Sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness are disabling because the world is not oriented to people with sensory disabilities.
I am reminded that the Deaf have their own mythology. American Sign Language is distinct; it's not English. Accordingly it has its own culture, including its own myths. Many of them are fables and stories from the western tradition slightly adapted. But some are original.
One common theme in American Deaf mythology (but I'd bet it's told elsewhere too) is stories about a world which is visually oriented. There's an ASL word for this world but English doesn't have one. Sometimes it's translated as Eyeth a.k.a. "Eye-Earth".
It's more than just a world where everyone is deaf or where everyone communicates in ASL. It has something like spiritual meaning to some of those who tell stories about it; in that world the Deaf are not disabled, not in the social way that matters.
Reminds me of The Country of the Blind by HG Wells.
It’s about a guy who finds his way into a valley in a mountain range where everyone has been blind for generations. At first he thinks that he’ll have “a superpower“ because he’s sighted. Instead the people of the valley view his sight as an illness.
I'm learning ASL. That led me to learn about Deaf culture in North America. The stories that the Deaf have told each other, and have passed down. A world where everyone is deaf is one of the first stories you'll learn about; I'm not even sure when I first encountered it, but it was in that context.
One common modern version of the fable is told with an astronaut who finds that they've landed on a parallel Earth where everyone is Deaf and sign language is the norm.
The book A Study of American Deaf Folklore by Susan D Rutherford is a bit dated now but interesting in exploring the functions and roles of myths here.
No, deafness and blindness are disabling because they provide critical long range data. Being able to see is essentially a superpower if you are blind. Same with hearing.
Maybe, but that isn't really what the GP post is talking about. At the level of mythology, the eye-earth is place where people of that group belong without judgment or limitation. No different from Harry Potter or Narnia or any other fantasy place one might imagine going where they can be with their people.
In any case, I'm not sure this even survives transposing to other senses that humans are weak in, such as smell (like prey animals) or magnetic direction (like migratory birds). A human who randomly had these would indeed be seen as superpowered, but that wouldn't become a statement that all regularly-abled humans are now disabled for missing the "critical" long range sense.
I wonder whether all the animals of Eyeth are also deaf, and how they are doing?
Deaf predators must have a field day sneaking up on deaf prey.
As life evolved on Earth, so did the senses that life forms possess, and that happened for a reason. If you hare missing some senses, there is a sense in which you are set back millions of years of evolution.
It's not just about human society, but biology.
Someone with no sensory disabilities, sent into the wilderness, has better chances of survival than someone with such disabilities, other factors being equal. That has nothing to do with society, which is absent from that scene. Civilization is the best place for people with disabilities, even if it is geared toward those without. For that matter, it's better for animals with disabilities. People help disabled pets lead quality lives; wild animals with disabilities don't live long.
That's all factually correct. Though both things can be true: Disabilities can be a disability in themselves and additionally the disabled can also be disabled by the society around them. Someone fully blind might not be able to distinguish some poisonous mushroom from an edible one with the same shape and smell but different color. That is a fundamental limitation of the inability to see. But blind people can for example still read. They are often just not provided by others with writings that are accessible to them, although that would be possible and is not a fundamental limitation of their condition.
Also ableism and othering are very much a thing that disables peoples' ability to function in a society and come exclusively from the social environment rather than from the disabled themselves.
I wouldn’t read too much into the logic of mythological worlds and realms.
Their purpose is narrative, not scientific. They don’t even need to be internally consistent.
No one expects Greek mythology to make scientific sense. Other mythologies should be seen from a similar perspective and understood that they are narrative, not logical.
Applying a scientific viewpoint to such mythologies results in a new narrative. The scientific view is always wrong unless scientific correctness is part of that world’s narrative.
I add this because a lot of people don’t know narrative purpose.
To put it briefly:
Other peoples worlds aren’t wrong when they don’t match “what makes sense in the real world”.
Meh, my formidable powers of foresight aren't really a superpower. Few people listen until things have progressed far enough that they see the things, too, by which point there are rarely many interventions available. And every time we do intervene early, that's "you said this would happen and it didn't happen!", making it harder to convince people the next time. And when things do turn out more-or-less as predicted, I "made a lucky guess" because "there was no way you could have known that".
In the land of the blind, why would anyone pay attention to this weirdo's ramblings about "rain-clouds"? Obviously they're just feeling changes to temperature, pressure, and humidity. Oh, and they know what shapes things are? Wow! So does everyone else who's touched the things. Sure, that "how many fingers am I holding up?" party trick is pretty neat (probably cold reading), but not something we should make policy decisions on the basis of.
