So Americans weren’t disturbed by the nationalism in War and Peace before this war, they were just bothered by that one throwaway racist comment?

Wow, people are shallow.

(War and Peace is one of my favorite books even though I disagree with Tolstoy about practically everything. There hasn’t been a book written in any language without beliefs I find disturbing, so I’m just used to it, and writing my own.)

So not living in a democracy means that you, as an ordinary person, aren’t worth protecting?

Those aren’t possible.

You have no understanding of math or science.

If “they” didn’t decide that 5 is a number in the first place, how could they change and decide it’s not?

If some group of professors got together and decided to declare that 5 isn’t a number, how could that affect the real world?

They could send out some guidance of how math teachers are supposed to teach differently, but schools would all ignore it. There just isn’t any organization with that kind of power in most of the world.

Even if in, say, North Korea, they decided to try that, it would probably involve creating a new symbol or word for 5.

Math simply does not work if you try to pretend that adding 4+1 is impossible.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there is no “they”. There is no board of experts that can make a declaration like that. It’s an extremely childish worldview to believe that there could be (again, aside from places like North Korea).

Humans realizing that they were wrong to label Pluto the same way they labeled Neptune, Uranus, etc. does not affect anything that happens in space. It’s the reverse, actually — when humans realize that their labeling systems are wrong, the humans must change. If a human scientist insists that since they learned xyz when they were a child, xyz must be true, despite evidence, then that human is not a true scientist and is harming humanity.

Saying “Actually, Pluto isn’t really a planet” (that is, “Actually, bodies in space under a certain size have certain properties that make them different from planets”) is no different from saying “Actually, the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around” all those centuries ago.

The whole “dwarf planet” thing was done to placate people who are uncomfortable with science, and that’s something any thinking person should be uncomfortable with.

(Also, if there were a board of scientists that powerful, tobacco would no longer be a thing. If only.)

Mathematicians didn’t decide that 5 is a number.

The fact that you can pick up one rock, then another rock, then another, then another, then another, then stop, means that five is a number.

If some government decided that they were only going to register numbers in binary, or base 3, or base 4, then 5 would still be a number, it would just be written differently (say, as 101, or as V, or as ○, or 五… but it’s still the same number).

Physicists, artists, whoever you’d consider the “authority” on color didn’t decide what wavelengths of light are visible to the human eye.

When light enters the majority of human eyes that are considered “healthy”, the rods and cones in those eyes notice things about the wavelengths of the light, and send signals to the brains they’re connected to, and call it “colors”.

Doctors could decide that actually, colorblind people are the healthy ones, and seeing color is a disease. That wouldn’t change the fact that the majority of human eyes recognize light with 550nm wavelengths as a thing that English calls “green” (some languages don’t have a separate word for “green”, and use the same word for 470nm (“blue”) light as green).

(Tipping point of human biology after which point, humans who can’t detect red outnumber those who can).

It’s not about what I say or what they say, or what anyone says, it’s about the effect that it has on others.

I don’t think 2022 standards are that much better than 1940 standards or 1840 standards, or 740 BCE standards, or Ancient Roman standards or Tang Chinese standards or Viking standards or Aztec standards or whatever else.

I think all the systems are broken — still, today, everywhere. and need to be reevaluated.

Elephant parable.

They’re all broken in a lot of different ways. Only by bringing the whole world and the present and the past together and honestly examining without bias and without discomfort, can a positive system be built.

“You are Bob” = “Your name is Robert Smith. You were born 35 years ago in Alabama, and you were 25 before you ever met someone from outside the state. When you were in high school, you heard a genre of music you friends didn’t listen to, for the first time. You liked it. When you tried to share it with your friends, they beat you up. When you were a kid, you didn’t really like football all that much, but social norms say you’re not valid if you don’t like football. So you forced yourself to pretend you like it. Your friends still bring up that “crazy Chinese song” you showed them that one time 20 years ago, and make fun of it, adding more and more racist caricatures about Chinese people to the story year after year (when the song was actually Korean).

