… in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this.
Shallow? It’s profound.
Have you tried to respond to the question, in the human context?
Shallow? It’s profound.
Have you tried to respond to the question, in the human context?
Were a comment to contain new and interesting information about a profound, i.e. generic, question, that would be fine. But this is precisely what internet comments bringing up generic questions don't usually do. It's not a good fit for the genre. Someone who really has something original to say about a profound question would be better off writing an essay, or a book. Certainly not a one-liner to an internet forum.
This is so much the case, in fact, that changing the subject from a concrete topic to a more generic one is a frequent form of trolling.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.
p.s. Please don't use multiple accounts to comment in the same thread. That's abusive, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.
It then goes on to complicate that narrative, claiming that more recent discoveries indicate many species of octopus are, in fact, social creatures, and older understanding of them was likely due to insufficient observation and the fact they hide themselves so well.
It's quite an in-depth essay with a lot of information in it that addresses this exact question with nuance, research, anecdotes, from every side of every possible answer. It deserves better than a pithy response implying the author never thought to just ask the reverse question. He definitely already thought of this.