Funny that the 1st Extreme Ironing World Championships were held in a country (Germany) where the native language has no word for the concept of “silly”. :D
No, parent is right.
There is no word for silly in german.
Instead, all german words pertaining to silly, also have an untranslatable connotation, a flavour to them, such as "silly, but with a deep undertone of contemplative thought as to how I ended up in this predicament", and so forth.
Doch! Of course we have a - or actually some - words for that. The above-mentioned, but what could also fit is "absurd". Most of the time we have even multiple words with slightly different meanings - it's why I like our language :D
Extreme ironing used to be fun sport but when Rowenta started sponsoring the UK team in the championships it's now only "commercial sponsorship and exploitation"
No single German word is equivalent to all of the English language uses of the word "silly". There are however individual German words for the English contextual equivalents.
"We took our own iron. It's not battery powered so it doesn't iron that well, but the quality of the ironing is not the point - it's where you do it."[1]
So it sounds like they just run a not-plugged-in regular iron over some fabric and call it ironing?
Putting your trousers under the mattress and sleeping on them so that in the morning, they'll be flattened and de-wrinkled... because the lack of an iron anywhere on the base does not cancel the army regulations, and those say that the sentry must be impeccably dressed.
Conversely, I would question whether you can iron without a mountain backdrop. Really calls into question whether those crisp lines on your clothing are the result of true ironing or just pressing something hot against them.
Ironing clothes -- actually getting them flat -- on a mountain peak or underwater is interesting because of the difficulty. Finding out the person isn't really ironing, but just pretending, detracts from it and takes it from "that's quite an accomplishment" to "so what?". It goes from an interesting logistical challenge to "can you take an ironing board and an iron up the mountain / into the sea with you?"
Indeed. In a competitive sport there should be a way to evaluate result to determine standings.
If ironing is just about extra bulk of equipment not the actual product of ironing, then it's more like weight-added competition. Otherwise there needs to be some way of judging the ironing aspect, like quality, novelty, or artistic merit, in addition to the otherwise difficulty, like in figure skating, for example.
But just for fun - everything is sport. In the line of "everything and the kitchen sink", how about extreme dish-washing!
> Commercially available irons are used for ironing. In places where no electrical power supply is available or cannot be used due to humidity, the heating plate is heated by auxiliary constructions (mostly gas cookers). For the World Cup, for example, a process was developed in which the iron is heated inside by an exothermic reaction, generated by mixing a hygroscopic chemical pressed into granules with water.
Oh, this takes me back. One of the first wonderfully weird things I discovered on Youtube almost 15 years ago. The VHS quality, the ubiquitous Rocky or Top Gun soundtrack, oh my...
What percentage of these people do you think do this and then DON'T post an image / video of it somewhere to get views? I would guess it rounds down to 0%.
It's pure attention seeking. And it also might be fun.
> What percentage of these people do you think do this and then DON'T post an image / video of it somewhere to get views? I would guess it rounds down to 0%.
What, just because you haven't seen it? (But seriously, how would we know? You're talking about a group that, by definition, would leave us no evidence to discuss their existence)
This can be explained by the fact that it's clearly a communal sport, though practiced individually. The social and sharing aspect is clearly a part of the sport.
Is commenting on this thread also "attention seeking," because no one does so without making their comments public? Or is it a form of social behavior?
And a smart clothes iron with built in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to control the temperature and steam setting with an Amazon Echo that hopefully you remembered to bring with you.
I invented a new sport a few months ago; extreme rock balancing. It's like regular rock balancing except I did it at the bottom of the sea at least 10 meters deep without scuba. I stacked 4 rocks.
It's a combination of freediving and rock balancing.
For those unfamiliar, irons were devices used to smooth clothes in historical times, when men's business casual at minimum required a dress shirt and collar.
This takes me way back. When I was in high school, one of my classmates had a job in a call center, and one of the surveys he was contracted to do was for a website dedicated to extreme ironing. Unlike most surveys he had to punch in phone numbers himself, so he called a friend who was in on the joke just to get some interesting responses.
"How much time do you spend ironing?"
"one or two hours a day, I try not to overindulge"
"What's the strangest place you've ever ironed?"
"A bass boat"
I don't remember any of the other responses, but everyone who heard that story got a good chuckle out of it. Interesting to hear that it's stayed around so long!
