I mean… that is a frontier where no Trek has gone before!

Oof don’t get me started. He read that line from Hawking and stuck to it. I had a blast watching nuCosmos when it came out and he’s done plenty good science communication, but Carl Sagan he is not.

It’s not a new thing. The same issues were the case for television, radio, and newspapers. They had to teach media literacy before the internet too. You go back into the archives and you’ll see some wild misinformation that’s very reminiscent of what we see on the internet. We did have a brief few decades where we had a more consistent and adhered to set of standards, but these were by no means universal. The perception of reliable information is also skewed the combination of being less aware of misinformation when younger and by a unique period where mass reputable media were all saying the same thing… But that also meant they were leaving the same things out.

But the internet did change things. Standards have been blown up, misinformation is much faster and the volume of it is much higher. Our brains couldn’t keep up with 24hr news channels, let alone the cesspools of social media we have now.

Here’s a psychological discussion that expands on that idea: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X22000719

That’s why you teach philosophy and critical thinking. Science will follow if that’s the kid’s interest. But learning to be being self-aware of your own position amongst others, including the position of Science, is key.

It’s probably something mundane like AAA releases come with more preparation for peak traffic.

I think the objection to the term is fine, you don’t have to see yourself as a parent or your pet as your kids. It’s an imperfect analogy for familial closeness and caregiving role–im sure other terms have their advantages. I was more suggesting an explanation for why it makes sense for some people, especially those who adopt puppies. After all, parents to human children stay parents regardless of the children’s age… Which gets to the semantic hiccup behind this disagreement, there are two usages of child, one usage denotes familial relationship and social role, and one denotes age. I’m not a child, but I am the child of my parents.

Words are socially constructed, develop new meanings, and vary between cultures. Pet parent might be a new definition distinct from biological parent. Some people feel comfortable calling every family friend of their parents’ generation auntie/uncle and others find it weird because it defies their blood-relation conception of the term. That’s okay. Live and Let live.

Though, I think comparing the analogy of pets as children to treating pets as plushies says more about how you view children than anything :P

It is weird for the traditional view of pets as property, beasts of labour, ornaments, or other living in-person. However recent decades has seen a popular shift towards treating select sentient animals (experience emotions) with some degree of sapience (reasoning/higher cognition), like cats and dogs, as people. Humans treat them as individual persons with their own subjective experience, desires, and lives worth living.

So when a human adopts a non-human animal under this view, they are also taking on the responsibility to care for the animal’s needs and we’ll-being, not just for what the animal provides the human (as would be the case of a beast of burden) but primarily for the sake of the animal’s own worthwhile life–the human takes on a guardianship/parental role. This is why people are more and more being referred to as mom/dad/parent of their pet. More and more people are adopting animals as non-human children. Vets like to enforce it because it reduces animal cruelty and makes people more likely to do basic care.

This isn’t to say many farmers don’t try to give their animals a good life or recognize them as feeling beings with their own personality. They do, but not to the same degree as treating a pet as a non-human child.

$25 a week on groceries in 1997 is around $50 today based on currency inflation, not even accounting for purchasing power. That could easily make the difference between a nutritious diet and one that leads to chronic health conditions for people living paycheck to paycheck. In 1997, the average weekly expenditure on food per person in the US was $34. You could probably have survived off of $15/wk for food back then and maybe find an extra 2-3hr of minimum wage to meet your $25 investment, but it wouldn’t have been pretty.

Fun fact, a $25 steak today in the US cost about $8.50 in 1997.

You go back in time to when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and zero financial literacy. You convince yourself to invest $100/month in Amazon no matter what, because it will be worth it. You eat nothing but instant ramen, forego preventative care, get sick from malnutrition. Your quality of life is horrible because you forego basic necessities to invest in Amazon. The dot com bubble wipes out 90% of Amazon’s value but you continue to invest because your past self told you about this, but if you just endure, Amazon will recover and you will be a millionaire.

In this timeline, Amazon never recovers and goes bankrupt. On Twitter, you read a post about George Shaheen’s wedding, and how he’s entitled to his billions, despite predatory and exploitative practices, because his wealth could have been yours. If you had only invested $100/month since 1996 into WebVan, you’d be a millionaire.

Investing is, at the end of the day, a gamble.

