People Who Set Things Up Often Have Problems.

[ajnabieh]

Inspired by nanila and the Ten Hundred Words of Science tumblr, I wrote a description of my research interests using the Up-Goer 5 text editor:

I went to school to study how people live together and make their lives together good or bad. I wrote a book about how people from a far away place do this in the large city where I lived. I studied how they said things and had ideas about how to live together with people who are different. Sometimes people do not listen to what different people have to say about how they should live together and what is right. I wrote a book to talk about how to listen to each other better when we are different and like different things.

Now I work with people studying how the people who set things up make sure that all the people have the things they need, like houses and water and food. People have a right to these things that they need, but not all people who set things up write down that they have this right. I study how this works in the far away place where the people from my first book are from. The way that the people who set things up get money to set things up and the way that they have set things up to work makes different things happen with writing down the rights people have.

I am also studying people who move between the place where I live and the far away place talk about different things for how to set things up. I want to know how moving between these places changes their thoughts about what is good and what is bad in how their places should be set up.

Sometimes I am a teacher (but not right now). I talk with young people about how people set things up and how they have ideas about how to set things up. I want those young people to think hard about the right way to set things up, and how different ways to set things up hurt or help other people. I want them to know better when to say yes or no to ideas about how to set things up. I also want them to like to read and write and think about these things, because I like to read and write and think about these things, too!

I wasn't able to work out any way to explain the Middle East in the Up-Goer 5 lexicon, but I'm pretty satisfied with "people who set things up" as a substitute for "government," and "how people live together and make their lives together good or bad" for "political science." I couldn't use the word "rules." It was challenging.

Your turn!

Comments

[jae]

Wow, you got a lot more detailed than I did in describing the nitty gritty of academia. *g* Mine was:

Sometimes I stand in front of a class of students and tell them about what people already know about different ways that humans talk.

Other times, I try to figure out new things that we don't already know about different ways that humans talk.

-J

[ajnabieh]

Heh, I wanted to play around with it--it's actually a lot of fun. I've also had occasion to summarize books I'm reading to my kid a lot lately, which is the same thing, only the vocabulary is a *little* less restricted, because I can use a term and then define it!

I like yours, though!

[dubhartach]

OK, that's harder than I expected, especially as I was impressed with yours.

I get to cheat a bit since doctor is there. I picked something not terribly complex but for which I have what I consider a very good and simple explanation. But with these constraints I'm not terribly sure anyone non-medical would have a clue what I am talking about!

A man came to my work today after calling for help and being driven in with the help of men who help people who are not well at home and take them to the place where I work as a doctor and can make them better.

He had made a sudden breath out (which was loud) and got a pain in his upper right side. When I listened to his chest he had less breath sounds on the right hand side. I thought one of his inside parts (which he breathes with) had burst. A picture of his insides showed that this was what happened.

He needed us to make an opening in his upper side to let the air which had come out with the burst escape. One of the doctors in training had never done this before so I watched and told him how to do it. He did it very well but we were not sure it had worked. We took another picture to check and to our surprise it had. The man was very pleased as this mean he did not have to have a bigger opening made. He stayed with us for an hour and was well so got to go home. There are some things he can't do and some things that if they happen mean he should come back to see us. He will come back to see us in 2 weeks time to get another picture taken to make sure things are continuing to get better.

[ajnabieh]

Off topic: CUTE CAMEL ICON! I actually just checked, and I could have defined the Middle East as "Most people think this place has horses with big things on their backs, but the places that I study do not have horses with big things on their backs, because they are cities or because they are too wet (there are wet parts of this place too!)." Man, the things that come to you in the shower...

*reads your description closely*...punctured lung? Or collapsed lung? The big loud breath is a cough, right? And then your intern had to...um, do the thing they do on medical shows where they put in a tube between ribs whose name I forget? Am I even close? :)

ETA: Oh, and I forgot: I'm TOTALLY using "rights" in a way that the text editor didn't anticipate, because obviously its most common meanings are "correct" or "opposite of left," not "something that people intrinsically deserve on the basis of a specific status or merely as living beings." By that measure, using "doctor"? Is nothing.

[dubhartach]

Thank you! I spent most of my 2 weeks in Egypt trying to haggle a singing camel down to 1 pound (I think I settled for paying 2 in the end).

The man in my description indeed had a collapsed lung (pneumothorax) and I'm glad "cough" was recognisable. Yes, my junior put a needle between his ribs and aspirated the air but the next stage was a chest drain (that was the bit he didn't need, much to his relief).

(I can't have an intern, that is too much like ER. And it's really not like ER.)

I also dithered over "men" who help people who are not well but "people who help people" felt wrong and in this case they were male so I left it.

[ironed_orchid]

I didn't get that it was the Middle East, but I did get that the people making the rules sometimes didn't understand what it was like to live in the places that the rules were for, and didn't necessarily have the best interests of the inhabitants at heart.

What I thought of when reading was governments treatment of indigenous peoples.

[ajnabieh]

That is one of the brilliant things about having to strip out proper nouns from something like this--it gives you a very clear view of the way that your problem might apply between cases. I definitely think discursive misrecogntion (the high-theory name for what I'm talking about) is a generalized problem in politics, and one that dictates a lot of moments of Bad Shit Happening To People.