Mildly related: I'm curious what are the latest advances in consumer irons and ironing boards. Something that improved them in the last 10-15 years, even incrementally.
For example SSDs became much more common and affordable over the past 15 years and their parameters also improved. Are there similar improvements in household appliances like irons? Where would one look for an industry overview?
I don’t think consumer cleaning technology products like this keep up with the rate of change of underlying technologies. People get used to doing certain things (e.g. ironing) and want to keep doing it the same way their parents taught them.
I’d instead look more at commercial cleaners (e.g. how shirts are cleaned/pressed for shipment to stores) if you want to see the bleeding edge of cleaning technology.
(It’s sort of like home consoles vs. arcade machines in the 80s/90s. Home consoles had to optimize for affordability, while arcade machines could essentially be expensive operationalized prototypes as long as they paid for themselves.)
> People get used to doing certain things (e.g. ironing) and want to keep doing it the same way their parents taught them.
tongue in cheek, but WHYY
On the other hand, my mom has sent me things like machines that fold and do other stuff whenever she finds something… or refinds something. So I doubt she likes doing it and maybe passed that down to me.
• For a lot of people, having to learn something new as an adult, no matter how small, causes them some kind of psychic pain.
• People (all animals?) seem to have a quirk about learning hygiene practices in particular, where the criteria they have for what is hygenic/unhygenic gets formed when they're children, and then becomes unalterable. People generally seem to intuitively believe that whatever hygiene practices they were taught as children, are exactly the set of things they need to do feel clean. No more, no less. And so they don't go out actively looking for new hygiene practices (or for hygiene technologies that would suggest new hygiene practices.)
Note: kids also often chafe at learning new things, if it feels like someone is telling them what to do. Source: My kids are 2.5 and 5, and I hang out with a lot of other small kids and their parents these days.
Depends on the thing. Children tend to be fine at self-directed learning, e.g. figuring out how to play a new video game. Some—most?—adults chafe at even the idea of engaging in an activity that requires self-directed learning. (To the point that we even have an English word for those adults that don't: "neophiles.")
Some children enjoy playing some new video games. (As do some adults.) Some children (and some adults) would refuse to play a video game that someone else told them to play. Their decisions and feelings are contingent on the context (including social context).
If you slow down and have a conversation you can sometimes figure out what the specific emotional problem is, often involving shame or fear, and what triggers it has. The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.
> Some children (and some adults) would refuse to play a video game that someone else told them to play.
Well, yes, but coercion, extrinsic motivation, and general spite are all edge-cases, and outside the scope of what the core fact about "learning" that I'm trying to talk about here.
Let's look at a specific non-edge-case case: learning under self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward + time pressure — for example, learning to hunt/gather when stranded in the wilderness and hungry.
In situations like this, children do better than adults at deciding to begin experimenting in an attempt to learn how to survive. Adults will try to apply any skills they already have (however rusty), but will have a much harder time than children do in deciding to try to do things they haven't already ever been taught to do. And even when they do make that decision, they will repeatedly revoke it—i.e. give up much more quickly when a solution does not come easily to them. Even though, in education-theoretic terms, all the stars should be aligned in terms of motivating their learning process.
> The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.
Of course not. That's the observed abstract pattern, not the reason. The reason for adults, AFAICT, is almost always pride/hubris — that is, the idea that they don't need to learn anything new, that there's no advantage in it to outweigh the learning cost, because they've got by just fine up to now without having learned it. (And also because learning is just plain harder for adults, since they have so many existing schemas that need to be broken+reshaped in the process of fully absorbing new ideas that don't fit the existing schema.)
This resistance comes almost always from adults who see themselves as having higher social status than whoever's trying to teach them the thing. They have no mental schema for learning from someone younger or more junior (or of a lower social class/caste) than themselves, since it's not something they've ever experienced earlier in their lives.
Instead, when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing, and offers to teach it to this social-superior adult, the adult will instead try to manipulate their social inferior into doing the task for them any time they need it to be done — often under the pretext of demonstration for purpose of learning. But with no intention of actually learning, and a complete rejection on being tested for knowledge acquisition (because that would be a violation of the social dynamic!)
Note also that learning is separate from doing. I know many adults that are willing to do novel things (without really understanding what they're doing), and to memorize that specific series of actions by rote — but who have no desire to understand the more general skill behind the rote actions they're taking, such that they could perform related actions in any context other than the exactly memorized thing. In general, memorizing is easy, while learning a new skill is much, much harder. (And yet memorization without learning almost never "sticks", since there's no backing mental schema to encode the memorized steps in terms of.)
