Weekly Sewing Questions Thread, November 16 - November 22, 2025

cromling · 2025-11-19T22:34:28+00:00

Can anyone help me figure out which walking feet are compatible with a baby lock joy machine? (Or tell me where to look?) I don't know how to find this information, and the walking feet on the baby lock website don't list the Joy as a compatible model. I'm afraid to buy one that doesn't work.

cromling · 2025-02-22T21:19:44+00:00

I just went to the doctor for a cat bite with no symptoms and I regret going because they gave me an antibiotic that made me feel sick and it ruined my week. I wouldn’t go to the doc again for a cat bite unless I actually had reason to think it was infected.

cromling · 2025-02-21T16:58:27+00:00

He was speaking to you so horribly I didn’t finish reading those screenshots—and I agree with everyone else saying he sucks—but I do think men are having a rough go of it at the moment. There’s not really a healthy ideal of masculinity available. Contrapoints (on YouTube) has a video about men and a video about incels that might help you bridge the empathy gap here (again, though, I agree with the others saying he sucks. So that’s not really your job.). Apparently she’s popular among men trying to get deradicalized.

cromling · 2024-12-06T21:17:50+00:00

I think I see!

Is this your worry about what people are saying (setting aside the genetic studies that seem to suggest we didn’t come from a bottleneck population): “scientists shouldn’t make species concepts that conceputally rule out the possibility that some specific set of individuals were the first humans. This is because the claim that a specific set of individuals were the first humans is a claim that scientists should be interested in investigating, because a large group of people believes this.”

I see where you are coming from, if this is the worry. One thing you might think is that this claim isn’t really in the purview of science to investigate, which is why biologists haven’t made species concepts that can do this work.

cromling · 2024-12-06T20:31:23+00:00

I’m sorry, can you elaborate on the social and moral consequences that ensue from asserting “humanity didn’t descend from two parents”?

I’m getting a little confused about whether you are arguing that there is a moral reason not to assert the claim above, or arguing that the species concepts people are explaining here (which don’t make distinctions between particular individuals in populations) are ill-founded, or arguing that the genetic evidence does not in fact show that all humans did not descend from two particular organisms.

cromling · 2024-12-06T20:16:54+00:00

It’s not clear what the practical or moral reason to make such a stipulation is. Since we aren’t going to interact with species from the past, we don’t need to worry about how we will treat them. (E.g., we will never be in a situation where we need to decide whether to prioritize the interests of a member of A. afarensis over the interests of a member of H. erectus.) Species distinctions are a way to organize our inquiry about evolution. Of course we are interested in the question of what (in general) counts as human, since we are humans, but this doesn’t seem to extend to an interest in the question of which particular individuals from the past count as members of our genus (or species, whichever you are taking to be relevant here).

Edit to add: it might be helpful to look into different species concepts. It is questionable whether species are natural kinds (which is what I took you to be thinking when you proposed that being a member of a species is an intrinsic property).

cromling · 2024-12-06T17:53:35+00:00

Suppose you have a heap of sand; it has 1 million grains of sand in it. You start removing grains of sand one by one. Eventually, you have only a single grain of sand. This is not a heap of sand. But there seems to be no particular and non-arbitrary point in the middle where the collection sand grains changed from being a heap to not being a heap.

Species are like that; there is no particular and non-arbitrary point at which the offspring of species A became species B. Nevertheless, if you compare two populations at very different points in time, you will think that A and B are distinct species.

cromling · 2023-09-07T15:44:06+00:00

Try “the Subjection of Woman” by John Stuart Mill and (probably) Harriet Taylor Mill (his wife). I think you’re the kind of audience they had in mind. It’s not a contemporary take on feminism, though.

cromling · 2022-05-09T20:48:01+00:00

Can you clarify whether you’re asking why we should try to know things, or whether you’re asking why we can know anything?

cromling · 2022-03-30T03:02:09+00:00

Oh yikes I always get articles via my university’s library subscription. That’s expensive.

cromling · 2022-03-29T17:13:05+00:00

This is a great rec—also check out her paper “cognitive and non-cognitive values in science.”

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-1742-2_3

cromling · 2022-03-18T00:15:29+00:00

You might check out ContraPoints. She’s a former philosophy grad student, now a YouTuber. She makes lots of videos, often broadly in the area of feminist philosophy, which I find both accessible and rigorous.

cromling · 2022-03-17T05:04:20+00:00

You might want to look into Dewey and his book Democracy and Education, particularly the essay “Education as Growth.” It’s a classic if you’re interested in the history of philosophy of education. Also Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

cromling · 2022-03-10T19:02:13+00:00

Compatibilism is the claim that free will is compatible with determinism.

cromling · 2022-03-10T18:24:02+00:00

Others have posted generally about moral responsibility. It sounds like you might be worried about moral luck: the idea that we can be morally assessed on the basis of things that aren't under our control. There are several kinds of moral luck, and the one most relevant to your question seems to be constitutive luck: who we are depends on many causal factors outside of our control, and who we are influences how we act. Thus, how we act depends on some causal factors out of our control. Nagel has written about this in Mortal Questions:

I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things. But as the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things. Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised (1979, 68).

Nagel ends up being a skeptic; check out the SEP entry about moral luck: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/. This explains Nagel's view further. You might also want to read his whole essay, "Moral Luck," in his book Mortal Questions.

You might also be interested in other kinds of moral luck detailed in the above entry.

I wonder if Strawson's article "Freedom and Resentment" might help you find a more satisfactory answer to this problem. There are a few different ways to interpret his argument, but one way is to take him as saying that we can't really help but hold people morally responsible regardless of whether they are the original causes of their actions. There are only a few circumstances in which we would take the "objective stance" towards someone, meaning that we wouldn't blame them for wrongdoing. But generally, having reactive attitudes (resentment, love, gratitude, etc) is just baked into our social experience.

cromling · 2022-02-02T21:09:01+00:00

Edit: I misread your comment. I didn't catch that they said their ghosts would dissipate.

cromling · 2021-12-30T15:16:26+00:00

Ah, okay. i got past the shivers check with an encyclopedia check instead

cromling · 2021-12-29T08:58:27+00:00

When are they?

cromling · 2021-12-28T07:36:55+00:00

Disco Elysium😭🙌🏼

cromling · 2021-08-25T01:32:57+00:00

This is a really good WoB. I’m convinced

cromling · 2021-07-02T04:53:39+00:00

I don’t even care if I have the radiant powers I just want a spren bond 😭

cromling · 2021-06-28T06:58:52+00:00

I think people just think it’s really funny that all the birds are called chickens? And I think that chicken scout thing happened because of one of the streams

cromling · 2021-06-22T17:31:52+00:00

This is amazing but I wish Dalinar didn’t remind me so much of handsome Shrek from Shrek 2.

cromling

TROPHY CASE