this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Yeah this is mindboggling. It wouldn't have ever crossed her mind to tell her kid that they don't need oxygen canisters on this planet? I mean, what the dad said is good, as it opened the door to some more learning... but wow.
You completely missed the point.
This was about the elegance of the answer, not the answer itself.
Never underestimate just how clueless the general population is about how the world works. More than you'd expect would prove to not really grasp even the most basic mechanisms of their environment.
People turn to religion for a reason.
To the majority of people, understanding the world beyond "inexplicable god magic" is difficult to learn good-for-nothing trivia unless it's needed for a good grade and maybe a job if you're cut out for it. Only the parts specific to surviving in the wild get a different treatment.
Even the non-religious seem to make a habit of thinking like this. The kind of "not a Christian" alcoholic that is completely disinterested in the actual philosophies that allowed for a world where open disbelief is safe, and vocally in favor of "rights" of some sort for currently relevant minorities, with maybe a rare acknowledgement of some surface-level misunderstanding of humanitarian ethics.
Pump the brakes.
She isn't saying that she doesn't know about photosynthesis. She is saying she didn't understand what the child was actually asking about.
There is a world of difference between knowing the answer and understanding the question, especially if the question was asked by someone who doesn't even really know what they're trying to ask either.
Yes. She didn't understand what the child was actually asking about.
Because to her, oxygen tanks are for other people who use them. To her, any information about it and the contexts of it is not relevant, it is not important for her, and it's not very interesting to her. To her it is a weird question, despite her stated interest in not wanting to make it seem weird. Normal people do not need oxygen tanks and don't need to concern themselves with them.
I want to really emphasize that all information like this is genuinely seen as trivia, and only gets to feel like it's really worth having someone knowing the very moment it becomes tangibly useful, and when the usefulness of the information expires, it becomes trivia again.
Respect for a researcher wavers in almost the exact same way, although a great achievement would be respected possibly for a lifetime if the public understands and appreciates it. Still, anything they learn after that is going to be treated like trivia again.
You want me to pump the brakes? Why would I? Our entire civilization is incapable of pumping the brakes on self inflicted and wholly deserved extinction by way of choking our world in the emissions of our desperate works to create decorative steel flowerpots and heavily marketed plastic garbage, because we cannot stomach the thought of feeding a man that does not create his share of junk.
Wow you're making some absolutely WILD assumptions about what the poster believes, and in generalizing it to the populous. You'd win Olympic gold in long-jumping-to-conclusions with the distance of that jump.
All that knowledge is trivia, dumbass. It's just that to people like you and me, it's worth having anyway. We're scientists. We're nerds. Trivia is our stock in trade. People don't do research on how smart corvids are or whether there was life on Mars millions of years ago because humanity needs to know, they do it because they personally thought it would be cool. If you think climate scientists are any different just because global warming is an existential threat, you should get out more.
I want more people interested in science as much as you do, but we should absolutely NOT do that by distancing ourselves from the idea that science is trivia, or that things that are trivia are not worth learning about. Nothing about deep-sea creatures and ecosystems are relevant to humanity's survival, but they sure are cool. People might not like learning about it, just like the lady in this post might not like learning about oxygen tanks, and that's their loss. Some areas of science are more important to the everyman than others, climate change being one of the biggies, and teaching people the basics they need to know to defend themselves against shitheads like Ben Shapiro is IMO something that ought to be done in schools. But people don't become scientists because they serve a higher calling to the knowledge of humanity. They become scientists because trivia interests them. It's interesting to a lot of people, and the sooner we stop shaming people for being into nerd shit, thr more scientists we'll get.
Speak for yourself, asshole. Call for corporate regulation, don't blame all of humanity equally.
Sure not equally. But go into any thread on this topic and talk about what individuals can do to minimize their own impact - because the reality is that we all need to shift on it behaviors not just corporations (even if they are the largest by far) - and then come back and tell me how confident you are that it isn't all humanity.
