Comment on It's just loss.
KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 2 days agoOkay, so you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm. How many mammals are in the pen?
This survey would answer that the pen is 90% cow and 10% rat, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.
In reality land, where the rest of us live, would say that there are 241 mammals in the pen and only 1 of them is a cow.
You see why I’m calling bullshit by the way this is worded?
Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Oh, I see now, thx.
For me (how I perceived the simplified pic) the main difference was that I didn’t think ‘in a pen on a farm’ but on a planet.
Do you not think the farmer saying he has 241 animals would be made fun of?
Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I’m basically saying that you can see from the context (the numbers) that it’s biomass, a la:
Image
KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
The pic says “of all the mammals on earth”. It’s exactly as i said with the pen, just scaled up to a 3d spherical planetary sized pen. The numbers I’m talking about don’t change.
There are WAY more rats than cows. Period. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, and there might be some weird subterranean prehistoric voles huddled around a hydrothermal vent pool or some shit.
OP just needs to add a qualifier to the graphic. Anything along the lines of “with respect to biomass” right at the start
Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
So it you know that, why would you insist it’s saying that instead of immediately looking for something that does fit?
A planet is not a pen and no farmer ever will say they have 241 animals!
davidagain@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I was trying to think of some other meaning than ‘drinks dispensary’ for ‘bar’ and I couldn’t think of a sensible reason for putting a bar in your shower for quite a while until I realised metal bar.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Yes, that describes the complexities of language perfectly (and the process of how you decipher the meaning)!
We tend to forget how complex communication is, expressing huge concepts with a few sounds/characters/gestures is one of the greatest achievements of Earth’s animals (humans included).
It’s amazing it even works. But requires a lot of brainpower to encode & decode.