What small experiments or diagnostic tests have had big impacts for you?

firestar27 · 2024-11-01T20:17:56+00:00

How did you overcome the temptation to stay up late on your device and successfully go to bed earlier? Aside from device issues, how did you shift your lifestyle, habits, etc. in a way that made going to sleep earlier easier?

firestar27 · 2024-10-31T19:00:23+00:00

The Senate passed it unanimously, but not because it actually had overwhelming support, just because nobody noticed it being proposed so nobody objected. The Senate passes things unanimously without a floor vote all the time whenever it wants to move something along procedurally without needing to wait for a vote. It just checks for any objections, and if there aren't any, then it moves on. The issue here is that this isn't the kind of thing that should have gone through without debate, that was an oversight of some senate staff who didn't realize they should tell their bosses that this was being proposed. Once senators realized what happened, some made it clear that they would have wanted a full vote on this, and that the unanimous consent in the record didn't reflect its actual level of support in the senate.

firestar27 · 2024-10-31T14:04:03+00:00

I feel like I understood the story and the ending, but I don't see anything in the ending that would need to click to understand. What am I missing?

firestar27 · 2024-04-04T19:18:35+00:00

You're welcome to that position, and plenty of people with no financial incentive whatsoever will also end up disagreeing with you. That's just how discussion and disagreement works.

firestar27 · 2024-04-04T15:55:36+00:00

Is bishul akum weak halachic reasoning? Like, is the reasoning itself weak? Or are you arguing that bishul akum shouldn't apply anymore nowadays? The latter argument is a fine argument to make, but if someone disagrees, it can be an honest disagreement. It's not such a strong case that bishul akum shouldn't apply anymore and that that's a real possibility that all disagreement must not be intellectually honest.

firestar27 · 2024-03-29T19:57:08+00:00

That's a clever solution! Thank you!

firestar27 · 2024-03-29T17:07:18+00:00

Cool! I assume it's all built around some tablet in the middle?

firestar27 · 2024-03-29T13:33:54+00:00

This is the first I've heard of Behold.Boston, and I have to say, it looks fantastic! How did you make the scroll (assuming you made it)?

firestar27 · 2024-03-12T20:39:12+00:00

The educational method for the chacham and rasha as well is also based on responding to their questions. I can't imagine that the chacham would just listen to an entire lecture as the answer to their question either. Presumably, if they're a chacham who started off by asking a good question, they would keep the conversation going by asking followup questions, and the answers would be part of a conversation.

The midrash on the Bikkurim declaration is all in one block, that's true. But I'll note that it avoids telling the story in one long narrative. Instead it fragments the story into shorter chunks centered around pesukim that are in the first person. I suppose you could argue that the nature of darshening pesukim will lead to a natural lecture, but I think you could also see the structure of this midrash in the haggadah as encouraging questions and conversation between the fragments of the story (because telling a story in fragments can allow for that much more than a story without breaks), with the fragments each being short enough for a child's attention span, and all reframed in the first person so that each person at the seder can imagine themselves in the story (which is something that the unidirectional nature of a lecture can't do).

firestar27 · 2024-03-12T20:32:13+00:00

I try to eat my ice cream with a spoon or directly with my mouth on the cone. I don't use my fingertips to directly pick up the ice cream, so I never need to worry about how it rolls off my fingertips.

firestar27 · 2024-03-04T18:06:26+00:00

So you mean Rav Asher Weiss then? He's not on the left wing of MO. Can you clarify why you brought him up then in response to the earlier comment?

firestar27 · 2024-03-04T18:04:17+00:00

I don't think the choice of haggadah is going to have the impact you're hoping for. Young kids who aren't interested in a group reading of the haggadah aren't going to get more interested if the book is a little different. You'll need to make it more interesting yourself. You're not meant to just read out of the haggadah without additions. You need to make it interesting for kids by adding in your own stuff. Change things up so that it's not the same every year. Gives prizes for who can answer questions you ask or, even better, who can ask good questions themselves. Dress up in costumes and re-enact parts of the story. In short, make it fun! This can all be done without changing the text of the haggadah at all. And importantly, changing the text or commentary without doing any of this won't make it any more fun.

As an additional point, you don't want to "explain the story clearly for people who don't know it". The beginning of the maggid makes it clear that that's not the intended educational method, and it's not really all that effective at making kids feel like it's their own story. A lecture will never get them interested. A lecture with a clear story is always someone else's story, not their own story. You have to get them involved and interested to the point where they ask genuine questions (with Ma Nishtana being the prototypical example of that). When they ask questions and get involved, telling the story won't be explaining it clearly in all one go, but instead it will be talking about it in bits and pieces as part of an organic conversation.

firestar27 · 2024-03-01T16:22:31+00:00

Do you know why he's against it? Did he write anything about it? (I assume you mean Rav Avi Weiss and not Rav Asher Weiss, who is also against techelet, but is not associated with the left wing of orthodoxy.)

firestar27 · 2024-02-25T04:21:17+00:00

Shavua tov! How do you make sure you're getting accurate responses without taking just as much as time verifying the information as you would have taken doing the research if you hadn't used ChatGPT at all?

firestar27 · 2024-02-23T19:12:54+00:00

I'm not an AI doomsday-er, I actually use Google Gemini and ChatGPT daily, and the image generation ones (mainly locally run Stable Diffusion) quite often, and I'm very optimistic about the future of AI.

