Cohen and Stewart coined the term "lies to children" for this concept in their 1994 book The Collapse of Chaos, it got popularized by Terry Pratchett when he collaborated with them on The Science of Discworld in 1999 It's a good concept, only a knob would get butthurt over it https://twitter.com/olivertraldi/status/1290043101642358789 …
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When speaking about it just for fun and to get smarter and learn things it is interesting to discuss all the possible answers to the question When it is a matter of some practical urgency to have a "right" answer, which one it is depends on what is causing the urgency
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Hell, the most basic one of these is one where you can easily defend the "wrong" answer from the uneducated yokel Of course the Earth is flat! Look around you! Put a level on it! Put your car in neutral and see if it rolls!
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Which is to say, the Earth is *almost* flat, very very very close to being flat, from the perspective of a human being Which is to say the Earth is, compared to a human being, very very very large You could walk all day and all night and not make it all the way around
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If you downplay this fact, and underestimate just how very flat the Earth in fact is -- i.e. overestimate the curvature of the Earth, and therefore underestimate its circumference -- you will be wrong Really really wrong, in a very important way
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Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, not as wrong as the person who thinks the curvature is 0 and the Earth is an infinite flat plane But at least that guy wouldn't try to sail all the way to China from Spain in that pathetically tiny boat like that dipshit Columbus
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I mean, do you actually think it's being *more correct* to interrupt someone saying "We need a perfectly level surface to start construction on" in your Neil DeGrasse Tyson voice going "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE, GRAVITY ENSURES ALL OF EARTH'S SURFACE CURVES"
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You think there's any benefit to being an Actually Guy who interrupts perfectly pleasant discussions of how much flatter it is on the east side of DC than the west side with facts about the shape of the Earth So you can be More Correct in the Big Picture
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I really really love this quote I just pulled from Notes From Underground about the "pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting" I can't believe Dostoyevsky identified DeGrasse Tyson energy almost a century before Tyson was bornpic.twitter.com/bYXaXUff00
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Like, Newton was a genius, and Newtonian mechanics is a great accomplishment From the big picture POV, it's completely wrong, but so what Most of the kink fics on AO3 are also just plain wrong, but they also get you where you need to go
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There's a certain kind of obnoxious pedantry about dunking on simplified ideas for laypeople that is very adolescent In the same way teenagers are far more embarrassed by liking things "for kids" than adults are
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That whole Well Actually phase people go through "Well Actually a tomato is a FRUIT" "Well Actually Hamlet says 'I knew him, Horatio'" "Well Actually it's a magazine and not a clip" "Well Actually Peyton Randolph was President of the US first"
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This is very tiresome And I get the feeling these guys think their opponents are doing this But they really aren't - nobody actually said "2+2=4 is dumb and wrong, stop teaching arithmetic now"
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Kareem Carr's whole original tweet was just saying "Hey, if you see someone saying something you think is dumb and wrong, step back and think about why they're saying it See if it's more interesting to try to find ways something can be right"
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"It's so much more fun to do that than to plant your flag on some bizarre religious crusade about how precious truth must be preserved like a fortress against a howling mob of ignorant hordes"
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I'm going to hot-take this -- James and his friends love to throw around the term "sophistry" as a negative And honestly in the cartoonish version of Socrates vs the Sophists we were given by Plato, I'm kinda with the Sophists
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Socrates' whole "I'm gonna own this guy so hard" shtick in the dialogues is unbearable and it's really clear the books are written to paint his enemies in the worst possible light There's a reason Aristophanes portrayed him as a buffoon in his play The Clouds
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Grammar, logic and rhetoric are tools You use them to get better at talking to people and at doing things They can't actually tell you what to do or what to believe, and the idea that that shit would be obvious if you just kicked out all the liars and deceivers is childish
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Man is, in fact, the measure of all things Who else is there to do the measuring
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End of conversation
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