>pursuing a masters in philosophy

This means as much as a hope, prayer, or wish. Wanting to accomplish something isn’t an accomplishment.

What you’re suggesting is training your brain to replace one shortcut with another. Once your brain is conditioned, you have no control over the perception. You’re intentionally trolling Reddit for things to argue about with the limited knowledge you learned watching YouTube.

I suggest you look into psychology. Your brain uses biases created through experience to create shortcuts so you don’t have to analyze everything you look at. That fluorescent light at the end of the hallway is rectangular. Even though it appears to be a trapezoid, your brain automatically registers that it’s a rectangle because of experience. You don’t have to analyze it for that to happen.

Your brain chooses how you perceive the world, and the best you can do is be aware it’s happening. Think about it like a colorblind person - the barn may be red, but that person will always see it a different color, no matter how aware they are that it’s not brown or gray or whatever.

Oh, it’s for sure true that there are people from the 80s who didn’t like his humor. My parents had Cosby records when I was a kid, and I listened to them in the 90s. I found them to be corny with too much religious humor, so they weren’t my thing. Much like you and Harry Potter, I didn’t think Cosby was funny before everything came to light.

That being said, I was more likely to enjoy it before I knew he was a rapist than I am after. The main reason is that I just thought it was corny before - now I think it’s hypocritical at best, which is a much stronger ethical response than when I was a kid.

I totally agree with your take on it, but there’s also something to be said of perception. How people see and interact with the world is colored by their personal biases (either explicit or implicit). Individuals who saw Bill Cosby’s comedy in the 1980s are infinitely more likely to recognize his talent despite his actions because they did not experience his comedy with a predefined bias of him being a predator. Likewise, people who experienced his comedy after his actions became public are absolutely more likely to perceive the comedy in a different light.

People have no real control over how their brains choose to perceive the world in response to its previous experiences.

Dear Leon,

I’m a middle-aged man who works at a perfume factory.

G.H.O.S.T.T.I.D.D.I.E.S.

Calloo-Callay!

Buy puts, you say?

Dr. Finkelstein has gone to shit since Sally left.