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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure about your visual interpretation, but I completely agree that the two scales don’t translate directly, and that if something is rated 7/10 I’d assume it’s better than something rated 3.5 stars / 5.

    As to the reason? I wonder if the scales five different senses of the middle value? In a five star system, 3/5 film is the middle value, and not especially good nor bad, but I’d probably give the same “totally average, not good not bad” film 5/10. Similarly, it seems weird to translate “Awful, 1/5” into “Awful, 2/10”. So maybe the difference comes from a lack of clarity about half stars, it’s okay to give 0.5 / 5? But not 0? Or 5.5?

    And that doesn’t even start to address the modern “if it’s rated less than 4.6* it’s probably awful” issue…






  • For a long time lots of European music was mostly thorough-composed, where there was little to no repitition. Madrigals (the popular music of the renaissance) were mostly like this, the melody would follow it’s own journey with no chorus / verse or other repetitive structure. I might be remembering wrong, but I think it was early baroque and Monteverdi’s Orfeo that popularised repeating structures, and turns out people love them. If you back and listen to some madrigals, it’s a very different approach to music. (also, there was folks music and all sorts of other traditions, which used more repeating patterns, that seem more familiar to us.)






  • It absolutely isn’t, and it’s for sure off-topic, but I glad it was posted here rather than somewhere more specialised. People in assistive tech might already know about this sort of thing. I think it’s cool to imagine how different social media would be if we could actually hear each other’s voices, and all the general information about age, background, confidence and humour that the voice can convey. There’d probably be less misunderstandings and trolling, but when it happened it would probably hurt more.

    But maybe op could change the title to an actual thought, “social media might be less awful if we heard each other’s voices” or whatever.


  • Because that’s the logical fallacy of Denying the Antecedent . If “it’s raining” then “the sidewalk is wet”. Knowing that it’s raining tells us something about the sidewalk, it’s not dry, it’s wet. And knowing the sidewalk is dry tells us something, it can’t be raining (because if it was, the sidewalk would be wet).

    But knowing “it is not raining” doesn’t tell us about the sidewalk (it could be dry, it could be wet, maybe it rained earlier, maybe a dog peed on it). And similarly knowing the sidewalk is wet doesn’t tell us anything about the rain.

    So even if “mo money causes mo problems” all that tells us is that someone with mo money will not be problem free. People with no money might also have mo problems, the syllogism doesn’t tell us about that.


  • If this is a genuine question, and not a halfhearted attempt at trolling, you need to be more specific about what you’re asking:

    Are you looking for biological / evolutionary theories about why maaaaany animals show same sex sexual activity?

    Are you looking for an anthropology/historical analysis of how human sexuality has been expressed in different ways and had very different norms and taboos than our current blend?

    Or are you asking individuals to talk about their own experience and what lead them to identify as whatever?





  • I’m mot sure I understand what kind of answer you are looking for. What did the Whig historiography achieve? Or the Great Man theory? Isn’t Critical Theory an academic approach that allows people in the humanities a different theoretical framework to approach the problems of culture, history, literature, etc? It’s been pretty successful in that, and while I believe that academic scholarship has some influence on world affairs, it’s generally the political zetgeist exerts more pressure on academic thinking than the other way around…