Making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers re-shape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making. Fire was a tool for early humans not just to cook but also to burn the landscape, encouraging edible bulbs and grasses that attracted animals for hunting. Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans; pines and fungi work together to take advantage of bright open spaces and exposed mineral soils. Humans, pines, and fungi make living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others: multispecies worlds.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
“As early as the 1920s, researchers giving IQ tests to non-Westerners realized that any test of intelligence is strongly, if subtly, imbued with cultural biases… Samoans, when given a test requiring them to trace a route form point A to point B, often chose not the most direct route (the “correct” answer), but rather the most aesthetically pleasing one. Australian aborigines find it difficult to understand why a friend would ask them to solve a difficult puzzle and not help them with it. Indeed, the assumption that one must provide answers alone, without assistance from those who are older and wiser, is a statement about the culture-bound view of intelligence. Certainly the smartest thing to do, when face with a difficult problem, is to seek the advice of more experienced relatives and friends!”
— Jonathan Marks - Anthropology and the Bell Curve (via leofarto)
I was reading an interesting article years ago about collective memory. There have been a lot of thinkpieces over the years about how humans are getting lazier and worse at remembering things thanks to technology. There’s a tendency, particularly in the western world, to behave as if memorization was all people did prior to the internet.
But outside of artificial school test-taking environments, human beings have always relied on the collective memory of their close peers to keep track of information. Anyone who’s ever worked clothing retail knows that no single employee has the location of every item in the store memorized, but as long as you have enough people working the floor, nobody will ever have to waste time searching for an item because at least one employee is bound to remember which rack it’s on.
TL&DR - brains were never designed to function in isolation.
Testing the intelligence of an individual in an isolation is never going to give you an accurate idea of a person’s true intellectual potential.
TL&DR TL&DR
Two (or more) heads is better than one.
My maternal grandfather was a math professor at the City University of New York. He died before I was born, but he passed a key bit of wisdom to my mother, and she passed it on to me:
The important thing is not knowing the answer, it’s knowing how to find the answer.
It our era of text and alphabets, that’s often knowing how to look something up. But for most of human existence, there were no alphabets. So knowing how to find the answer meant finding the person who knew the answer.
Kasamatsu Shiro “Into the Woods” color woodcut 1955
image description: a colored print of a forest. The ground is entirely covered with orange and yellow leaves, and all the trees are missing their own leaves. In the center there is a puddle, which reflects the sky and the tops of the trees. Rays of light also shine on the center of the image, just above the puddle. end image description.
thinking about andrew garfield and the fact that he said yes i do believe in love at first sight but i also believe that you would love absolutely anybody if you knew their story i also believe that the modern notion of romantic love is seriously misguided and it creates a lot of problems in our modern world i believe that we need to reevaluate this idea that we have of the nuclear family this idea that we have of 2.4 children this idea that we have that it’s adam and eve and not adam and steve i believe that um it’s possible for all of us to be in love all the time with ourselves and with everyone around us
By consistently presenting nature as an untouched wilderness, many nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched wildernesses left. I certainly thought there were, before I became an environmental journalist. This misapprehension then prompts people to build their environmental ideas around preserving untouched places and to embrace profoundly antihuman “solutions” to environmental problems, such as kicking indigenous people out of their homeland. In truth, wilderness doesn’t really exist.
In his famous 1995 essay, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” the historian William Cronon demolished the concept of wilderness. Cronon argued that European settlers in North America had transformed their inherited idea of “wilderness” as worthless, scary, and unimproved land by reimagining it as a sublime, prehuman Eden. “The myth of the wilderness as ‘virgin’ uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home,” Cronon wrote. In reality, the Americas had already been thoroughly shaped by the nearly 60 million people who lived there when colonists first arrived. Agriculture and other intensive human use was widespread, covering 10 percent of the Americas’ landmass; human-caused fires maintained grasslands and prairies; hunting, foraging, gathering, and replanting—sometimes in new places—regulated the populations and ranges of dozens of species.
The wilderness myth is simply factually inaccurate, in the Americas and elsewhere. It has also been a real stumbling block for conservation. With wilderness set as the gold standard for nature, any human influence has come to be seen as negative by default. The myth has thus ruled out any approaches to saving nature except walling it off and keeping humans out. Trying to “save the planet” with a wilderness mindset has been all about self-exile. It offers “little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like,” as Cronon wrote.
There is no such thing as wilderness except possibly parts of Antarctica.
I think like, the death of Vine and Rabbit, Wikipedia constantly needing to beg for money, Discord depending so heavily on venture capital, Facebook turning towards spying on users to generate a return on all the venture capital that got them started, Adobe creative suite turning into a subscription rather than a single product you buy, the strangulation of streaming entertainment as every company pulls their content and makes it exclusive to their service, are all great examples of how like, it really doesn’t matter if something is legitimately useful, efficient, or beloved, it is next to impossible for a service to exist if it doesn’t make shareholders increasing amounts of money year after year. Which may seem like a “no duh” type of statement, but it’s a very simple window into how the profit motive makes products and services worse, not better. And how that’s not just a matter of certain companies or ceos being bad and greedy on an individual level, but is an inescapable factor of an economy where existence is dependent on generating capital.
This is because of the Dodd-Frank Act, full title Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
You see, many people thought that the housing bubble and subsequent financial crash in 2008 was caused by banks loaning too much money to people who couldn’t pay it back (it’s actually waaayyy more complicated than that) but the Democrats decided to totally change the banking and lending system to make sure it never happened again. Thus the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was written by Barney Frank (D-MA) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) and signed into law by President Obama in 2010. The Act placed strict requirements on institutions and who they could lend to, as well as creating several committees and expanding the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission to include overseeing banking institutions in general and not just the stock market.
So yeah, blame the Democrats and Dodd-Frank for that one.
