Rachel Carrell

I counted it up and across all my babies and trips from London to New Zealand I've spent almost 400 hours looking after a baby/toddler on a plane. Here are my 56 survival tips (one for each hour of the shortest return journey)

@fbpplemons @BBDaybreakEU Async social calls

@BBDaybreakEU There’s no justification for a voice note ever. They are either something that should have been a conversation and so are selfish in that they are one sided, or they should have been properly formulated and written down, in which case they are selfish for the reason OP suggests

Assuming you're literate, it's a selfish way of communicating. It saves the sender a small amount of time where they can 'ummm' instead of formulating a point properly. Then the receiver has to sit through it all, spending multiples of the amount of time they'd spend to read it.

@mhartl Logical fallacy. By your logic there is also no point ever voting in a major election, or not littering, or doing any one of millions of things that only matter if enough people do them

The discourse on the red button/blue button problem can get a bit heated, so I’m reluctant to engage. Nevertheless, after some reflection, I do feel like I have something to contribute. (Please be considerate in the replies.) First, I think it’s worth noting that the problem statement is carefully phrased to recruit prosocial impulses and to mislead people who know something about game theory (specifically, the prisoner’s dilemma). This suggests a baseline stance of sympathy. Moreover, it’s clear that at least some people in the given scenario would press blue, so blue-pressers reason correctly that the only way to save everyone is for more than 50% of people to vote blue. Unfortunately, from this correct conclusion, many blue-pressers reason incorrectly that they should therefore press blue to help blue to win (often condemning red-pressers as selfish because they refuse to help). This might make sense if we were trying to coordinate a big push to get people to vote blue ahead of time, but by hypothesis there is no such coordination. Since it’s a private vote, we need to supply an individual justification to vote blue, not one that relies on nonexistent coordination with others. This can be deeply counterintuitive. To many blue-pressers, it seems obvious that pressing red is “part of the problem”, while pressing blue is “part of the solution”. This brings us to our key result: The vote of any individual blue-presser makes no difference to the outcome unless there would have been a tie otherwise. (Absent coordination, this is a mathematical fact; blue-pressers tempted to deny it should take a moment to reflect.) Because voting blue saves lives only in the case of breaking a tie vote, it is essential to get a sense of the a priori likelihood of such a tie. There are alternate scenarios where such a tie is not all that unlikely. For example, I’ve seen some blue parents say they would vote blue because their kids might vote blue and they should do everything they can to save them. And this logic makes sense in, say, a vote by a family of four, where the chances of a tie are quite high. A responsible father might well vote blue on speculation that his vote would save his children’s lives. (He might also find it rather awkward trying to explain himself if he voted red when his wife and two kids voted blue; more on such social consequences later.) But, as with political philosophies that sometimes work fine with a few people but always collapse when scaled to millions, this strategy of voting blue to “save the children” (or whomever else) fails when the vote is global. There’s no way to calculate the exact probability of a tie, but we can get a sense of the numbers by plugging in, say, 55% for the probability that any given person votes blue (which I think is a reasonable estimate for a blue optimist; in a real-life vote with real consequences, I suspect that red would win in a landslide, but our argument here does not require that). According to my calculations, in this case the probability of an exact tie for a global population of 8.3 billion people is approximately 3 in 10^18,113,948. That’s not three in eighteen million. It’s 3 divided by 1 followed by eighteen million zeros. It’s hard to express in words how small this number is. It is utterly negligible. Physicists Charles Kittel and Herbert Kroemer once wrote in a similar context that such a probability is “zero in any operational sense of an event.” We could hold a worldwide vote a billion times a second for the entire history of the universe and still have a negligible chance of a tie. As a result, any individual blue voter, although he may feel like he is helping blue to win, in fact has ~no chance of affecting the outcome. And since the probability of blue losing is nonnegligible, he is risking his life in the process. (One might reasonably observe that a similar logic could apply to voting in elections; I’ll leave pulling on that loose thread as an exercise to the reader.) Based on my observations of their comments, it seems to me that blue-pressers are driven to vote blue mainly by wanting to do what they feel is the right thing, and I think there’s also a desire to be perceived as doing the right thing. As we have seen, the first of these is misguided since the probability of affecting the outcome is ~0, but the motive is laudable. Regarding perceptions, my sense is that most blue-pressers can very clearly imagine what it would be like having to admit they voted red in a world where blue carried the day, and they don’t want to live in that world. Moreover, even if they came to appreciate the logical arguments in favor of pressing the red button, the social consequences of doing the logically correct thing can be quite real and painful if enough other people believe that the logically correct thing is selfish or evil. This leaves us with various costs and benefits of pressing the blue button. We have seen above that the probability is ~0 of saving half of humanity, so we should not include that in the benefits column for pressing blue. There are also potential personal benefits of the feeling of having “done the right thing”, even if those feelings are not logically justified. And even absent personal benefits, the social benefits of voting blue could remain quite real. Meanwhile, the cost of voting blue is a significant likelihood of death. In contrast, the only cost of voting red is the social cost of being perceived as selfish or evil if blue wins. (Blue-pressers might identify an additional cost, namely, guilt about being selfish, but this is projection.) Meanwhile, the benefit of voting red is guaranteed survival. In sum: Blue-pressers have a reasonable chance of realizing the social and possibly personal benefits of having done “the right thing”, but they also have a reasonable chance of dying. Red-pressers have a reasonable chance of realizing the social cost of being perceived as selfish or evil, but they have no chance of dying. Anyone who sincerely feels that being perceived as selfish is worse than dying should seriously consider pressing blue. Everyone else should press red.

