I hear the same about the conceptualization of zero as a numeral that operations can be performed on (a crucial turning point in human thinking) which is also laughable. It simply was not compatible with the Greek understanding of mathematics which emphasized the discrete and trigonometric but fit very well into the more abstract view towards math on the Indian subcontinent. There’s a reason why human discovery has global roots.
The relation between mass & energy seems very intuitive, I’ve known it for most of my life!
Wdym humanity just recently learned that??(It’s a cognitive bias when you internalise some information you just learned, & suddenly get the feeling that all who don’t know it are kinda dumb, like that
intoinfo wasn’t gifted to you by chance/random experience.)like that into wasn’t gifted to you by chance/random experience.
This sounds like you think purposefully learning things isn’t a thing.
Do you mean that things you don’t remember purposefully learning, are more easily consciously forgotten, even when internalised?
Because we are often somewhat bad at saying where we specifically picked up a bit of information, unless we have very good context like having studied for a test on a specific subject or smth.
Sorry, I don’t think I understood your reply.
(What’s is the difference between learning something on purpose or not?)It’s not about forgetting where you got the info from, it’s forgetting that others (other brainholes besides your own) don’t/might not know it.
It’s just a characteristic of human(?) psychology, we all have it (it’s not applicable/the bias doesn’t kick in constantly, but it’s there, you can’t really function without it).
Information asymmetry isn’t that intuitive to us, the languages/communication itself (memetics) heavily implies that - you just can’t always explain everything from scratch, from inventing a form of communication to everything in the universe, etc just to tell someone to eg boil some water.A basic example of this might be a child opening a tin box with cookies pictured on it only to find a sewing kit, then another child walking into the room, not seeing the opened box they don’t know it doesn’t contain cookies so they check. The first child usually thinks that the other one is stupid af bcs “it is known that there are no cookies in that box, duh, everyone knows that” (even forgetting that it’s a reasonable assumption that there should be cookies in it). Children up to 4 (or 7?) can really struggle with that but can comprehend if explained to them (sooner or later we usually do learn it & try our best to compensate for it).
More nuanced cases are ofc when it gets tricky to correct the bias (you just don’t have the data or the time to account for all of it, perhaps even a cultural hurdle as ppl might take offence to you over-explaining something they think they already know), eg at work giving tasks to someone less/differently experienced than you.
I think it’s a subset of wiki/Curse_of_knowledge, but I’m no psychology expert so I’m not sure (might be classified differently, wiki/Cognitive_bias).
Yes, I understand the bias.
You just worded it as if all the information in your head is in there by accident, and you can’t actually influence the amount.
You very much can, obviously.
But that doesn’t remove the bias… again, obviously.
I’m still not sure I follow the reasoning, but maybe: I meant that bcs of the unimaginable randomness of cases and impossible vastness of data. You absolutely don’t have free access to all the data (you don’t know what I keep in my tin box at home). You can purposely (or not) only access the data that is by chance accessible to you.
So within this context I find it weird differentiating between purposely vs accidentally (if that is the opposite?) acquiring knowledge bcs even if you pick up a book you chose it’s still very much random & nothing in comparison to all the data in existence (and the comparison was between overlapping experiences of different people, so another dimension of random selection).
That’s why I was presenting it as random (but active or passive learning - it makes no difference to that point, so that’s why I didn’t initially get what you were saying).Ofc you have experts in their fields, they gathered knowledge “on purpose” to that end - and yet when I hire such an expert, first day on the job that idiot doesn’t even know where their desk is.
You can’t follow the sentence “the way you worded that implied that all the information you have was ‘gifted’ by ‘random chance’”?
Lots of people enjoy general knowledge. There’s even quite a few games and TV-shows based on it. You’d argue that everyone who did well in those, or say, Trivial Pursuit, are better by chance because they were “gifted” something instead of having had worked for it?
There are people addicted to generalised trivia and facts and then there are people who don’t understand the difference between amperes and volts, despite that being taught in pretty much all basic education in at least the developed world.
But no, the kids getting A’s didn’t work for anything, they were just gifted?
Just like
This girl was also probably gifted her massive arms. I mean, there’s so many other things she could possibly be doing with her arms, so it’s just random that she’d get larger ones on purpose. It was a random “gift” from… God?
