That question below is honestly a good way to demonstrate how bad people can be at understanding what would be called materialism without it being explained to them first
Easy to assume the shape of that flower is due to decisions made by the plant itself instead of the more accurate way of understanding its shape being the result of external conditions and pressures acting upon the plant and its flower growth over a long time
Hoooooly shit I forgot about the bedbug meltdown
HE GOOGLED "JEWS AS BEDBUGS" what a classic
Yeah I suppose the OP says "opinion" but this here fact has put me in the situation in the picture more than once
Bugs are not just bugs
Bugs are a subcategory of insects and you are wrong almost every time you call any old insect a bug
No need to go all the way to beatnik wandering artist. I feel like the creative urge can strike any person at any time, and the problem with this is that as things are currently organized, that spark will be smothered. Part of demonstrating to people why they should want things to change is appealing to those who have felt that happen to them. I don't think a person ever forgets the pain of it, and it can happen to anyone.
I just responded to a pretty similar position below.
It is silly to conflate opposition to the status quo with intellectualism. Those visionaries whose ideas led to paradigm shifts were still building upon previous consensus. Sometimes being correct puts you at odds with the group, but so does being COMPLETELY WRONG.
Sometimes
If I was in college still there's a part of me that would have wanted to make it my life's work to reach the same level of "legitimacy" as PeePee Jordanson so that I could spend all my time sabotaging his reputation as publicly as possible
This is an uncomfortable reality but the more recent examples of the sciences and humanities being considered progressive overall gives me hope.
Yeah probably. I don't like the idea of having faith in science of course, considering that science is done by people, and people aren't infallible. But it's the best tool we have for preserving and interacting with past ideas and breakthroughs. I suppose the thing I'd have to have faith in is humanity's drive to understand a "truth" that holds up to scrutiny, instead of the characterization some have of human beings as creatures that wish only to satisfy existential terror incuriously.
I get what you are saying, but I don't think anti-intellectualism refers to people being against people who happen to have "intellect." And also, this claim about being a true intellectual seems like an impossible standard. It's possible to rigorously scrutinize an assumption drawn from smart types, sure, but nobody has the time to do that for everything that makes up their understanding of reality.
I could tell you right now that sidewinder rattlesnakes don't use their heat-sensitive facial pits to select thermally ideal ambush sites, they just use their eyes to pick a site that looks good. You could not deduce this without experimentation. (I was part of a study that tested it.)
Now, you could trust that I'm telling you the closest thing to the truth that is known in the world of rattlesnakes, but let's say you want to be intellectual by your definition and go know it without just taking my (admittedly qualified) word for it. You could go get a herpetology degree, go convince a grad student that it would be worth challenging our conclusion, and spend another three months like we did out in the desert catching snakes and running experiments with thermal cameras.
You probably don't want to do that, because you probably don't have the highly specific interest in snakes that we had, and so it would feel like a waste of your time. In the end, I think you'll probably admit that I know more about this snake topic than you, you'll accept my conclusion, and go around understanding it without having personally studied or observed it, and that's a good thing because it will free you up to go figure something out that fits into your interests and you can share your findings with me in turn.
It frustrated me, I've been pretty depressed in the past and I felt like I detected all the same thought patterns in it. Not a badly written book but I didn't enjoy what felt like a book written as a sort of self-flagellation
So ashamed of how shit I was at organic chemistry
My brain just could not complete those fucking benzene rings why am I so INCOMPETENT WHY