It's shocking to me how many people deny climate change, but it's even more shocking to me how much push back you get from people about actually doing anything individually, when they realize it is happening.
The reason we shouldn't be pushing the message of "understanding the world is not just trivia" is not because it's wrong. It's because people would not be responsive to it.
Besides, there are far more fundamental structures to prioritize understanding before getting into the varieties of aquatic lifeforms, which do become pretty trivial. If a category of fish does something that significantly impacts something important, that matters. You have a role to fulfill as an informed voter, with a responsibility to participate in ruling your territory well. If you have a working understanding of how and why this shit works as it does, you can be reminded of that important function when they are threatened by dangerous interests. Whether or not you personally recall all their colorful patterns and names of the fish without looking them up is not as important.
As for our ruination, I don't place blame equally. But as voters I do blame the majority of your friends and family, as well as my own.
But I stand by the idea that it is a deserved disaster, but further I think it's for the best. Ideally we don't bring our bullshit too far into the future. A few more centuries as we fade away is more than enough. It would be a disaster if we managed to keep growing into larger and larger civilizations for millennia, repeating the same behaviors at larger and larger scales with more and more to suffer it.
It's best if we all die out.
Suppose my child asks when she's going to get fur. If I don't know what she's been reading, my first thought might be that she saw one of her friends or a rich old lady wearing a fur coat and wants one for herself, not that she doesn't know that humans don't need fur to stay warm like dogs do. If I then begin explaining that raising or (worse) hunting wild animals for their fur is unethical, but I'm happy to buy her a nice synthetic jacket if she wants it, that doesn't mean I'm an idiot who doesn't even know humans don't grow fur and Everything That's Wrong With Society Today, it means I misunderstood her question.
How quaint that you defaulted to a fashion analogy.
How predictable that someone who decries the intellectual decay of the human race defaulted to an ad hominem attack.
It's surprised me once I got out of school and uni how little people know. But what really blew my mind is just how little they actually care.
Like someone will say they don't know how something works, I'll explain and they will stare at me blankly and I really realise they didn't want me to explain and they were actually happy not knowing. Whereas I will look at something, whether it's a kettle or pasteurisation or grass and wonder how it works. But for people actually to prefer not to know and live in ignorance really messed with me for a while.
I've largely given up now. My boss said he was getting all the heating changed in his house to have electric. I asked why he doesn't get a heat pump and he told me it's because they don't work they just blow air our like a fan so it's colder than an electric radiator. I just said okay and moved on.
Yeah. I've built an entire library worth of knowledge into my head and a deep love of piecing everything together to extend my understanding of how things are and works.... And will take it all to the grave with me cause no one cares and honestly whatever.
People don't care. The idea of us being an intelligent and exploring species is a mistake from those of us that are applying it to everyone else. The maybe 10% of us are doomed to be at the whims of the other 90% that just doesn't care or want to hear it.
There's a lot of people who claim to be science lovers who think this way too. They liked watching Bill Nye and participating in science class as a kid. But now that they're adults, they expect to already know everything and aren't interested in learning more. Even Einstein thought this way. That's why he said "God does not play dice with the universe".
These anti science reactions are especially common if you tell people about fringe or advanced science or occultism. Like if you discuss how consensus reality is a social construct and our beliefs are highly influential of our perceptions, thus permitting control of perception through belief, a lot of people's eyes will glaze over and then they'll yell about how science is exactly what they learned in school and not an inch more.
That's the opposite of why he said that though. He said that because he felt that the things that seemed random couldn't actually be random and that there was something more that they didn't understand. In other words, he felt he didn't know enough and wanted to learn more. Not sure where you came up with the idea that he wasn't interested in learning more.
My first thought, when I heard that question, would be "do we have a backup in case the naturally produced oxygen for some reason goes away?" like some families have an emergency supply of food or water, not that the child did not know that Earth's atmosphere naturally contains oxygen thanks to plants.