> give up much more quickly when a solution does not come easily to them
Anecdotally, kids often also give up easily when faced with trivial setbacks. I think your speculative generalization is far too broad. I’d be interested to see some concrete research, but my impression is that there is very wide variability, and I’m not sure how meaningful the statistical averages are.
The people I know who are best at diving into a new never-seen thing and experimenting systematically to figure out quickly and accurately how it works are all adults. They easily run circles around kids at this: the kids get tired, get distracted, get confused and give up, get stuck into an obviously sub-optimal pattern but don’t try to fix it, etc. (The kind of adults who have decades of practice at trying / learning new things. Many relevant metacognitive skills have broad applicability across disciplines.)
One big advantage kids have is that their basic needs are met by someone else, and they generally don’t have lots of other worries and responsibilities. This allows them to focus on something they are interested in far longer and deeper than most people who aren’t doing that thing professionally.
The best for learning (for either an adult or a child) is a combination of personal interest + pleasant no-pressure environment + face-to-face guidance from a trusted expert tutor/coach, who can probe weak points, notice and correct mistakes and misconceptions, suggest methods of practice, ....
> pride/hubris
What you call pride/hubris, I call shame and fear of embarrassment. People really don’t want other people (or themselves) to see them as failures.
> when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing
This kind of social situation is completely different than the “self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward” situation you were talking about before.
It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert doesn’t want to be shown up by their subordinate or their junior colleague. It makes them look incompetent and is a direct threat to their social position and livelihood.
> What you call pride/hubris, I call shame and fear of embarrassment.
It sounds like you're assuming these conversations/learning events occur in public. Why would people feel shame/embarrassment about something nobody can see them doing?
This was the point of my example: if someone is alone in the wilderness, what does it matter to anyone but them—to anything but their survival—if they were to try and fail at building a shelter or a trap?
> It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert
Who said anything about being an expert?
The example that comes first to my mind is a grandchild trying to teach their grantparent to post photos to Facebook on their iPad. The grandmother explicitly—even "infamously"—has no experience with computers or anything to do with them. If their friends/family/etc. were to observe the situation, they'd have a preconception that the child would know more about "posting photos to Facebook" than the adult would.
And yet, despite nominally having no real way to be "shown up"–no presumed domain expertise to lose; and despite nominally wanting the grandchild to teach them how to post photos to Facebook; and despite the grandparent being intrinsically motivated to learn how to post photos to Facebook (because they enjoy the social interaction that comes when friends see their photos); the grandparent still won't bother to focus at all on paying attention to / understanding / remembering what the grandchild is saying.
I would describe this as a kind of learned helplessness, except it's more like contextual helplessness. It's not that they can't learn how to do this–they seem to be able to learn it from a peer their own age just fine. But when it comes to those they think of as people they are supposed to be teaching, their mind just turns into a brick wall.
I would compare it to the prevalence of people who get their romantic partner to open jars for them, instead of buying one of those gripper gadgets that allow them to open the jar. If their partner offers to buy them one of those, they'll often actively refuse the gadget! They think of this job as something someone is supposed to do for them — something they shouldn't have to do – rather than something they want to get done by whatever means, as efficiently as possible. Despite it not being a hard/complex job, or a matter of comparative advantage.
There's a market niche for "steam generator" irons specifically for use when sewing (where you need the iron sporadically while assembling a garment from pieces). This is sort of a "pro-sumer" space.
These typically have an offboard water tank and boiler that doubles as a stand for the hot iron. This also lets the iron itself be lighter in weight.
A key feature for this market is the absence of the automatic shutoff that's commonly found in consumer irons.
same answer from my perspective, i did not iron a lot during the last year because of lockdows but i see nice machines using steam. The sound is the same as a nespresso machine so i believe that it is based on the same steam generation technology, opposed to the brass tank steam generation process used in quality espresso machines & professional irons.
Also realizing that a lot of times you don't need to iron something at all. Fold it nicely, or hang it up to dry without creases and you'd be amazed at how good it looks without ironing. Short of formal work clothes, I don't have anything that needs ironing.
My idea years ago, if human shaped and sized balloons were easily available, was to put clothes on one, then inflate it until it gently keeps clothes tight, then wait for them to dry. I could never test it however.
