Thetisch21 - Sum One

What's some advice you wish you received much earlier

“When people come to you to establish a boundary or a need or to express hurt feelings, that’s a compliment, not an attack. That is them wanting to develop the relationship and trusting you to listen and care to do better. And no matter how sad you are about accidentally hurting them, it’s a GOOD thing that they cared to have a hard conversation with you”

I forget this myself sometimes, I can’t work nonstop without breaks. I’ve had to drop commitments just because there’s not enough time in the week to do it all and stay mentally healthy.

THIS!

"It can't be an allegory for X because the protagonist is textually X" like, you've gotta understand that these two things are not mutually exclusive. For example, Madeline Celeste is canonically trans, but that does not render the plot of Celeste non-allegorical. Most people's gender transition does not involve being chased up and down a mountain by ghosts.

Story time:

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly unscientific conclusions, I just remember those fucking sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.

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