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Is anyone besides me with the villagers on this one? The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back!
More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
That kind of intellectually dominated "democracy" killed well over a hundred million people in the 20th century. And the people who promoted the horribly oppressive governments that did it--the Soviet Union, Mao's People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, etc.--were among the most intellectually sophisticated and literate people on the planet.
None of this is to say that illiteracy and ignorance are good things. They're not. I'm much better off in my personal life being literate and knowledgeable. But literacy and knowledge have limits, and the people who want to dictate how entire societies should be organized and run based on their literacy and knowledge are in over their heads. Basic human instincts and intuitions, like the ones those villagers had that Luria completely missed, contain valuable information too.
This doesn't explain the difference between the collective farm workers, who were actually forced by the government to change their lives, and the villagers who were not forced to change their lives. Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
They were--they just hadn't been yet when Luria ran his experiments.
> Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.
Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.
These were previously peasants still under feudal lords. Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs in order to assign every death under communism as a death caused by communism. It's not even intellectually dishonest, it's not intellectual at all.
If Stalin didn't kill enough people for you that you still feel the need to inflate the numbers, it's an indication of how many murders you're willing to excuse for your preferred system: "We only killed 50 million!"
For a salient example, see the "60,000" protestors killed in Iran. What's a few exploded schoolgirls in comparison to that?
What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.
> Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
And you think the communists taught the peasants to read for the benefit of the peasants? It is to laugh.
> This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs
I'm not ignoring them at all. Where did I say that it was perfectly okay for tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs to kill people?
Indeed, if you look at how societies under tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs are run, they basically have the same problem I described: one person, or a small elite, at the top thinks they know enough to run an entire society. But they don't. And their attempts to do it cause massive human suffering and death.
Being able to understand theoretical suppositions is a measure of intellectual maturity.
If I tell you "imagine I was made of iron, how much would I weight" as an exercise, an answer like "but you are not made of iron" shows inability for abstract thought.
Outside of scientific exercises: if I asked you what would you do if your significant other cheates on you, would you imagine yourself in the situation or would you answer that your partner is loyal/ that you're single?
> As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
Why does “as if the waters had but newly retired” mean there’s a lot of water (and thus mud)? “As much mud as” clued me in, but I don’t get this part.
And apparently it’s also referencing not just some flood but the flood of Noah’s Ark from the Bible, which is why you might happen to see a dinosaur because it was such a long time ago. I guess I don’t come across many opportunities to think of / that remind me of Noah’s Ark because I didn’t think of that either.
"Imagine everything here was flooded and then the water leaves. The land would be left super muddy right? That's how much mud there is now".
I'm surprised it's a difficult phrase, I'm not even a native speaker.
The part with the stegosaurus is harder in that it relies on a biblical reference, but there is no way for it to be interpreted by a decent reader as a literal animal, it should at most make you wonder why he's suddenly bringing up that idea ("it would not be wonderful...).
And yes even without the reference it's not that there's a literal animal there.
It doesn't. It means there's a lot of mud. It might help if you had the rest of the paragraph in front of you. It sets the scene for us with a bunch of sentence fragments -- bullet points, we would say. Here's the beginning of each of them:
... and so on.And yes, modern audiences aren't attuned to biblical references.
Not really.
According to Nielsen, 59% of Russians read at least weekly. High, but not the highest in the world, and behind China:
https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/commentary/2017/maj...
Several European countries have a very strong reading rates, some exceeding 70% of adults reading books annually:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
It's my opinion that writing is by far a more effective way to understand the world and the nuance in it. You could, theoretically, watch a video on YouTube, understand it, think about it, and then write out your thoughts and ideas and would be far more educated than someone merely reading a novel.
There is always a strange disconnect with egg head types where they fail to understand that information input is not the only way to become smart. And valuable information exists everywhere: a book, a blog entry, a podcast, a video, a movie, in the real world, etc. Thinking that text, which by the way is one of the most inefficient methods of information consumption, is the only way to be "smart" is incorrect. Critical thinking is what is desperately needed.