Vision is absolutely a superpower if everyone else is blind. Just think how far you can shoot something with a rifle and scope. Guns are useless to blind people. A person who can see has an enormous advantage over a blind person in a fight. Try to imagine a military where everyone is blind fighting against another where everyone can see.
And, again, is one person going to develop those? A person with access to elastic rope might invent the slingshot, but I wouldn't expect them to invent the far superior sling: it's not obvious that the sling is better, since the learning curve is steeper. And a slingshot is not a particularly effective weapon: it's an inefficient bow that can't fire arrows.
You're still thinking in terms of "sighted society versus blind society", which is not what we are discussing. (Unless you're thinking "sighted and superintelligent", in which case I'd say sight is probably redundant.)
Ok. Just evading blind people would be absurdly easy if you can see. You could accurately throw rocks and run away from them all day. And being attacked from a distance would be terrifying to blind people.
Blind people are no less capable of throwing stones, and you only have the flight advantage if the ground is potentially-treacherous (e.g. unmanaged forest, scrubland) or you're that much faster. Any inhabited area will have been engineered to be safe for people to navigate – and it will not be lit well at night, where your reliance on vision will put you at a skill disadvantage.
The main advantage in an urban combat environment, I think, would be the ability to detect quiet people at a distance. Not needing to see makes it easier to hide yourself from visual inspection, but why would anyone develop this skill if nobody can see? Then, if the only person to practice with is the enemy you're trying to hide from… Also, you'd be able to dodge projectiles by watching the person throwing them, who might not telegraph their throws audibly, but would probably do so visually. This would let you defeat a single ranged opponent, possibly two – though I doubt your ability to dodge the rocks from three people at once for long enough to take one down.
But what do you gain from winning fights against small numbers of people? (I doubt very much you could win against a group of 30 or 40 opponents, with only sight as your advantage.) You would run out of food, shelter would be hard to come by, and every theft of resources would risk defeat: and one defeat against a society means it's over. Either you're killed, imprisoned, or they decide to do something else with you, presumably depending how much of a menace you've been. Your only options are to attempt a self-sufficient lifestyle (which you probably won't survive for long), to flee somewhere they haven't heard of your deeds, or to put yourself at the mercy of the justice system (and hope it isn't too retributive).
Only in that narrow viewpoint. Most people talk about disability in the context of a society because much of what we encounter in our day to day is created by other people. The sights, sounds, smells, and experiences in our world are frequently because of others. So in that context, if the dominant culture makes it a point to create experiences that require hearing or sight to consume, then yes it's a disability. But if we adapt some or all of what we do for people who don't have those senses, then we can make it less disabling.
While it's good for society to accommodate those with disabilities as much as possible, we shouldn't pretend it isn't detrimental to be unable to see or hear. You don't need to believe obvious falsehoods in order to accommodate people.
I’ve always found this semantic argument somewhat silly as being blind or deaf is an obvious disadvantage in natural contexts, but one of the more compelling ideas here is that the fitness boundary isn’t fixed. It would probably be a fitness advantage if I could sense electromagnetic fields, but no one would describe me as disabled for not being able to sense these fields—unless, perhaps, everyone else could.
So what we consider to be a disability does seem to be a function of what we consider to be normal.
The point is that the capability is measurable but the capabilities we consider to be essential are based on normalcy and thus effectively arbitrary. Eugenicists make the argument that evolution demonstrates that the classification is not arbitrary because deafness and blindness confer measurable fitness disadvantages, but they don’t actually bridge the gap of deriving an ought from an is.
> Obviously?
If the answers to these problems are obvious to you, perhaps you’d consider writing a book instead of participating in a discussion forum. I would encourage you to review the site guidelines.
If it were a fitness advantage if you could sense electromagnetic fields, then why have you evolved over billions of years to get where you are, without it?
But wait, you do sense electromagnetic fields in the 380 to 750 nm wavelength range, and remarkably well, to great profit.
The only fitness advantage that matters for evolution is whatever gets you to pass down your genes, versus someone else not passing down theirs. If sensing low-frequency electromagnetism, or static magnetic fields, were advantageous in the context of everything else that you are, for passing down your genes, you would have it by now.
Migratory birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field for navigation; if you needed to migrate thousands of kilometers every year (due to lacking other advantages to make that unnecessary), you might evolve that.
Evolution is highly path dependent and stochastic, so I’m not sure your logic follows.
Eg, the laryngeal nerve in giraffes is ridiculous — but having gone down that path before their current form, there’s little way to fix it. They’re now stuck in a local optima of long necks (good) with poor wiring (bad).