The “Ex-colleague with a liver disease” sent a chill through my spine. Was he an Ex-colleague because he was fired for being sick 👀👀👀? Was he healing himself or was he desperate not to die? There’s a difference.

Work can be meaningful, therapeutic, or simply a useful tool for coping. That doesn’t mean it should be the only tool, nor should it be relied on without clinical guidance, nor should it be the expectation.

Talk-therapy might not be for everyone, work therapy certainly isn’t. The complete lack of empathy and humanization in the post is disgusting.

Ohhh I forgot about this! And somebody said Andor broke the bible with their 2D video

Well awktshualy, read the whole definition entry. Pendants are always so eager to ignore lay meanings.

Cute, but no. The definition of shining is not limited to emitting light.

It’s hyperbole for effect.

It’s like “fuck”, it means several different things depending on context.

For example, there’s also the meaning of lamenting that people seem too cavalier, ignorant, or dismissive of something you feel is important.

But you’re right, the meaning in context is sometimes unclear and there are better ways to communicate your feelings.

As for responses, you could always go with a polite “What do you mean?”

They’re for storing the molecular correlates of trauma, obviously :3

Koko is a great example! I should clarify that when I say evidence, I mean the collected body of scientific evidence, of which Koko would be one data point. I will also clarify that I was talking about weak evidence for sapience in dogs, not animals in general. Different species are different. We have much more evidence for sapience in animals such as simians like gorillas, as well as dolphins. Just because gorillas are sapient doesn’t mean Koalas are likely to be. But heck Cows may well be more intelligent and closer to sapience than dogs.

None of this is to put a downer on how folks may perceive dogs and it certainly doesn’t shut the door on their possible sapience. I project all of the sapience into my dog. I just think it’s important to understand and acknowledge where scientific knowledge is at as we rely heavily on it for policy, if not individual beliefs.

You are right to think through this question, and as you imply, there are different forms of knowledge, i.e. epistemologies. Science geneologically derives from empiricism, the epistemological idea that true knowledge comes from sensory experience and observation–philosophy has moved on from this idea. But accepting empirocism, the default is necessarily no knowledge, as absence of knowledge precedes knowledge from observation. Science applies empirical methods and deductive/inductive reasoning to generate new knowledge; while you may reason a theory, that theory must ultimately be tested against observation. So empirically, we cannot conclude/know sapience exists somewhere without observing it. Now the idea of “null hypothesis” can be thought of as a formalization of this. It comes from statistics in the 1920s when they were trying to determine a relationship between two data sets. As per empiricism, the null hypothesis is always that there is no relationship and therefore observations are due to random chance. And the purpose of the tests are to see if this null hypothesis should be rejected/disproven.

Another dated, but still helpful approach to thinking of the scientific question is Karl Popper’s falsifiability. It is possible to falsify the theory that “dogs cannot possess sapience by” observing one instance (not due to random chance) of sapience in a dog. However you cannot falsify the theory that “dogs can possess sapience” unless you can observe all dogs throughout space and time and show they don’t possess sapience.

You bring up some great points! Indeed it is very difficult to determine scientifically what kinds of reasoning occurs within animals’ experiences and behaviours. My post was more to clarify the classic distinction between sentience and sapience going with the assumption that dogs aren’t sapient. But as you indicate, it’s absolutely an ongoing question we’re actively interrogating. Sure, sapience is a bit of a floppy term, but we can choose more operational definitions around meta-cognition and the like. I leave it to the experts to refine terms and conduct research. We have very strong collective evidence that animals are sentient and very weak evidence (so far) to indicate sapience (however you define it). Epistemologically, we are limited in that we can only ever approach this question from the human perspective.

Your dog may well ponder their life as a dog, but the evidence for it is nil. So scientifically we cannot conclude it and assume the null hypothesis of non-sapience.

Philosophically we can consider how we approach the possibility of it though. Metaphysically, we can consider whether dogs’ consciousness resemble humans re: perception, free will, or self. Ethically, we can consider if it’s better to treat them as if they are sapient or not, I can imagine arguments either way. And an example of where we would is with humans who are extremely cognitively impaired.

Emotionally, we can also decide for ourselves what is the appropriately meaningful relationship we have with our pets in how we relate to them.