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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"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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YES! This is why the original "The physics of superhero" books seemed boring as FUCK to me, all "Physics says no". A much more fun series is "Assume this Super Power exists. What are some possible ways it could be so? What are some of the implications OF this power?"
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A friend and I were toying with the idea of starting a youtube series or podcast that takes the more interesting take, but I think it's been done, alas.
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I abhor the well-actually style of teaching science topics, so I'm pleasantly surprised when people teach science by exploring how ideas that are normally well-actually-'d to death can instead by right. The specific example I'm thinking about was Spider Man's origin story.
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Like, instead of ripping the idea apart they used it as a jumping off point to explore all kinds of topics like just how aggressive are spiders actually and what it means to be radioactive, etc. all without making fun of the story.
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