reading Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, a piece of high octane award bait about being a talented neurosurgeon and ~philosopher of mortality~ then finding out you're going to die young of cancer, and there's this passage in it that is just bugging the shit out of me
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is it some kind of object lesson in Gell-Mann amnesia? am i supposed to conclude that the rest of the book is also made up or poorly recalled without any effort to impose coherence on it, and i just don't realize it because it's medical drama presented with authority?
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is it trolling? is it the author saying, lulz, i am writing a Serious Award-Bait Book so i can leaven it with anecdotes that absolutely could not have happened and you'll just nod your heads solemnly because of the holiness i am wrapping myself in
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this latter seems like the best explanation for how the passage could have made it through every editor on the project without some kind of world-model consistency being imposed on it; if he were trolling he'd have marked it up as stet early and often
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so this is my current attempt to figure out in what fashion exactly a dead dude is making fun of me for reading his book, hope you've had fun on this journey
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I buy this detail. Chocolate, like other chewable sugars, gets lodged in my molars. The rest of your points stand. Especially the 30 minute melting... if I left cheap ice cream out for 30 minutes, I’m bringing a roll of paper towels and a wastebasket when I go to get it
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apparently there are ice cream sandwiches that are made of plastic and are structurally stable at room temperature though o brave new world, that has such "food" in it
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