And this isn’t even about the context. Again, the way you worded it excluded experts as well. But you just have to move the goalposts instead of saying “yeah, you’re right, it does imply that, I could’ve worded that better”. No, instead you’re like “I didn’t mean experts, obviously!” Why not? (Do you notice btw how I’m asking you things instead of telling them? Wish there was like a name for this style of rhetoric. Can someone perhaps think of one?)
“Socrates was the wisest man in Athens.”
Dude, the population of Athens and it’s surrounding territory at the time was about 200k-250k people, a very sizable portion of which were foreigners who probably had a different primary language, and even more of which were slaves (like 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire population). Would be like talking about the wisest person in Dayton, Ohio 2500 years later in every philosophy textbook in the world becuase he realized it was better to say “I dunno” than to talk out of your ass.
If Plato is accurate then I don’t know if he didn’t talk out of his ass.
Much like another wise man.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know things. He specifically showed you how you didn’t know things you thought you did. That’s quiet different.
It’s literally still called “the Socratic method”. And it made the ancient Athenians so mad at Socrates they executed him.
If you manage to have things named after you a few thousand years from now by saying “I dunno”, I’ll raise my hat to you.
The socratic method, which, as the name suggests, he did, is about asking probing questions to expose gaps or contradictions in their knowledge which reveal their ignorance. Both to themselves and oftentimes to other’s, as well. He didn’t stump them with his own knowledge. He only asked questions until they stumped themselves.
He found that wisdom was found in humility. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” That is what I paraphrased as “I dunno”. Understanding that you do not and cannot know all things is a core principle of his idea of wisdom and his methodology.
“Only tasked questions”
Yeah and Einstein “only wrote some equations”?
The point is the questions he asked, just like the point is that E=mc^2 really isn’t as simple as it seems, but has a world of theory behind it.
Socrates knew to ask the right questions.
Too bad I don’t get to sit around and think all day so I can discuss with others who sit around and think all day.
Have you tried being born wealthy? Hope this helps!
That was Plato and Socrates’s secret
Well, a society with a vast management/“thinker” class (the rest, including bureaucrats, being slaves) should produce some thinkening shit.
Not as much as a society with universal individual’s needs guaranteed (the tech back then just wasn’t there), but more than a society with overwhelming oligarchy/feudalism rule where only a random few are allowed to think.
In the UK our £2 coins have “Standing on the shoulders of giants” written around the rim, to remind us all that no, you wouldn’t have thought of that, you berk.
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No you wouldn’t. All this stuff may seem obvious now but it only does so because somebody figured it out before.
“Einstein is such an idiot. I learned about general relativity in middle school”
I mean a lot of what Socrates and Plato wrote and taught are just self justifications for the ancient Greek ruling class.
Historical projections of population place the global population at roughly 162 million people. Let’s say only .1% of the population was capable of this sort of thing. Although I think it’s low and while these early Greek philosophers were certainly smart the key to their success was wealth and the ability to focus on their “craft”. But I’ll really lowball human intelligence
Anyway, at .1% of people that means roughly 162,000 thousand people would be capable. The number of those with resources to actually dedicate the time even smaller.
Today the world population is over 8 billion, but we’ll use 8 billion. So at .1% that gives us 8 million people alive today that would be capable.
I really underestimated human intelligence, but the point is the same. We have so so many people alive today that there is certainly quite a few people capable of doing these sorts of things
That seems like a fair percentage estimate. What you’re leaving out is society. The ancient Greeks, even the 99.9% dummies, were excited about philosophy and learning. Today, Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasts in the world and you can’t throw a stick without hitting a dozen grifters proudly parroting logical fallacies while people clap. So yeah, there might be eight million people out there, but their thoughtful blog probably gets a dozen hits a month. Their world changing lecture was cancelled for being woke. Their exciting revelation they add to the conversation get overshadowed by someone yelling how great “Oh! My Balls!” was last night.
Bringing up Joe Rogan, but ignoring the estimated 1% of the global population with PhDs is a choice.
If we just counted phds that becomes 800 million people, but truthfully I think most capable of a masters would stand a good chance of doing this work.
Human intelligence is often underestimated by cynics imo
That delusion is so common that I suspect it must have a name, but I don’t know what it is.
But the better a solution appears, the more a person who sees the solution believes it to be obvious, and therefore also believes that, had they tried to solve the problem, they’d have come up with this “obvious” solution straight away with no effort.