Also, how do people get power for their irons? Do they backpack an inverter and huge lithium battery? Or are there chemically powered irons that they use?
More like "is it released after all those years". I've been very interested in the concept, but that's the last I've heard from them in the last 3-4 years.
You can now get 'cordless' (electric) irons. Like an electric kettle, they heat up while sitting in the (decidedly non-cordless) base, but you don't have to contend with the cord while actually doing the pressing. I am a bit doubtful about whether they are much of an improvement over the usual corded kind, but the one person I know who has one insists that she greatly prefers it.
I used on in Japan years ago and had to wait about 5 years before they showed up in Australia at a reasonable price. Not worth replacing a perfectly good iron with, but if you accidently melt the cord to your current iron it's worth considering.
It is definitely easier not having to worry about the cord tangling or pulling at your clothes.
My grandma used them for years. Hers weren't electric though, she had to put them on the wood stove to heat. The wood stove was next to her sewing machine, while the electric iron was in a different room, so it was a lot faster for her to pick up the iron than use the electric one. They didn't have automatic steam, but otherwise worked just as well.
> Are there similar improvements in household appliances like irons?
I bought a new washer/dryer recently. A bunch of bells and whistles, but... the "autosense the water level" feature is awesome, and likely saves water in the long run.
It seems like washers use so much less water these days, its not like the old agitator models from 2000s which filled up a tank. Instead, modern washers thoroughly wet the clothes, add a bit of extra water at the bottom, and then mix vigorously (be it a front-load or top load, the HE washers all do this technique).
This leads to lower water usage. I also ended up using much less soap per load (the first few times, I noticed the soap wasn't fully getting rinsed out, but the significantly less water usage means I also should use significantly less soap).
> Where would one look for an industry overview?
At least for generic household appliances, Consumer Reports is a non-profit survey / reviewer group. I dunno if they have much on irons themselves, but I haven't seen anything wrong with their reviews yet.
I think there's a problem when the price goes too low. For something like $20, $50, or even $200 or $1000 appliances even... its not really worthwhile to review. Instead, you often have to just buy the thing and hope for the best.
Maybe there's a specific professional group who is thinking about these tools and how to use them (chefs and cooking tools, or woodworkers + woodworking tools). But for things like irons or washers, or other household appliances... I don't think any such group exists outside of things like Consumer Reports.
Still, I get my reviews on "Tide vs Persil", and other household items. I think "Wirecutter" is a competitor and some people say they've got good reviews too.
As an extension to the soap, there are single squeeze detergent bottles now that precisely meter on a one handed squeeze. So simple, yet phenomenally useful.
I've seen those, but... how does the bottle know how big your washer is? Or how water efficient it is?
A agitator "tub washer" uses 40-gallons of water to wash clothes. A modern front-loading HE washer uses 10-gallons.
If you use the same amount of soap on both washers, you'll naturally be either... adding too much soap to the HE washer, or too little soap to the agitator washer.
-------
Same thing with "Tide Pods". The idea of those things is "one pod per load", which removes the mental need to think of how much soap to add per load. But... once again, there's many different washers that all use different amounts of water. There's no way we really have a one-side fits all situation.
> Are there similar improvements in household appliances like irons?
Some examples that I know of:
- modern robot vacuums, that can mop, use LIDAR etc. We have a pretty decent one, it works OK, but we still have to vacuum by ourselves every 2 weeks or so.
- battery operated vacuums, irons, hair dryers etc.
- smart homes -- automaticcally setting heat, window blinds
- tons of gimmicky stuff like smart fridges, or water taps with touch screens.
But I'd consider these just some quality of life improvements, not major time savers like washing things by hand vs a washing machine. IMO the next big thing will be household 3D printers when someone finds out how to make them safe and reliable for everyday use by non-technical people.
My favourite advance from the last ten years has been around precision cooking. Sous vide is perhaps the most well known, but you can now get sensors to automatically control a bbq, steam and temperature controlled ovens are becoming more common/affordable (still waiting for a home-use Rational), etc. I love being able to cook with consistent quality and easily repeatable results.
Yeah, Anova has something that claims to be a temperature controlled (+-0.5F) steam oven at the $600 price point. It's tempting, but I'm not sure I want to give up the counter space.
