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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Honestly (and I see you do recognise this in your comment) but this really seems like a kinda crappy study that I’m surprised made it into plos.

    For instance I couldn’t find any evidence of them considering that the dietary choices of the guardian may affect the attitudes of the guardian to vetenarians (and thus the self-reported health of those animals). To take this further, in the scenario that a cat guardian believes their choices make their cat healthier, especially when going against vetinary orthodoxy, the guardian is probably less likely to take the cat to the vet for minor issues. This confounds the analysis of “healthiness” as performed by the authors.

    Furthermore any cat that is not an indoor cat is likely also not fed a purely vegan diet (as they do hunt), so they should possibly account for that via a sort of bootstrapped approach. Generally the stats were okay though, and don’t make super strong claims from some pretty weak data. Though GAMs were a pretty odd choice and I’d have preferred some sort of explicit model fit with Bayesian fitting or NLLS.

    In the end all of this points to the sort of thing where they should really have been doing perturbational research. I.e. feeding cats different diets in a controlled lab space. This is not the sort of research that lends itself to surveys and that seriously impacts the actual practicality of its findings.

    Also as an aside, I really cannot abide anyone who includes a questionably inspirational quote that they said themselves in the fucking French Alps on their own website. That’s just pure wankery. The only people I usually see doing things like that are scientists like Trivers, which is not company one should wish to be in.




  • Right, some advice from an allo person with an ace family member:

    1. Dating and meeting people is hard, I’m sorry to say. Same as making friends, sometimes it just happens but most of the time it takes putting yourself out there in a meaningful and deliberate way.

    2. Liking someone and being interested in dating them does not usually hit like a bolt from the blue. It often grows over a while. You’ll often have to build a friendship with someone before you build a relationship.

    3. If you find someone tiring and boring, don’t date them. If you find everyone you meet boring and tiring after very little time then you have two options, either really challenge that preconception internally or consider whether you actually want to date.

    If you want to date but aren’t ready to actually put in the time and effort to get to know people then you are really going to struggle. Are you going to want to date someone long term when you don’t even want to be connected to them for more than a few days?

    There is also no guidebook, as much as it would be easier that way. People are individuals and dating requires you to see another as a person, not a puzzle to be solved. The only piece of advice that actually applies as a blanket is “be interested in them”. You need to actually take an interest in who they are, what they do, how they feel. Ask the questions and listen to the answers.

    Good luck, truly. Learning how to do friendship and relationship stuff is fucking hard. But getting interested in people is the most rewarding approach to take (at least in my experience, and that of my close friends).