You know you can’t leave Alabama, because no one from your town can. Everyone believes this, believes they’re better off staying, believes that anyone who wants to leave is crazy, a traitor. Your parents wouldn’t let you go to college. You ended up following in the same sort of aimless jobs they did their whole lives. Nothing around you excites you — not like the videos you watch online, in secret. If anyone knew about them, you’d never be able to show your face outside again. Society teaches you to be ashamed of sex, though your male friends are always sharing sexual videos and saying abusive things about women, and their wives are forced to put up with it, because their mothers told them that the only alternative is to be single, and that’s the worst thing ever. But your videos aren’t even sexual, so why are you ashamed? They’re just different types of music that your friends don’t understand. Places in the world that you can’t travel to, because you’re stuck in Alabama. Documentaries about interesting things that happened in history, in distant parts of the world. Why is it wrong to like these? Why should they hurt you for it?

You don’t know why. You just know that they will.

You just know that it’s wrong for Bob from Alabama to want to travel to Poland or Peru. You know that it’s wrong for Bob from Alabama to like music from Korea or Romania. You know that it’s wrong to want to wear colors besides grey. You know that it’s wrong to not want to watch football. It’s wrong to drink wine instead of beer, or to not drink at all.

All of these things that don’t seem wrong… well, they aren’t wrong objectively. They’re just wrong for you because you were born as Bob in Alabama.

And you’ve been taught by your town all along that these things are not for you.”

“Well, I’m actually not Bob from Alabama” is one attempt at breaking free from those limits.

And it’s not necessarily a bad one.

Moving to another city and changing your name, and lying about where you’re from does not necessarily mean perjuring yourself if it comes to that.

(See also — about a billion crime dramas where the red herring is the smooth, well-set, probably mafia-tied businessman whose lies have nothing to do with the crime at hand — what he’s really trying to hide is that until two years ago, he was Bob from Alabama.)

Making an online persona where you can live a different life is also not a bad outlet, though it doesn’t solve the real issue.

The real issue is that it is okay for that person to want to do those things, no matter where they were born.

And obviously, that’s a mild example.

None of them is “the truth”, every society is one limited perspective. To get a full, three-dimensional view, you have to combine them all, and discover even more views, that were never enshrined as anyone’s culture. Parable of the elephant.

Wikipedia is generally a good place to start

And it depends on what you mean by “liberalism” — freedom to do what?

Specifically on the topic of whether his ideas were freeing or repressive:

He believed in that sort of philosophy where everyone born into a group must be ideologically limited to the doctrines of that group, must not question those doctrines, must glorify those doctrines and through that glorification, work towards the advancement of the group. That dissenters from that doctrine should not be tolerated.

I am of the opinion that that undermines any claim towards liberality that one might attribute to him. But his time and place were so different from the present that if you understand his time, you can see how dissent was such a rare thing, and easy to condemn.

Again, context.

These labels like “liberalism” are really pointless unless you’re talking about one issue over a limited time-span. Freedoms often come at the expense of other freedoms. The thing Person A thinks of first when they hear the word “freedom” has everything to do with that individual’s priorities and circumstances in their surroundings.

Isn’t this a question for neurologists, not philosophers?

What’s the point of this discussion?

You’re trying to decide whether it’s “objectively” less bad…?

Why? To do what with?

There are reasons why there are such things as legal trials. One reason is to establish the facts of the case, and to make sure (with witnesses and evidence) that those facts are accurate. The other is to decide what should be done based on the laws. There’s a reason why laws will give a range of suggested penalties for things, not one absolute correspondence between people injured and time in jail, or what have you.

This reminds me of my response to the Argo problem. That is, “if you change the parts, how much do you have to change before it’s no longer considered the same ship?”

I think it always depends. To what practical purpose are you asking? What practical thing can you do only if it is the same ship?

I don’t think there can be such thing as “objectively, absolutely, the same object” — the object is made of a ton of smaller parts, anyway. How do you even draw the line and say “These things are one object, a Ship”, and “Those things are not one object, they are parts”? You only do it by practicality.

(tl;dr I am not a Platonist)

When did “culture” start to mean “conspicuous consumption” as opposed to “art”?

I think I find something sublime in art quite often.

Whether it’s just a particularly skilled or intense or emotional performance of a song or a dance; or the character arc of a character I really care for in a piece of media with a longer story… art tends to be what gives me that feeling of just wanting to gasp.