If anyone here has one, I'm curious how well it works.
back in the days when I used to have to wear a suit and tie, my wife bought me a laurastar. The hook was that they had a fan built into the board, that could suck (it could also blow and hence billow the material instead) the shirt to the board, so that ironing was easier.
A quick Amazon search doesn't seem to show them being popular in the States, but in Asia at least irons with separate water tanks where the iron itself doesn't get hot enough to burn clothes have become the new standard over the past few years.
I don't know about the last 10 to 15 years, but 30 years ago, a lot of clothing brands had wrinkle free/resistant products which significantly reduced the need for ironing.
This article reminds me of the fake cities that Rand McNally puts on maps to see if someone else is copying their work. I feel like this is probably a fake article put into Wikipedia to see if somebody else is copying their work....
Someone needs to host a legit tournament called the "Extreme Ironman". Although confusing, I bet some tri-athletes will appreciate the humor and actually sign up.
176 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadInstead, all german words pertaining to silly, also have an untranslatable connotation, a flavour to them, such as "silly, but with a deep undertone of contemplative thought as to how I ended up in this predicament", and so forth.
http://www.ntk.net/2002/09/13/?l=92#l
https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1227/how-to-expre...
"We took our own iron. It's not battery powered so it doesn't iron that well, but the quality of the ironing is not the point - it's where you do it."[1]
So it sounds like they just run a not-plugged-in regular iron over some fabric and call it ironing?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/25/everest.nepal
This photo, for example, shows a plain old plug-in iron: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017222702/http://teamsteam....
Same guy, up in a tree, with the same iron: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017223140/http://teamsteam....
From this page: https://web.archive.org/web/20160920083532/http://teamsteam....
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If ironing is just about extra bulk of equipment not the actual product of ironing, then it's more like weight-added competition. Otherwise there needs to be some way of judging the ironing aspect, like quality, novelty, or artistic merit, in addition to the otherwise difficulty, like in figure skating, for example.
But just for fun - everything is sport. In the line of "everything and the kitchen sink", how about extreme dish-washing!
Apparently the clothes don't need to be dry either!
[1] https://www.bluetti.com/products/bluetti-ac50s-500wh-300w-po...
> Commercially available irons are used for ironing. In places where no electrical power supply is available or cannot be used due to humidity, the heating plate is heated by auxiliary constructions (mostly gas cookers). For the World Cup, for example, a process was developed in which the iron is heated inside by an exothermic reaction, generated by mixing a hygroscopic chemical pressed into granules with water.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremb%C3%BCgeln
Your love life.
(just kidding!)
Not too bad!
Why I do this?
Well, certainly not because of attention seeking, rather the opposite.
No one bothers my flow state there and the elements bring inspiration.
It's pure attention seeking. And it also might be fun.
What, just because you haven't seen it? (But seriously, how would we know? You're talking about a group that, by definition, would leave us no evidence to discuss their existence)
Is commenting on this thread also "attention seeking," because no one does so without making their comments public? Or is it a form of social behavior?
[1] https://youtu.be/UCvnrkN9Jjw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Edit: You could just cut out the generator bit and have a nuclear iron.
It's a combination of freediving and rock balancing.
"How much time do you spend ironing?" "one or two hours a day, I try not to overindulge"
"What's the strangest place you've ever ironed?" "A bass boat"
I don't remember any of the other responses, but everyone who heard that story got a good chuckle out of it. Interesting to hear that it's stayed around so long!
For example SSDs became much more common and affordable over the past 15 years and their parameters also improved. Are there similar improvements in household appliances like irons? Where would one look for an industry overview?
I’d instead look more at commercial cleaners (e.g. how shirts are cleaned/pressed for shipment to stores) if you want to see the bleeding edge of cleaning technology.
(It’s sort of like home consoles vs. arcade machines in the 80s/90s. Home consoles had to optimize for affordability, while arcade machines could essentially be expensive operationalized prototypes as long as they paid for themselves.)
tongue in cheek, but WHYY
On the other hand, my mom has sent me things like machines that fold and do other stuff whenever she finds something… or refinds something. So I doubt she likes doing it and maybe passed that down to me.
• People (all animals?) seem to have a quirk about learning hygiene practices in particular, where the criteria they have for what is hygenic/unhygenic gets formed when they're children, and then becomes unalterable. People generally seem to intuitively believe that whatever hygiene practices they were taught as children, are exactly the set of things they need to do feel clean. No more, no less. And so they don't go out actively looking for new hygiene practices (or for hygiene technologies that would suggest new hygiene practices.)