Meanwhile, the person who actually solved the problem could only come up with the perfect simple solution after a lifetime of study in the area to the point that you’d call them an expert or master, and after agonizing for a long time over this particular problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
“Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.”
It’s a kind of cognitive bias that assumes things that are obvious to us would be inevitably found without uncertainty, or trial and error.
Teaching “common sense” is so hard because kids get so offended that you think they are stupid.
I’ll go further, i reckon i couldve done better than “featherless biped” as the definition of a human.
Honestly they mustve said so much bollocks that people were too embaressed to write down or copy and it was lost to time.
If I recall correctly, “fatherless biped” was an attempt to define a human in the simplest, most basic form, and as short as possible.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas and other primates. Are they classified as bipedal? I mean they don’t HAVE to use their arms to move around. It’s just more efficient for them…
Of course, I wouldn’t have plucked a chicken and presented it ad a fatherless biped, either… So what do I know lmao
I guess they just forgot about gorillas
We often take for granted how much information we have about the animal kingdom. Gorillas are native to central Africa; it is highly unlikely Plato ever even met somebody who had seen one. What makes Greek philosophy impressive is how much they were able to accurately describe given the incredibly limited slice of what is now “common knowledge” available to them, and how durable the methods they employed have proven when provided better priors.
At the time, in Greece they thought of apes as monkeys without tails. They also had no reason to think those creatures were particularly bipedal. Or that there was any particular relation to humans. Aristotle was describing Baboons, which walk on all 4s. To Plato, a bird might be the only other creature that walked on two legs. It also has pink skin for what that’s worth.
It’s easy to forget that the foundation of knowledge we have is so incredibly vast it would be incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks. We learn in elementary school things that people wouldn’t work out for centuries.
Imagine telling Diogenes that dolphins are foxes that learned to swim. Or that the giant skulls they keep finding aren’t one eyed giants, but the skulls of ancient hairy elephants.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
Closer to 150 than “a few hundred”, don’t mind me, just nitpicking a little.
I think geological time, planetary formation & the Big Bang etc would probably be harder to explain and for the greeks to accept than evolution, even though it requires pretty much geological timeframes as well.
I doubt Diogenes would care abt the foxes being dolphins so much as how u explained it. If u brought a series of dolphin to fox fossil records he’d accept it but if u come in waving ur hands abt and mumbling something abt dolphins and foxes he’d think ur as insane as him.
Their relationship to humans is irrelevant to being able to walk around just fine on two legs.
My last point was apes fit the “featherles biped” just as much as a plucked chicken, and just as much as we do.
It really just depends on how much knowledge they had of the existence of various primates and how they walk around. I’ve just seen enough monkeys and apes walking on two legs to consider them a child’s understanding of “featherless biped”
My favorite bit of trivia about how much/little we knew about things, we technically discovered steam power thousands of years ago, but only relatively recently in human history figured out how to use it to do things.
I could also had put 3 sticks of the same size on one axis and 4 on another and see that between the ends you can fit 5 sticks.
Wat
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
Oooohhhhh
I guess you wouldn’t have figured it out on your own, lol.
I’m the 11th guy
Just keep asking why to everything. My nephew was basically Socrates.
I admit I am old, but can anybody explain this meme format with an expressionless person making a selfie with a statement at the top? And do I need to be as conventionally attractive as this young man here or do looks not matter?
It makes me feel old too, lol. I think some people make them with streamers or content creators (maybe?) or just because they need an image, since people are more likely to share something funny if it’s not just text. It’s a little weird, but whatever.
I think you just discovered looksmaxing
I think that if I were intelligentsia in a different period of human development I would go and try to discover something. But that’s only because I’m in academia now so as long as I have the prerequisite material conditions my personal impulse for obtaining new knowledge would drive me
This is the Manosphere™ mindset. They suffer from constant Dunning-Kruger. Ask them about climate change and they’ll suddenly be smarter than climate scientists because they watched a few YouTube videos.
I don’t think this meme is about science, but rather about “thinking about thinking”
I know, but it’s the same type of thing dudes in the bro camp do. They obsess over stoicism, Rome, etc. Their ego makes them think they’re thinking on some other plane of existence. Then it starts leaking into science and social topics.
This is utter bullcrap. Must be funny somehow, but that I am sadly missing.
