write interludes to disk

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / interlude-xii.md

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 Title: Interlude XII
-Date: 2018-01-01
-Category: fiction
-Tags: interlude
+Date: 2020-01-01
+Category: other
+Tags: cathartic, interlude, Star Trek
 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's _rare_ for an accident to take out exactly the parts of the brain to leave the patient alive and yet demonstrate the functionality of some key brain area—or for boys with cloacal exstophy to be raised as girls. 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."