yeahiknow3
@yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Major L 2 weeks ago:
Sometimes we use super technical precise language to say something that we later realize is fairly simple. It might be obvious in retrospect but take us literally thousands of years to figure out. I have so many examples of that phenomenon.
Anyway, other times we just need new words for all sorts of new concepts. Even the smartest humans are stupid by default and ordinary language is outstripped by our intellectual ambitions.
- Comment on Major L 2 weeks ago:
New concepts require new words. New concepts relate to each other in interesting ways. These also have names.
Alternatively, if I ever wanted to assert something more complicated than the weather I’d need to re-build the entire conceptual framework from scratch using small words and pictures.
- Comment on Met police arrest pensioner for ‘jury crime’ already ruled not a crime 2 weeks ago:
Legally speaking, jury nullification is real. Try to absorb this fact.
More importantly, when corruption is the norm, and other democratic avenues have failed, jury nullification isn’t just a legal option, it is the only rational one. Next comes vigilantism.
- Comment on Met police arrest pensioner for ‘jury crime’ already ruled not a crime 2 weeks ago:
What precisely is the point of a jury if you’re going to constrain how they vote? Of course jury nullification could be bad. And of course it can be good. All legal systems are made up. The whole idea is to allow people — a jury — the freedom to decide for themselves.
- Comment on Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha 4 weeks ago:
Oh no. Anyway.
- Comment on Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha 4 weeks ago:
I wish that my world were small enough never to learn about Hassan fans, or about the worms that burrow into children’s eyeballs, or the genocides of history, or any other kind of evil.
- Comment on Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha 4 weeks ago:
No idea. I could write a lot about Hassan, but it’s not worth my time and it’s faster to relegate his fans to Trump supporter status.
- Comment on Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha 4 weeks ago:
I watched Hassan become famous and his dishonest imbecility is about the only consistent feature of his character.
- Comment on Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha 4 weeks ago:
Performative socialism is all the rage.
- Comment on Inshallah 5 weeks ago:
Anyone know the source of this quote?
- Comment on I turned down MMA fighter on a night out - so he punched me 1 month ago:
His organs should be sold and the profits used for reparations.
- Comment on California union pushes work-from-home bill as Newsom calls state employees back to the office 2 months ago:
What a colossal and dumbass waste of time, traffic, and resources.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 3 months ago:
“Gaming community.”
Steam and Epic are both malware.
- Comment on With the ICE raids coming up at a very faster rate, do we need more self-defense (or community defense organizing) classes? 3 months ago:
Most of America has no communities at all. It’s a bunch of strangers.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
Math exists in the minds of humans, [not animals].
This is incorrect. Every animal we’ve ever researched, including insects like bees, can do basic arithmetic. The ability to do math has evolutionary advantages.
Anyway, not a single one of the examples you’ve given involves second-order reasoning. These are all prosaic interactions with the environment, which is how most animas (yes, including dumb humans) experience the world.
First-order reasoning: “What is moral?” Second-order reasoning: “Do moral beliefs constitute knowledge claims?”
First-order reasoning: “One plus one is two.” Second-order reasoning: “number theory is either inconsistent or incomplete.”
First-order reasoning: “What does this word mean?” Second-order reasoning: “How is meaning grounded in language?”
The examples I gave you are extreme, but to be fair you seem extremely confused.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
Elephants are wise in that they’re concerned with (some of) the things that matter most — social bonds and creature comforts. But, as far as we know, they can’t abstract away from those concerns to scrutinize them abstractly, or analytically, or reflect on the nature of wisdom or the metanormative conditions of their own experience.
We can do that — due to some freak accident of evolution that probably has to do with the recursivity of language and the self-referential nature of subjective experience. And again, when I say “we,” I mean some humans sometimes.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
Most humans can’t even contemplate these questions. We have a lot of depressing research showing that most people can barely engage in abstract reasoning at all, let alone willingly.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
Well, the information that aliens created us for some particular purpose would certainly be of academic interest to me. It’s empirically interesting, but normatively insignificant.
For that, I would need to learn about the aliens’ philosophical progress (if any).
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
It’s not that cats can’t ask questions. It’s that they can’t ask abstract questions. That’s quite different.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
if you wake up in a compound, catered to your every need by weird alien captors, “why am I here?” is a pretty obvious question.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
No, they don’t. Second-order questions aren’t just the prosaic things any intelligent creature would ask, such as “why am I here?” or “what do you want from me?”
but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”
Animals (and, indeed, most humans) don’t ask second-order questions at all because that requires abstraction, which is the sort of reasoning that requires enormous amounts of education and curiosity.
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
Well, curiosity comes in different stripes. Investigating your environment is one thing. Asking second-order questions is quite another.
“Can I have food?” vs “What is food?” or “Why am I hungry?”
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 4 months ago:
Yeah, when my cat meows, it is “asking” for snacks. But it’s not inquiring about snacks, or curious about where the snacks comes from or why dogs like snacks so much.
Granted, many humans don’t ask such questions either, but that’s because intellectual acuity is on a spectrum whose overlap with non-human animals, at least in the realm of being an incurious dunderhead, is overwhelming.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
Sociocultural boundaries are almost entirely grounded in language. Nation states are almost entirely grounded in imagination.
- Comment on Greed Is Destroying the World 5 months ago:
- Comment on I Quit 6 months ago:
Denying intellectual disparities is denying the vulnerability of people with special needs, not to mention average folks who are easily deceived, swindled, manipulated, propagandized, and parasitized by the rich and powerful every single day.
- Comment on I Quit 6 months ago:
You don’t know people who are clearly dumb?
The average ACT score for college bound seniors in Florida is 18. The test costs money, which means they’re trying their best. It’s childishly easy. My cat, who is illiterate, can score almost as high (answering at random). Again, the average is 18. What kind of conversations can you have with people who can’t read basic English? I’m asking sincerely, because as far as I can tell the answer is “none.” Maybe you can discuss the weather? Sports? Idk.
I want to stress that Americans, uniquely, are really weird about testing mental ability, probably because of their history of racism. Nevertheless, mental ability is a real phenomenon. Yes, high IQ doesn’t make you a good person, and it clearly has very little to do with accumulating wealth. But it does make life a hell of a lot easier.
- Comment on Anon is a fact checker 8 months ago:
They’re not. Last I checked the percentage virgins at age 30 was almost double digits.
- Comment on 🎶Somewhere in the ether 🎵 8 months ago:
Yeah, so do most word processors. Microsoft is unique in so many ways.
- Comment on 🎶Somewhere in the ether 🎵 8 months ago:
Fun fact, a few years ago Microsoft Word removed their auto-recovery (pseudo-autosave) feature, and rebranded it so that it’s only available through their OneDrive service.
If you write for an hour and your computer crashes, you’re shit out of luck (unless you have a really old version of Microsoft Word).