@kglightspire @cremieuxrecueil If you can poll your friends it is a big game changer

@cremieuxrecueil This is a really bad hypothetical because we don't get the real-world situation. Do the two buttons appear in front of you with no chance to talk to anyone else or do we get a week to talk about it? Are the buttons shown to babies? Illiterates? Not enough details here.

If this was how the buttons looked, what portion of humanity would press blue? It'd probably be a large enough number due to mistakes, the young, altruists, etc., such that it remains wise to press blue.

@andycollins6768 @fimbres_paul @CJDGiesen @petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy This is a good explanation x.com/qiaochuyuan/st…

@fimbres_paul @RachCarrell @CJDGiesen @petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy That doesn't make sense. People are not coordinating in the hypothetical

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

@blindedllama @ChinggisFroggJr @CJDGiesen @petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy Men in general should be allowed to continue to vote but you in particular should not

@RachCarrell @ChinggisFroggJr @CJDGiesen @petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy #RepealThe19th

@ChinggisFroggJr @CJDGiesen @petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy lol. 100% live.

@RachCarrell @CJDGiesen @petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy This is exactly why women can’t be trusted with important societal-scale decisions

@CJDGiesen @petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy I voted blue because I want you to live, even though I have no idea who you are. It doesn’t matter if you think I’m stupid or what you say, I still want you to live. So I press blue.

@petrmares2 @Td7653 @waitbutwhy I am not feeling superior. I am feeling angry. Because the people pressing blue here do the same retarded shit in real life and vote for stuff that kills them for no reason.

@robkhenderson Hmmm this requires an unusual definition of the word ‘purpose’

Yeah. Say you watch a commercial for Lexus, and a beautiful woman gazes longingly at the car as it passes. You know the commercial is for Lexus. You know that they pair the car with her for that reason. So you resist, knowing that getting a Lexus isn't going to make you beautiful or make beautiful women be attracted to you. What you don't realize, though, is that the commercial is telling you what a beautiful woman looks like. It is telling you that she is the kind of woman that is desirable. This, in fact, is the real purpose of the commercial. Even if the ad executives themselves are unaware of it.

