tpc

• tpc 9 Aug 2010 5:34 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: DonGeddis’s comment on: Ab­solute de­nial for atheists

  From Paul Graham’s essay:

  How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don’t matter—just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can’t say.

  Maybe there is something I am missing, but I don’t understand his last sentence. How do you take two people, and “subtract one from the other” ?

• tpc 29 Jul 2010 12:10 UTC

  4 points

  on: Against the stan­dard nar­ra­tive of hu­man sex­ual evolution

  Wrongbot, I wanted to note a disparity between what you say here:

  The most recent common ancestor [chimpanzees] share with humans lived somewhere between 3 million and 800,000 years ago.

  and what that Wikipedia article on bonobos says twice:

  The chimpanzee line split from the last common ancestor shared with humans approximately six to seven million years ago.

  What links here?

  • Against the stan­dard nar­ra­tive of hu­man sex­ual evolution by WrongBot (23 Jul 2010 5:28 UTC; 15 points)