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Comment by hobs | Hacker News Reader

Why? I must be missing something because Native Americans definitely had philosophy, oral traditions, and the like - smoke didn't change that and a vaguely racist comment about how they wouldn't be able to form thoughts because they didn't have some special medium for doing so just comes off as that.

Socrates didn't really write stuff down...

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You’re inserting intent that isn’t in the text - a sign of our times. It only says such thoughts can’t be transmitted via smoke signal. Here it’s used to say, “Fuck Tweet threads.”

And yet, they can be used to transmit such thoughts and the Native's communication is used as a frame - so what was that about me inserting things again?

So can Twitter threads. The bit about wood and blankets alludes to impracticality. It’s not about information theory. Why shouldn’t smoke signals be the frame? It’s an analogy. Why do you feel smoke signals are taboo for that purpose?

The problem here is you assuming that someone thinks that Natives only communicate via smoke signals.

The comment had nothing to do with forming thoughts, but instead how thoughts can be meaningfully conveyed. If the mention of a minority or Native American technique in the analogy makes you close your mind before being able to understand:

Telegrams are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a frontier philosopher would run short of either money or time long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use telegrams to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.

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>You cannot use telegrams to do philosophy

Tell that to Wittgenstein. Tractatus would have been a twitter thread nowadays.

"I think therefore I am" doesn't take a lot of bits to say. A guy once said "brevity is the soul of wit."

It doesn't take that many leaves to make smoke.

You should keep in mind your medium, sir. All of human philosophy is encoded at your fingertips in 0's and 1's.

Literally smoke signals implemented in rocks so dumb we tricked them into thinking.

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The point has to do with Twitter, sir.

Nice Rorschach there with your quip about racism, however. You may want to think about that a bit.

137 characters - too small to be considered as thoughts as your message would fit in a tweet.

It doesn't say anything about "wouldn't be able to form thoughts", in fact it explicitly refers to smoke as a medium being insufficient.

It's an analogy.

Hahaha. As a Mexican, I find the American focus on racism so simultaneously hilarious and unnecessary.

In Mexico, we don't have clean water in our faucets. Electricity and the internet shuts off, randomly due to infrastructure problems or maintenance. And yet, we are humorous. We make fun of each other. And yes, this includes racial and cultural differences which we laugh at, in poking fun at each other, together. In England they might call it "taking the piss out of you". In Mexico, it's normal.

And yet in the US, there's not these "third world problems",

So the aspect of "simultaneously hilarious and unnecessary" I mention is regarding how people in the US, since they don't have "third world problems", they make their own problems to create drama about... I suppose so that they can feel some sort of relevance of a struggle.

In doing so, they reduce the capacity of dialogue, and they ruin and potential existence of Humor in a conversation -- because people are expected to walk on egg shells on certain topics.

It really destroys the fun in conversations when you have to worry about "oh my goodness, I am risking talking about something that's not politically correct! Someone who isn't actually related to the conversation content might pretend to be offended for the sake of some other non-existing-in-the-conversation person to show off their virtuous nature".

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