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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.

It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.

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I hope you understand that just because a proposed explanations makes intuitive sense, it doesn't automatically have to be right.

Edit - it seems there's evidence that this intuitive explanation is wrong, see the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146562

This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.

As I get older, I consistently find the world to be far less interesting than I used to believe. So many factoids that I once marveled at have turned out to be false or exaggerated, or now seem pretentious and forced to me even if they are true.

It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.

Dont know how old you are or what age has to do with it. But i find that as I get older simple factoids about the world are even more amazing. There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic and that gets more interesting the more you meditate on it.

It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.

Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.

> There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic

Is it? I used to think so myself, but nowadays I realize my reaction was just imitating what others had shown me was an “appropriate” response to this.

Whether there are 4 fundamental forces, a single one, or 100, none of these help me understand the world in any sense I actually care about.

I shouldn't use the word magic in a forum like this, last time I did something similar, it also got caught up with the semantics. I mean awe inducing. I've been doing the exercise of writing poetry and one thing that I love about the process is that you can absolutely find inspiration in the banal everyday things.

By the way, this mode of being makes me happier so I invite everyone to take a second and actually consider the question "how is this magical?" for everything. It can be a beautiful experience.

I've met amazing buddhist masters who have meditated for decades that describe the world in these terms. They are also the happiest and the people most oriented towards helping others that I've met.

What exactly about it is “awe-inducing”? There are four fundamental forces. Okay. Not three, not five. Just like there are five Platonic solids, rather than four or six.

Now what? What am I supposed to feel awe about? Are you sure you aren’t just echoing words you’ve read in a popular science book?

To be clear, I have myself parroted such soundbites for decades. But at some point I asked myself what I was actually trying to say when I said them, and came up empty.

You're not the first time that someone in this site tries to argue with me that I should not look for beauty and wonder. I'll do it anyway and am not interested in arguing with strangers about what deserves being open about to wonder and interest.

I do find it interesting the fact that there's some kind of order that happens to make the world the way it is and not some other way. That's enough.

I'm not surprised that this is your experience if you approach interesting questions with the attitude from your original comment.

I’m doing my very best not to fall into these deep mental and physical ruts or grooves.

It’s part of why time seems to accelerate when you age too our brains only record novelty and new experiences. Drive the thousandth time to the store, won’t remember even going. Do something new - suddenly the weekend seems long.

Then you aren't actively seeking out interesting things.

“You either agree with me or you are doing something wrong.”

Correct.

Interestingly, in practice different languages tend to have markedly different common representations of animal sounds.

In Korean, dogs say meong (멍), sounds like mung) rather than woof.

In Spanish, they say "guau" (pronounced like "wow")

in English i say UAUH? (pronounced like Tim from Home Improvement)

"Gav" in Russian (sounds like "guff" :)

in English you say bow-wow. And a lot of other potential words.

In Romanian the dog says 'ham ham'

Sure, and not every single person agrees with the proposed phonetic shape-matching either, but the broad trend does hold and there is similarly in animal vocalizations even across unrelated languages.

No, actually it doesn’t. You are just wrong here. Amazing that your ‘older’ brain that ‘sees through it all’ won’t let you admit it and is actually just a necrotic defense or superiority mechanism. Genuinely very alarming to me and a huge warning not to let myself get like this.

Scroll up a bit. People posted examples mostly confirming they're right. Korean seems to be the odd one out.

Most animal sounds do not actually map that well into the range of sounds we use for human language. And even if they did, you would end up with different representations because different languages use different sets of sounds. Not to mention most animals make more than one kind of sound

But all of that doesn't mean that someone who has never heard English wouldn't be able two tell which of "woof" and "miaw" is supposed to be the cat

I don't think the insight is trivial, but to each their own I suppose.

>across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog

Mexican / Spanish its Guau-guau or "wow-wow". Russia its tyaf-tyaf. Mandarin Chinese its wāng wāng. Few if any cultures that don't speak English know what 'woof' is.

obviously the idea is not that all cultures have the same word for the sound that a dog makes, but rather if you ask people from cultures which is the sound a dog makes "woof" or "miaow" assuming they have these concepts for the animals they would say "woof".

I am not arguing this is the case, but the original poster obviously feels it is, connecting it to the top level post's idea of common ideas for what words describe over languages.

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