@annathebanana @balumcarnes Slaves were owned people who couldn’t leave. Doesn’t help to do this comparison

@balumcarnes I am not sure what is worse, that they are looking for slave labour or that the have used the word "staffer"!!

utterly astonished to see an Edinburgh bookshop make a plea for volunteers to perform the same duties as their paid booksellers

@thisstuartlaws Better to curve the queue than fork it

I’ve been casually slipping in fake British sayings and words into conversation with my American partner - here’s the one’s she believes:

@gazzatrone @Notwokenow I don’t understand why people use the AI voice instead of doing a voiceover

@Notwokenow my top pet peeves 1: the wagging finger for (don't do this) 2: that "no no no no" track 3: reels filmed in cars 4: cringe AI "progression" vids 5: AI narration on a video I'M FRICKING WATCHING 6: stupid canned asthmatic laughter I'm sure there's more.

Let’s find whoever started all that crap and LOCK THEIR ASSES UP. Not even exaggerating. Lock ‘em up.

@NoEducationTax @CharlesHThyme @Fox_Claire Bursaries are often like this. You get ones for people from specific geographies, or whose parents did x role, or who attended x school

@RachCarrell @CharlesHThyme @Fox_Claire They cannot apply for the bursary based on the single fact that they attend a parent funded school. Apparently kids who attend premium state schools at taxpayer expense are oppressed & bereft of opportunity?

- Private school pupils permanently banned from Royal Academy of Music courses regardless of their other circumstances. The UK is suffering from an illness of the mind that will eventually destroy the country. thetimes.com/uk/education/a…

@MikeDrewWhat @subtleoctopus @meghan_daum It absolutely was. It knew how awful everyone was, that was the point

@subtleoctopus @meghan_daum Yes, it’s a devastating critique of the people and the scene. However, I don’t think it was meant to be.

GIRLS is one of the best shows of all time. It was the capstone on an era of culture that believed in art and trusted the intelligence of its audiences. Everything since then has been an insult.

@ScreamnKanenite @KristyT It’s my and his name in the same way that my nationality is also someone else’s nationality. It doesn’t mean the other person owns the nationality, nor that I do. It means we share it.

@RachCarrell @KristyT Your surname is his name. There have only ever been male surnames. Check the history books. Look into the original purpose of such names. You've bought a progressive lie. Come back to reality.

The thing about this is you really don't even need a reason beyond that fact that it is already your name and you want to keep it.

@ScreamnKanenite @KristyT It’s my birth name. My dad has that same name, and it connects us. His name is his name and my name is my name. My name isn’t his name, that doesn’t make sense.

@KristyT It's not their name. It's their dad's name. All women have a man's surname. There are no women's surnames. When you give up your dad's for your husband's, you're declaring your transition from one tribe to another. Without that, you remain your fathers spiritually.

@CarmelaSo1960 @KristyT I’ve heard this rationale a hundred times but only ever from women justifying why they took their husband’s name, not once the other way around

@KristyT Me and my brothers have my mothers last name (she kept hers too) and my dad has his own last name i was raised on partners keeping their last names? dont other people sit together w their partner and decide who has the cooler lastname and then they both take that name

@choculatopguy @KristyT It’s both my name and my father’s name. It’s also my mum’s name. And various other relatives.

@KristyT It's not your name. It's your father's name.

@hopepilled02 @cljack Even this though. Mine would show me vibes and I would like all of them. They never liked that answer

@cljack lol, in that situation the designer should show a few pairs of photos of different vibes and have you pick between them then come up with a mockup for you to approve. Take the pressure off you but also makes sure everything works with your vibe and lifestyle

God interior design professionals are really just not prepared for women who don’t come to them with a vision already in mind. “So what were you thinking for a rug?” I was thinking you were going to point at one and tell me to buy it

@cljack @alyssaleann This was absolutely my attitude and it also did not work in my experience. They always want you to have an opinion. I like everything! It’s all fine! That’s why I hire you, to choose

@alyssaleann That’s what I’m trying to do! 🥺 I respect you as a professional, all your opinions are going to be better than anything I could come up with, I’ve come to you for help in my hour of need (my kids are embarrassed to have friends over)