Victor-Victoria Problem: Difference between revisions

|timestamp=4:40 PM · Nov 21, 2016

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'''Eric Weinstein:''' ''So this is the middlebrow answer that almost everyone gives. And the idea being that the lowest level, you know, the whalers used to say "the whale fishes," because morphologically it swims like a fish, looks like a fish, got a tail, obviously a fish. One level up from that, you say, "Oh, no, it's a mammal. It crawled back into the sea many years ago and evolved in water and breathes air and gives live birth." But the problem is, one level above that, the thing reverses back because you're bracketed on Darwin's phylogenetic tree between Lampreys, which are clearly fishes—I'm just, all I'm doing Bret is stealing your thunder here—and Coelacanths, let's say, and so all mammals are fishes. So if somebody says that a whale is a fish, you don't know whether you're dealing with somebody who's just completely uneducated, or somebody who does this for a living. And that confusion of not knowing whether you're sophisticated relative to somebody's point or unsophisticated is one of the ways in which great conversations just derail.

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