Vision has evolved numerous times, with estimates suggesting eyes or light-sensitive spots have appeared independently at least 40 to 65 times, possibly even 100 times, across different animal lineages.
Hearing has evolved numerous times independently, at least six times in major vertebrate groups (mammals, lizards, frogs, birds, crocodiles, turtles) for airborne sound and at least 19-20 times in insects
Vision and hearing have evolved so many times because they give an absolutely huge survival advantage.
To my knowledge, photosensitivity has arisen a few times independently and eyes again a few times from shared photosensitive receptors in animalia but I'm fairly sure hearing in the groups you mention is a tetrapod synapomorphy.
Yes it it path dependent; my example alludes to it. Birds benefit from being able to sense the magnetic field for navigation precisely because they evolved the ability to fly, and the endurance to do that over long distances. In that context, not losing your bearing is a fitness advantage.
> if I could sense electromagnetic fields, but no one would describe me as disabled for not being able to sense these fields—unless, perhaps, everyone else could.
Light is EM fields. A possible scenario is a battle at night with others having night vision equipment and you don’t. You can absolutely be described as disabled or being at a significant disadvantage.
Because, like you say, what we consider normal in that scenario is to have a proper night vision equipment.
You've set up a straw man here - nobody in this thread is claiming that it's not detrimental to be missing a sense.
The point is that disability exists within the context of the world we live in, and the society we've built is one that largely assumes people have both sight and hearing.
Ah, I see the disconnect. In this discussion, "disabling" is not the same as "detrimental." Disabling is when you are unable to do important activities that others can do. I'm not an expert here on the subject, but this is my understanding.
For a simplified example, imagine two government buildings, one with and one without an accessibility ramp. A person in a wheelchair is able to access the former, even if going up the ramp takes longer than the stairs. Not having the option to take the stairs is still detrimental to the person, but they're still able to access those services. The second disables the person, as they're no longer able to access important services because they are unable to take the stairs.
Accommodations help keep "detrimental" from meaning disabled. The voice at the street crossing that says "walk", curb cuts, and closed captioning all help people participate in daily normal life, despite having those sensory disabilities.
There are other designs that are more holistic as well - for example, if those same government services are accessible online, or the agent makes house calls, it naturally makes the services more accessible to more people. (Note: I'm not saying that this specific example is a good idea - just as an example of "how we design our society affects how people can participate in it.")
Since I'm the person who wrote that I can explain what I meant.
I have never had to deal with a giant cat stalking me and being unable to hear it. I do routinely have to deal with intercom systems which I cannot hear, though.
The world most humans inhabit is human-made. And the human-made environment can be remade.
You're cheating with your world knowledge to guide the parsing.
eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.
Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."
Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.
Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.
But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.
Language cannot be decoupled from what it is trying to work with. It is a tool! We can manipulate the air in such a way with our mouths that ears can hear.
I don't think there is anything wrong with allowing a small amount of "world knowledge" to guide language parsing - the world caused language to "be" not the other way around.
Anyway whenever, outside of smoking crack, did a girl get eaten by a biscuit? Never, so that phase is unambiguous.
Object before subject: I'll grant you that - its a probable sign of madness or a green puppet.
The GBP/USD currency pair is still known just as "the cable".
Aside from all its other uses: the telegraph gave a way to synchronize clocks. And accurate time is accurate measurement of distance.
> [...] The latest determination in 1892 is due to the cooperation of the McGill College Observatory at Montreal, Canada, with the Greenwich Observatory. [...] The final value for the longitude of the Harvard Observatory at Cambridge, as adjusted in June, 1897, is 4h 44m 31s.046 ±0s.048.
One of the major uses for the telegraph was the first funds transfers that could happen quicker than moving paper (or bullion) from one location to another. London banks would telegraph correspondent banks in India, Australia, etc.
This essentially doubled the capital intensity of international trade since the goods had to move in one direction but the money could be sent instantaneously in the other.
When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain location could be exchanged by other banks in other locations.
Payments were thus often settled in metal rather than being transacted with it.
Perhaps a mixing issue on your end? Multi-channel audio has the dialog track separated. So you can increase the volume of the dialog if you want. Unfortunately I think there is variability in hardware (and software players) in how to down-mix, which sometimes results in background music in the surround channels drowning out the dialog in the centre channel.
It's reasonable for the 5.1 mix to have louder atmosphere and be more dependent on directionality for the viewer to pick the dialog out of the center channel. However, all media should also be supplying a stereo mix where the dialog is appropriately boosted.
