I now regret when I was trying to explain this earlier, such that some people might justifiably suspect that I am irrationally emotionally-attached to the four-lights hypothesis and guilty of motivated reasoning, and I totally agree that you should definitely take that possibility into account insofar as you are unable to count the lights yourself and are deciding how much you should update based on my report. -"Um. Illustrative case studies are hard to come by. It takes some incredibly rare coincidences for an accident to take out exactly enough of the brain to leave the patient alive but with deficits demonstrating the functionality of the frontal lobe, or for a boy _with an identical twin brother_ to be raised as girl after a botched circumcision—" - -"More like circum-_trans_-ion if you ask me!" - -"_I didn't_. Anyway, it's not like we could deliberately invent such horrors to inflict on human subjects, just to find out what would happen." - -"It's not?" - -"Well, it would be unthinkably unethi—I don't like that look on your face." +"Nevertheless, there are, in fact, four lights. It's OK if you don't believe me, but I counted them, and I recounted them a few more times, and I'm not going to pretend to be confused about the number of lights unless I discover some specific reason to suspect that I miscounted in the same way every time." -- 2.17.1