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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

> Learning only happens when there are consequences for being wrong

If I'm writing a toy project to teach myself WebGL, what are the consequences for doing something incorrectly and later having to debug it?

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I would argue the act of debugging it is the consequence. You assume something to be correct (or make a stupid mistake), you face the fact that it's not, you adjust your behavior and gain insight into facing the problem again. Same thing applies to social experience, the difference is in WebGL there is something approximating a 'right way.' I never thought Yoga would be contentious, some people do, now I'll think about it and try and understand why they feel that way.

It is impossible to prove a yoga class at a university harms a culture. It is easily provable that forcing these people not to meet on campus as a group does real actual harm. And I don't care about their feelings, I care about fairness and justice.

I think the argument would be more along the lines of: "You're calling this Yoga, but here is what Yoga has meant historically in my culture, which is actually quite different." I think the types of behaviors people attribute to PC nazis or similar are understandable responses by groups of people who are usually ignored by the mainstream so they raise a stink (read: pay attention to us or else!). Conversely putting people into that box usually comes from groups who are (like myself) historically highly empowered and have the luxury of intellectualizing things that are more in the corporeal/emotional realm for the groups they're critiquing (ie. stereotyping, mockery, physical abuse). I think fairness and justice are highly subjective and can only be gleaned by carful consideration of both sides, which is to say understanding why they have their "feelings" and why you don't care about them.

> I think the argument would be more along the lines of: "You're calling this Yoga, but here is what Yoga has meant historically in my culture, which is actually quite different."

This argument was actually made in the case of the University of Ottawa. The yoga instructor even offered to rename the class to "mindful stretching" so as not to associate it with the spiritual and cultural aspects of yoga / Yogi Practice, but was still shut down by the student's union because they felt that it was gentrifying and demonstrated cultural appropriation.

Personally I think the vast majority of culture has been stolen or replicated from older cultures and I don't think that having a stretching class really constitutes some kind of injustice just because it is derived from traditional yoga.

There's nothing understandable, and certainly not mindful, about a bunch of childish students telling someone they can't do Yoga because it might hurt someone's feelings. Especially when the argument devolved into "You can't even have a stretching class (no longer associated with yoga), because it might hurt someone's feelings." That is ripe for hurtful, deserved, mockery.

The consequence is your toy project won't work, and you'll have to find a solution. In doing so, you probably won't make the same mistake again, hopefully having learned something.

Aren't the bugs the consequence? Or it not working correctly? The framerate being to low? I taught myself WebGL by making planet sized spherical terrains. There were consequences just about every single moment I was doing this.

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