Just wanting to… point at it and say, “This! This! Look at this! Just look at this!!”

I feel this way about things all over anyone’s highbrow-lowbrow spectrum, with no regard to those distinctions.

If what “culture” means to someone is the food selfies you post online to show off, I’d recommend picking up a book. Any book.

…. Stop me before I start talking about how sublime my favorite character is, but like…!!!

If you think neurodivergence is a bad thing? Stop.

Neurotypicality is probably a myth, anyway. I mean, how can people claim to know how a person 200 years ago would have gotten diagnosed as today, if that person were…

• born into a situation where they had no option but to work on the farm their whole life, and/or pump out babies?
• born into a richer family, but thought of as “the odd one”, so they get either sent off into some war to die, or thrown in a back office to just file papers and never say anything but “yes sir”?
• Made it out of either of the above situations by being creative in the arts or sciences, their eccentricities shrugged off as “genius”; if they’re remembered at all today, internet mind-blown types want to debate whether or not they were neurodivergent but serious biographers and doctors realize you can’t just do that about someone who isn’t there, etc.

It’s not like people throughout history had as many options as people today.

Behavior is influenced by literally millions of things — every sensory input, even the ones we’re not aware of… which then awaken (consciously or subconsciously) memories, which are recorded (again, millions of sensory inputs every second, which get recorded and how?) and accessed for reasons we don’y understand and can’t control…

And the emotions evoked by a memory you didn’t realize you were remembering, that comes up due to a smell you didn’t realize you were smelling, nudges your behavior slightly this or that way, for better or for worse, times a trillion.

It’s like a pool table, but with as many balls as, well… atoms in your body.

“Behavior issues” in the past few years, like more public fights and loudness and rudeness comes from the spread of the belief that if you have any standards whatsoever, you’re a snob and a bad person.

(Signed, someone who’s legitimately autistic/neurodiverse/whatever word you want to use, and moved to the other side of the planet to be where people don’t do that rubbish. So don’t blame neurodiversity for assholes.)

Isn’t this a signified/signifier thing?

I’ve heard of an example about two languages both having a word that more or less means “stool” and a word that more or less means “chair”, but then there’s some kind of seat where one would call it a stool and the other would call it a chair…

Either way, it’s not an issue of authorities.

The “authorities” didn’t decide that Pluto wasn’t a planet. Scientists discovered a celestial body far out in the universe that changed a lot of the models they were operating on, and when they tried to make new models — which are necessary and useful for understanding a lot of things, and for formulating new experiments to learn more things — they realized Pluto didn’t fit.

There’s a book, called “How I killed Pluto and why it had it coming” or something cheesy like that, that’s by the actual scientists involved.

As for colors… define “a color” and “not a color”. Could physicists discover some new aspect of light particles that makes primary colors so much more fundamentally different from secondary colors that it has to change even how these are taught to 4 year olds? I guess it’s possible.

It’s also possible for the evolution of human biology to fall over some tipping point, or for climate change to affect standard air pressure, or something so that the line between “red” and “infrared”, or between “violent” and “ultraviolet”, changes.

But short of that, “green is no longer a color” seems as likely as “five is no longer a number”.

> Nurtured, taught, educated

> Trained, Indoctrinated

The mobile app won’t let me reply to your post in any decent way, but these things are opposites.

Opposites don’t always come in twos.

There are three prongs here.

1. Basic observation -> basic assumptions/hypotheses about causality coming from just what that one individual can see with the naked eye, without building off of anyone else’s experiences.

2. Schooling and indoctrination -> A set interpretation of the past imposed on individuals by society. Mistakes are enshrined as truth because they confirm the biases of some decision maker (that decision maker can be an individual leader, or can just as easily — more often — be a crowd/the majority).

3. Actual education means ruthlessly questioning beliefs and refusing to accept confirmation bias. It means ruthlessly breaking down inherited packages into the smaller blocks that make them up, and questioning who put those blocks together into that package, and why, and whether that system is still functioning, etc.

So if you stop at 2, or if you accept this idea that 2 is “reason” — that 2 is the limit of what “reason” can mean — then of course, “reason” isn’t going to get you much further than 1.

But 2 isn’t reason.