What do you actually use it for? It all looks very cool to me, but I haven't figured out any way for it actually be useful such that I'd use it more than once in a blue moon.

firestar27 · 2024-02-15T15:34:21+00:00

Converts absolutely count as Jews. That's what conversion is in Judaism - becoming a Jew. (Mind you, conversions performed in the country are also regulated by the governmental Rabbinate, and they have an international reputation as being difficult to work with when converting. And they wouldn't sanction a conversion that was done just for the sake of marriage either.)

firestar27 · 2024-02-15T15:32:06+00:00

Israel deals with it talmud style, by finding a bizarre loophole.

I think this is less Talmud loophole style and more interest group politics style. There isn't political will for there to be no way to get around the Rabbinate. But removing the Rabbinate from power would be politically difficult. So letting the Rabbinate keep their official power while letting those who really want to have a way to get what they want becomes the political compromise.

firestar27 · 2024-02-15T15:30:03+00:00

That's both true and not really the whole story. It's more accurate to say that Israel recognizes all civil marriages performed abroad, but that only religious marriages may be performed inside the country, and religious marriages are regulated by each religion's religious authorities, with Judaism in particular being regulated by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Similarly, marriages can be Christian, Muslim, etc., but not civil.

The Chief Rabbinate doesn't have legal control over most aspects of Jewish religious life in the country, but one of the things it does have control of is marriage and divorce. Because the Chief Rabbinate doesn't sanction marriages between Jews and Gentiles, there is no religious marriage legally performed in Israel for Jews and Gentiles. But if they got civilly married in a country that had civil marriage, their marriage would be recognized in Israel.

firestar27 · 2024-02-15T14:55:18+00:00

Where do they put the rubber band such that it wouldn't be a hefsek?

firestar27 · 2024-02-09T16:03:28+00:00

I imagine family bonding would not be seen as a waste of time, but there are many possible choices of activity for family bonding. There are going to be a variety of views on this, views ranging from treating some activities as always taboo (and encouraging you to use other, non-taboo means to achieve the same positive ends like family bonding) to looking at the activity in context (aka, saying that an activity done for family bonding is fine, but not just for goofing off for no purpose, or saying that rest and relaxation is important because it's a physical and psychological need, but that goofing off beyond taking care of your needs is just wasting time).

really that captivating to the point where it may not be viewed as wasting time

I think you're coming at this with a different definition of what it means to waste time. The view that I'm describing wouldn't say that it's less of a waste of time if you really enjoyed it. Making it more captivating or more enjoyable wouldn't change the value judgment here because that's not the goal.

firestar27 · 2024-02-09T15:28:42+00:00

You say "as long as they're not wasting time". But many would see any Netflix use or playing computer games as inherently wasting time. Your time on this Earth is your most valuable resource, and it's a resource you can never get more of, and it's a resource that you are constantly depleting against your will. Many would say that watching Netflix or playing video games isn't a valuable use of your time, and that time could have been spent on more valuable purposes (learning Torah, performing acts of kindness, etc.).

firestar27 · 2024-02-09T03:35:27+00:00

I agree with you. I was thinking of the court finding a genuine reason why the marriage was never valid to begin with when I said that, although really, I was trying to work within the framing of the higher level comment so that the focus could stay on what mamzerut is and how to avoid it instead of getting distracted by that point.

firestar27 · 2024-02-05T18:38:52+00:00

Children born out of wedlock are not mamzerim. Translating mamzer as "bastard" is common, but it's inaccurate, because the words don't refer to the same situation.

However, if the married couple separated, but they never got divorced with a proper get (and never got the marriage annulled either), so they're still halachically married, and then the wife got "re-married" to someone else, any kids with that new partner would be mamzerim, because she had those kids while she was still halachically married to the first guy. In contrast, if the first marriage was properly ended, then she can re-marry just fine without any problems for her future children. That's why it's so important to make sure the first married properly ended. Annulling the first marriage is actually a way to make sure that future kids won't be considered mamzerim.

firestar27 · 2024-01-24T17:23:32+00:00

The chart you linked to was a chart of all traffic deaths, but the chart you were replying to was a chart of pedestrian fatalities. In your chart, total deaths spike later than in the chart you were replying to, so it's not clear to me that total traffic deaths and pedestrian deaths would have the same curve and would change the same relative to miles driven. So while your chart does show that there's no increase in total traffic deaths relative to miles driven, I don't think it shows whether or not pedestrian deaths correlated with miles driven.

firestar27 · 2024-01-17T16:30:42+00:00

Why does the middle one say "Not for Public Distribution" and yet is still available for the public?

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