i’m still mad about this

“this is why” my fucking ass. if you torture people with isolation then they go crazy. you don’t need a fucking scientific paper to tell you this. your experience of your own suffering doesn’t need to be mediated through Science to be legitimate https://t.co/G10ZdtmjhY

— QC (@QiaochuYuan) February 10, 2021

It’s crazy the kind of stuff the quant types get up to. I won’t make fun of her again because I like her, but one Twitter user I read was feeling the effects of altitude sickness but denied her own experience because her cheap-ass pulse oximeter showed some number on a screen that to her meant she was fine.

That’s taking the denial of one’s own reality very damn far in service of quantification — but it’s not uncommon for certain “smart kids” brought up in our poor education system.

But when you see it, from the outside, it just looks so bizarre. “Oh, I’m good, the knife only penetrated 10 centimeters and Wikipedia says my heart is at least 30 centimeters beneath the chest wall, no reason to rush an ambulance here.”