If you slow down and have a conversation you can sometimes figure out what the specific emotional problem is, often involving shame or fear, and what triggers it has. The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.
Well, yes, but coercion, extrinsic motivation, and general spite are all edge-cases, and outside the scope of what the core fact about "learning" that I'm trying to talk about here.
Let's look at a specific non-edge-case case: learning under self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward + time pressure — for example, learning to hunt/gather when stranded in the wilderness and hungry.
In situations like this, children do better than adults at deciding to begin experimenting in an attempt to learn how to survive. Adults will try to apply any skills they already have (however rusty), but will have a much harder time than children do in deciding to try to do things they haven't already ever been taught to do. And even when they do make that decision, they will repeatedly revoke it—i.e. give up much more quickly when a solution does not come easily to them. Even though, in education-theoretic terms, all the stars should be aligned in terms of motivating their learning process.
> The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.
Of course not. That's the observed abstract pattern, not the reason. The reason for adults, AFAICT, is almost always pride/hubris — that is, the idea that they don't need to learn anything new, that there's no advantage in it to outweigh the learning cost, because they've got by just fine up to now without having learned it. (And also because learning is just plain harder for adults, since they have so many existing schemas that need to be broken+reshaped in the process of fully absorbing new ideas that don't fit the existing schema.)
This resistance comes almost always from adults who see themselves as having higher social status than whoever's trying to teach them the thing. They have no mental schema for learning from someone younger or more junior (or of a lower social class/caste) than themselves, since it's not something they've ever experienced earlier in their lives.
Instead, when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing, and offers to teach it to this social-superior adult, the adult will instead try to manipulate their social inferior into doing the task for them any time they need it to be done — often under the pretext of demonstration for purpose of learning. But with no intention of actually learning, and a complete rejection on being tested for knowledge acquisition (because that would be a violation of the social dynamic!)
Note also that learning is separate from doing. I know many adults that are willing to do novel things (without really understanding what they're doing), and to memorize that specific series of actions by rote — but who have no desire to understand the more general skill behind the rote actions they're taking, such that they could perform related actions in any context other than the exactly memorized thing. In general, memorizing is easy, while learning a new skill is much, much harder. (And yet memorization without learning almost never "sticks", since there's no backing mental schema to encode the memorized steps in terms of.)
Anecdotally, kids often also give up easily when faced with trivial setbacks. I think your speculative generalization is far too broad. I’d be interested to see some concrete research, but my impression is that there is very wide variability, and I’m not sure how meaningful the statistical averages are.
The people I know who are best at diving into a new never-seen thing and experimenting systematically to figure out quickly and accurately how it works are all adults. They easily run circles around kids at this: the kids get tired, get distracted, get confused and give up, get stuck into an obviously sub-optimal pattern but don’t try to fix it, etc. (The kind of adults who have decades of practice at trying / learning new things. Many relevant metacognitive skills have broad applicability across disciplines.)
One big advantage kids have is that their basic needs are met by someone else, and they generally don’t have lots of other worries and responsibilities. This allows them to focus on something they are interested in far longer and deeper than most people who aren’t doing that thing professionally.
The best for learning (for either an adult or a child) is a combination of personal interest + pleasant no-pressure environment + face-to-face guidance from a trusted expert tutor/coach, who can probe weak points, notice and correct mistakes and misconceptions, suggest methods of practice, ....
> pride/hubris
What you call pride/hubris, I call shame and fear of embarrassment. People really don’t want other people (or themselves) to see them as failures.
> when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing
This kind of social situation is completely different than the “self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward” situation you were talking about before.
It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert doesn’t want to be shown up by their subordinate or their junior colleague. It makes them look incompetent and is a direct threat to their social position and livelihood.
It sounds like you're assuming these conversations/learning events occur in public. Why would people feel shame/embarrassment about something nobody can see them doing?
This was the point of my example: if someone is alone in the wilderness, what does it matter to anyone but them—to anything but their survival—if they were to try and fail at building a shelter or a trap?
> It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert
Who said anything about being an expert?
The example that comes first to my mind is a grandchild trying to teach their grantparent to post photos to Facebook on their iPad. The grandmother explicitly—even "infamously"—has no experience with computers or anything to do with them. If their friends/family/etc. were to observe the situation, they'd have a preconception that the child would know more about "posting photos to Facebook" than the adult would.
