I am known here as redbeanjon, or RBJ. Those who know me in real life are welcome here, as as those who do not, although I prefer to keep both realms as distinct identities.
I am an Engineer and researcher by training, a sportsperson by interest, a musician by passion, a nerd by training, a geek by default, a philosopher by nature, and many other things by nurture. You can find more details about me on my About page.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
You can always ask me something on my Askbox, or if you wish to drop me a mail (or if the Askbox is not working) you can do so at this address (or by clicking on the banner):
I reserve the right to decide what emails I wish to answer, and do not welcome spam.
OP HOW CAN YOU NOT ADD THE BEST PART OF THIS TWEET THREAD
A CHUBBY FRIEND <3
I know that the probability of T. Rex being a large fluffy round birb is pretty low, given the climactic conditions the species lived under, but I don’t care because I want T. Rex to have been super fluffy.
Her life was more-or-less average, until she unwittingly opened a mysterious jar containing the apocalypse. To prevent the Earth’s destruction, Hope shoved her arm into the jar. This stopped the calamity, but the jar reshaped around her hand, becoming a glove with immense and terrible power.
Now that a doomsday device had been activated, all the other apocalyptic powers-that-be began rushing to see who could destroy humanity first.
can we all please just assume by default that no artist is okay with having their art reposted unless they state otherwise instead of the other way around
reposting: saving an image to your computer and uploading it as a new post
reblogging: clicking the reblog button to add it to your blog
we love it if you reblog our work; we really hate it if you repost it
As a recovering perfectionist, I was thrilled when author Jon Acuff asked me to draw a poster for his new book Finish. Visit Jon on his book tour to get a poster, or find it at my shop.
I’ve been quiet here for what feels like years, and I don’t really have an answer to why it happened. Perhaps the biggest reason why I halted blogging was that I found it so much navel gazing, and I got sick of looking at my own - especially since I don’t have a six-pack.
Much has changed since the last proper post. I’ve gotten married, moved into my own flat, had a daughter. And while this blog may remain fallow for much longer, I thought I should shout out to where I now put more thoughts, in the form of letters to my daughter.
Head over to lovedad.redbeanjon.com, and see what I have to say to her :)
Me:
You'll probably need to work very hard, have a good grasp of the content, learn to extrapolate from existing data, and then infer based on given assumptions, later debunking their validity.
Student:
I don't want to know all that, I want to know how to get an A - how is that done?
Very often, for those who hope to change themselves for the better, we/they think of someone they can emulate. The WWJD phenomenon took the teenagers by storm when it first came out, but a similar concept applies to all - we all have someone, real or fictional, present or historical, known or known, whom we desire to be like, and when we are faced with a situation in which we have not experienced before, and likely do not know how to deal with, we think “What would so-and-so do?” to elicit our own desired behaviour. I call this the WWXD - where X is any person - phenomenon.
There is, however, one realisation I had about this method, today.
While I profess to be the faith to carry out the WWJD procedure, that method has failed me miserably many times - partly because of my own shoddy knowledge, partly because the social environments I am in now are different from those days and therefore the principles must first be extracted before extrapolation, and partly because I don’t really know what Jesus would have done. As such, I’d preferred to use a real person - someone I look up to, for example, or someone whom I know has had the same experience before. Most of the time said person has indeed had conversation(s) with me on these matters, and it is far easier to translate into my own action.
But today I realised, even that is an extrapolation - which means one thing: it may not necessary be what the person would actually do.
Think about it: in social sciences, and particularly in the qualitative methods, every observation can only be carried out once - even if the same incident happened at another time, the environment - both natural and human - would have changed, and the conditions are never held constant. It is different from that of the physical or natural sciences, where we can hold all but one variable constant in an experiment - social observations cannot be carried out in a controlled environment, because by doing so we are not observing the natural behaviour. So in the situation in which we are thinking “WWXD?”, X may even have had one reaction to X’s own situation in the past, but it may not be a good approximation of our current situation.
Which means that we aren’t really mimicking what X had really done - we are acting out what we think X would do. In other words, the X we are mimicking is the X in our perception, and not necessarily what X would have really done.
So we aren’t really copying the other person’s behaviour; we’re copying what we think is the other person’s behaviour - an extrapolation of an observation that may or may not be accurate. It is like the statement made on self-perception, where “I am not who I think I am; I am not who you think I am; I am who I think you think I am.”
This is the fallacy of the WWXD phenomenon - and one in which everyone can behave as they wish, if they would only justify it with their own perceptions of their models’ behaviour.
![felren13:
“ hellotailor:
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”
please!!!!
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