This is astonishing. How could a person go to the lengths of writing an entire book without ever looking up this sort of thing?

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somenameforme 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The term she mistook for meaning a death/execution had been recorded was "death recorded". So it's a mistake that could be made similarly to how one might confidently assume that a "public school" is a school which is a school that is either government funded or open to anybody in the local area.

More generally I think people are inappropriately confident in general. When you go through history just about every century prior people believed many things that the next century would come to see as plainly false. People in modern times seemed to have stopped believing this was true, yet it's likely that people during every given century also stopped believing such was true, because what you believe "now" is always assumed to be correct. Nobody wants to believe they hold false beliefs, even though there's a practically 100% certainty that all of us do, and in quite healthy quantities.

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NooneAtAll3 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

...what is public school then?

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somenameforme 7 hours ago | parent [-]

A fee charging privately operated institution that does not receive public funding. [1] Brits have a way with words.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)

	▲	t-3 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The US still somewhat has a similar distinction with public and private colleges. Private vs public funding rather than private vs public admission.

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inigyou 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You have to be confident by default or you'll never get anything done. I always find myself stuck in analysis paralysis and then I look back at something like the history of Minecraft and realise he wrote the whole game (minus content additions) from scratch in only about two years, and all the updates I remember not liking were just another Tuesday for him as there had been similar updates every few weeks during that entire time period.

Like, I bought the game just before the Nether was added, and I thought that was not a very good feature, but just a few weeks before that, he'd added monster spawners, and just a few weeks before that, he'd added redstone, and a few weeks before that, minecarts, and a few weeks before that, signs, and a few weeks before that, the world wasn't infinite yet. Just another few months back, and the game didn't have an inventory. That guy had the opposite mindset of me and he got shit done.

	▲	RossBencina 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You have to be confident by default or you'll never get anything done. Crippling doubt can happen. Blind confidence has its own hazards. You only need to be confident that you can proceed, in spite of having provisional, incomplete knowledge. "But if you grip to your beliefs too tightly, you will not recognise The Truth when it comes knocking on your door." (forget who said that)

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brohee 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The most astonishing thing is that she still holds the PhD whose thesis was the basis of the book. A stain on Oxford reputation.

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bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When I read your comment I completely give myself over to the understanding that you mean she wrote a whole and continuous book, without ever researching whether you meant a book about uncastrated male animals. Imagine my surprise when I go the radio to discuss your comment and a zoologist calls up to correct my understanding of a common English phrase.