And yet, despite nominally having no real way to be "shown up"–no presumed domain expertise to lose; and despite nominally wanting the grandchild to teach them how to post photos to Facebook; and despite the grandparent being intrinsically motivated to learn how to post photos to Facebook (because they enjoy the social interaction that comes when friends see their photos); the grandparent still won't bother to focus at all on paying attention to / understanding / remembering what the grandchild is saying.
I would describe this as a kind of learned helplessness, except it's more like contextual helplessness. It's not that they can't learn how to do this–they seem to be able to learn it from a peer their own age just fine. But when it comes to those they think of as people they are supposed to be teaching, their mind just turns into a brick wall.
I would compare it to the prevalence of people who get their romantic partner to open jars for them, instead of buying one of those gripper gadgets that allow them to open the jar. If their partner offers to buy them one of those, they'll often actively refuse the gadget! They think of this job as something someone is supposed to do for them — something they shouldn't have to do – rather than something they want to get done by whatever means, as efficiently as possible. Despite it not being a hard/complex job, or a matter of comparative advantage.
These typically have an offboard water tank and boiler that doubles as a stand for the hot iron. This also lets the iron itself be lighter in weight.
A key feature for this market is the absence of the automatic shutoff that's commonly found in consumer irons.
That’s real progress!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aR_o-Y7Mpo
They weren’t always electric.
Never used it myself but i have been curious if it actually works.
It is definitely easier not having to worry about the cord tangling or pulling at your clothes.
I bought a new washer/dryer recently. A bunch of bells and whistles, but... the "autosense the water level" feature is awesome, and likely saves water in the long run.
It seems like washers use so much less water these days, its not like the old agitator models from 2000s which filled up a tank. Instead, modern washers thoroughly wet the clothes, add a bit of extra water at the bottom, and then mix vigorously (be it a front-load or top load, the HE washers all do this technique).
This leads to lower water usage. I also ended up using much less soap per load (the first few times, I noticed the soap wasn't fully getting rinsed out, but the significantly less water usage means I also should use significantly less soap).
> Where would one look for an industry overview?
At least for generic household appliances, Consumer Reports is a non-profit survey / reviewer group. I dunno if they have much on irons themselves, but I haven't seen anything wrong with their reviews yet.
I think there's a problem when the price goes too low. For something like $20, $50, or even $200 or $1000 appliances even... its not really worthwhile to review. Instead, you often have to just buy the thing and hope for the best.
Maybe there's a specific professional group who is thinking about these tools and how to use them (chefs and cooking tools, or woodworkers + woodworking tools). But for things like irons or washers, or other household appliances... I don't think any such group exists outside of things like Consumer Reports.
Still, I get my reviews on "Tide vs Persil", and other household items. I think "Wirecutter" is a competitor and some people say they've got good reviews too.
In any case, Consumer Report's page on steam irons is here: https://www.consumerreports.org/products/steam-irons-28981/s...
A agitator "tub washer" uses 40-gallons of water to wash clothes. A modern front-loading HE washer uses 10-gallons.
If you use the same amount of soap on both washers, you'll naturally be either... adding too much soap to the HE washer, or too little soap to the agitator washer.
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Same thing with "Tide Pods". The idea of those things is "one pod per load", which removes the mental need to think of how much soap to add per load. But... once again, there's many different washers that all use different amounts of water. There's no way we really have a one-side fits all situation.
Some examples that I know of:
- modern robot vacuums, that can mop, use LIDAR etc. We have a pretty decent one, it works OK, but we still have to vacuum by ourselves every 2 weeks or so.
- battery operated vacuums, irons, hair dryers etc.
- smart homes -- automaticcally setting heat, window blinds
- tons of gimmicky stuff like smart fridges, or water taps with touch screens.
But I'd consider these just some quality of life improvements, not major time savers like washing things by hand vs a washing machine. IMO the next big thing will be household 3D printers when someone finds out how to make them safe and reliable for everyday use by non-technical people.
If anyone here has one, I'm curious how well it works.
well that, and the electric toothbrush
This was some of the humor that I didn't know I needed today. Had me laughing out loud.
Extreme ironing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6594989 - Oct 2013 (2 comments)
In the English and Spanish versions, it was invented by Tony Hiam in 1980 in Seattle.