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Comment by cameronh90 | Hacker News Reader

There are ways you can present being deaf as an advantage.

I personally think it's excessively reductive, but there are those that say, for example, that you become more attuned to your other senses when you lose your hearing, or even that area of the brain can be repurposed for other tasks. They may say, therefore, that the only reason being deaf is a disability is because the world is designed for non-deaf people. In the same way that you wouldn't consider yourself disabled for being unable to see x-rays or detect magnetic fields.

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Saying the world is designed for people with hearing is causally inaccurate. Hearing evolved because sound is a useful way to perceive the world, the same way vision evolved in the spectrum it did because those are the strongest frequencies of sunlight. And more generally, I don't see many things in my everyday life with exclusively audio feedback. Usually anything designed with an audio cue just uses it to reinforce a visual one. Things we are interested in (animals, cars, etc) make noise, and we have evolved hearing in response to that. Without hearing, you have no way to be notified about things outside your field of view. This is not something we've designed about the world, it's just how that sense works.

They probably meant "the human world", cities, etc. For example in the subway, the warning for the closing of doors used to be only audio, now you can see more modern ones that have both audio and visual cues that doors are about to close. In the same way, when crossing at a traffic light, there used to be only visual cues. In some cities now you have places that also have audio cues for people that need it.

A non-trivial part of our artificial world is designed on the tacit assumption that listening to spoken language is what we do.

The world was dark half the day for much of human history. Communicating in the dark is clearly easier with noise than signing or passing tactile writing around. It's not like we just invented noise for the fun of it, it's just a better medium in most situations.

Well, most of human activity, then and now, is conducted in a lighted environment. Regardless, it is not clear to me how the reasons for vocal/aural communication arising as the dominant mode is at all relevant here.

We don't have food that's only detectable with x-ray vision and we're not food for predators that are hiding in the x-ray spectrum who pop out and attack you with that advantage, so not being able to see in x-ray is not a comparable disability.

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