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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2024

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  • Dogs seek humans for help when they cannot solve the problem themselves. It’s one of the behavioural adaptations that distinguish them from wolves.

    I can’t find the video of it, but there’s an experiment where a chunk of meat has a long piece of rope tied to it and placed in the centre of a cage so that only the end of the rope is accessible. Both both domesticated wolves and dogs are smart enough to start pulling on the reachable end of rope to get the meat to the cage edge.

    Same experiment is repeated but this time the rope is nailed to the floor so that pulling on it will not work as last time. A wolf will eventually give up trying and ignore the cage. A dog will try every way it can think of and then seek out a human for help when all the attempts fail.

    The behaviour of the dog in this article is more common than you think. What is impressive is that the human didn’t get in the way and actually figured it out.








  • Your seeming inability to comprehend the tenets of basic rational argumentation and outright refusal to accept what anyone says to you that you disagree with, supported or not, are glaring flaws in someone whose job it is to evaluate what people are saying in their forums and arbitrate fairly.

    Did I not expressly agree that Trump is racist? Show me where I “excuse racism”. All I have done is simply (to some) state that “racism accusations are an unnecessary complication to successfully counter Trumps core argument”. As I’ve said already: if someone like MLK jr, or Al Sharpton, or Maya Angelou said “Kamala was pandering to her heritage” your ‘that person is racist!’ counter would be laughed at. It is besides the point. Nobody disagrees that Trump is racist. Let it go as it doesn’t matter for the best counter-argument.




  • Based on your whole ‘principle of charity’ idea, isn’t it your duty to believe him?

    No. The duty is to argue against the best version of his argument. For example: “Uttering the N-word in a racist manner is evidence I am a racist, I didn’t say the N-word, so this is not evidence I am a racist” fairly (side note: this may not be the best version of the argument so if someone concocts a better one I would attack that instead).

    In this example I would (and already did elsewhere) say “I listened to the tape and heard a hard-N so the premise ‘I didn’t say the N-word’ is false” so the rest of the argument collapses and the argument concludes “he said the N-word, so this IS evidence he is racist”.