> Multi-channel audio has the dialog track separated. So you can increase the volume of the dialog if you want
Are you talking about the center channel on an X.1 setup or something else? My Denon AVR certainly doesn't have a dedicated setting for dialog, but I can turn up the center channel which yields variable results for improved audio clarity. Note that DVDs and Blurays from 10+ years ago are easily intelligible without any of this futzing.
It's an issue even in theaters and is the main reason I prefer to watch new releases at home on DVD (Dune I saw in the theater, Dune 2 I watched at home.)
We do have a fair amount of gun homicide here in Canada; well above the average in many European countries and about 1/3rd the rate in the United States. But historically this was mostly crimes of passion, and organized crime. Someone would get real angry and kill their lover or business partner, or it would arise out of a dispute over criminal property. We've had spree killings, too.
What happened in Toronto with the death of that boy from a stray bullet in his mother's arms in his own home, is rather novel to Canadians. And I'm not sure what the ultimate effect will be. I'm not sure that gun control can get much more stricter domestically; while most people can buy a handgun in practice, they are heavily regulated such that lawfully licensed ones are only very rarely used in crimes.
The handguns used to murder almost all come from over the border. The way this intersects with the border and US foreign and trade policy re: Canada is hard to avoid. Free exchange with the USA increasingly is seen as a vulnerability.
>The handguns used to murder almost all come from over the border. The way this intersects with the border and US foreign and trade policy re: Canada is hard to avoid. Free exchange with the USA increasingly is seen as a vulnerability.
The elephant in the room...
Where do the people who murder come from? Immigration from certain parts of the world could also be seen as a vulnerability. There is a trend that no one wants to admit, So when you have a certain type of person who is violent and killing people, perhaps it is the type of people we are letting in, they are incompatible with Canadian/Western values.
What are the stats for that? Here in the USA, the overwhelming majority of criminals are native-born citizens. If you have stats that show immigrants are disproportionately the gun-wielding criminals, that'll bolster your argument. Otherwise, that just sounds like Russian talking points.
Well, since you've opened Pandora's box: the highest rate of homicide (by perpetrator) among major ethnic groups in Canada is indigenous. (Also as victims: the child who died in Toronto was indigenous.) There's definitely something going on there with that statistic, but it's not because of immigration.
It's unfortunately true in southern Ontario, too. Indigenous people make up about 3% of Ontario's population, and they make up 20% of the population in provincial jails. The large disparity is also seen in Toronto, but since indigenous people are less than 1% of the population of Toronto, it doesn't show up so much in absolute terms.
> Would be interesting to see what Tolkien would think of modern urbanism movements. Feels very aligned with his values.
Still much too dense.
There was a movement, broadly contemporary with Tolkien, that somewhat reflect his views on this topic. The push at end of the late 19th century in the UK to create "garden cities". They were the first modern planned cities. Supposed to be communities of several tens of thousands, fully walkable, with industry and large ugly infrastructure hidden out of sight behind greenbelts.
They wouldn't really be built in that manner until after World War II and by then were much more car-centric.
I anticipate some skepticism on Tolkien's part about the basically progressive nature of the whole scheme. I think Tolkien was skeptical about the basic concept of social progress. His whole generation was. The War sort of ruined any hope of progress. He hated industrialization for a much deeper reason than just the automobile. The influence of the war on his anti-industrial and social views is hard to overstate:
> Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about,
That is surely from his memory, lifted directly from the Western Front.
Exposing large amounts of skin to the sun has other health risks when it is freezing outside. :)
Vitamin D deficiency is very common in Canada particularly during winter. The government recommends that everyone intentionally seek out vitamin D rich foods, or to take a supplement.
I won't try to defend Chomsky. (Not really a big fan even before this.) But if the mere mention of him is sus to you then I advise you to not study either linguistics or computer science because it's Chomsky normal forms and Chomsky hierarchies all the way down. There's even still people clinging to some iteration of the universal grammar despite the beating it has taken lately.
He's also one of the most prominent political thinkers on the American hard left for the last half century.
There's a joke going around for a while now that you either know Chomsky for his politics, or for his work in linguistics and discrete mathematics, and you are shocked to discover his other work. I guess we can extend that to a third category of fame, or infamy.
The merge operation in the later Chomsky modern linguistics program is similar in a lot of ways to transformer's softmax merging of representations to the next layer.
There's also still a lot to his arguments that we are much more sample efficient. And it isn't like monkies only learn language at a gpt-2 level, bigger brains take us to gpt-8 or whatever. There's a step change where they don't really pick things up linguistically at all and we do. But with a lot more data than we ever get, LLMs seem to distill some of the broad mechanisms what may be our innate ability, though still seems to have a large learned component in us.
What compiler are you using?
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