this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
24 points (100.0% liked)

Humanities & Cultures

2532 readers
3 users here now

Human society and cultural news, studies, and other things of that nature. From linguistics to philosophy to religion to anthropology, if it's an academic discipline you can most likely put it here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Good read on the attainment of perfection and accepting our flaws.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bear_delune 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So it’s wholly dependent on how you’re being observed and the collective understanding and knowledge of your actions?

I feel that makes the entire concept nothing but something that exists in the mind of the observer; which would imply stupidity doesn’t really exist at all

Are we all’ Schrodinger idiot’ and whether we are or aren’t stupid depends entirely on if we’re known to do stupid things?

[–] Lycanthrotree 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To the same extent that every trait is relative, I suppose. There's not a big physical block of stupid somewhere we can point to, so we have to judge it relative to others. If someone is kinder than most people we say that they're kind, if someone is smarter than most people we say they're smart, if someone is more beautiful than most people we say they're beautiful - it's not something unique to stupidity or to negative traits. It 'doesn't exist' in that it's not something you can pick up and hold in your hand, but it can be measured as an identifying trait when compared to other people and generally agreed upon.

I could say my dog is brown and my friend's dog is white. I can't go touch 'brown,' it exists only in my mind and my brain's perception of wavelengths of light, but the brown dog is still more brown than the white dog. As long as you have 2 objects you can come up with these kinds of differentiated descriptions of them. (I wouldn't say "my dog exists in 3-dimensional space and breathes air" because all dogs exist in 3-dimensional space and breathe air, therefore it isn't usefully descriptive the way "brown" is.)

[–] bear_delune 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes but there are measurable qualities of a dog. It can been seen and confirmed by science. Can stupidity?