he describes an ER patient arriving as he's eating an ice cream sandwich for lunch. he stashes the ice cream sandwich behind a computer in the trauma bay, where there is "sweltering heat". more than half an hour later, he suddenly remembers the sandwich
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he retrieves it, "resuscitates" it by putting it in the freezer for 30 minutes, after which it's fine and "tasty". he picks chocolate chips from it out of his teeth. it's like somebody who'd only ever seen ice cream sandwiches on television wanted to write an anecdote about one
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like, anybody who has ever eaten any ice cream based food knows that after thirty-plus minutes in a hot room, you don't have a slightly wilted ice cream sandwich; if you're lucky enough not to have destroyed an expensive medical computer, you have a bag of goo
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and if for some reason you refreeze that, you have a mess of spiky ice shards that will be profoundly unpleasant to eat. and this get me suspicious of other details. chocolate chips? the only ice cream sandwiches i've seen with those are the cookie type at movie theaters.
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and who picks chocolate chips out of their teeth? why wouldn't you just lick your teeth like everybody else? idk, maybe, i guess? but at some level this passage is top tier Did Not Happen for the most bizarre and trivial reasons. so what the fuck is it doing in this book?
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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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you also a fan of the part where he's contemplating the weight of his natural role as the decider of who we shouldn't bother to save
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Replying to @chaosprime
From that perspective, I thought it was a pretty honest picture of how fucked up most doctors are.
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