Gorillas

By -
Are not manatees. Yet they have a similarity. Just as manatees do not appear on this blog, for about half the population, a gorilla does not appear in this video.


This just goes to show what Michael Oakeshott pointed out many years ago: when we enter into a practical endeavor, we define ends and means. When we do this, we filter what we experience. All that exists for us are basketball players and a bouncing ball of which we can count its passes.

Hence the power of philosophy: we see what we don't look for.

Comments

  1. Ken B6:04 PM

    This is the greatest experiment in social science. I saw this years ago. Of course they swapped the film for the replay, because the gorilla guy was in the replay. He wasn't there before. So this proves you can fool about half the population with a fake replay!

    :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more