Please, enough with the dead butterflies (2017)
emilydamstra.com
emilydamstra.com
It's a good example of art imitating art. On screen depictions of ER doctors zapping patients back to life with a defibrillator. Adrenaline shots to the heart. Gently putting bad guys to sleep with a concussive blow to the head.
Artists' dramatic depictions become cliche, and cliche becomes our norm. Good to stop and ponder, on occasion, how much of our worldview is shaped by such fallacies.
I think we all immitate and there's very little, if any, truly original... thoughts/behaviours
A mundane example is people turning up to court and behaving incorrectly because they're used to Hollywood depictions.
Another one is people thinking someone using a command-line on a computer must be “hacking”.
More troublesome is dramatically unrealistic depictions of minorities.
The world is full of examples where literary cliches have more influence on our biases and expectations than first or second hand experiences. We rarely observe other people falling in love, but we see it in movies and stories all the time.
Hence why this article is subtly brilliant. It reminds us how much of our "knowledge" is actually fiction.
Especially for girls, this gives a tremendously powerful incorrect body image signal.
However, even for guys, it's starting to get ridiculous--the actors always have their shirt off, are completely cut and have <5% bodyfat. The only boys who look like that at 15 are short, currently miserable as hell and cutting weight for a tournament (and probably on steroids, to boot).
In serialised fiction where you have a set of "cast members" the writers sometimes feel that they should shake things up. Temporarily put out of action one or the other member of the recurring characters to see how the new group dynamics will evolve. One common trope is where a member of the heroes' group falls into coma. Hijinks happen, the rest of the group copes with the missing member, and a few episodes later when the writers get bored of the scenario they bring back the person from coma. And because the whole motivation for the coma was a plot convenience you will get a quick recovery. A dramatic scene usually occurs where the patient wakes up, frequently due to some stimulus from a friend. You are lucky if you can see one cut scene of the patient recovering afterwards.
Real life coma is nothing like this. In reality a high percentage of those in coma die. They can have all kind of involuntary movements which would confuse someone who expects a sleeping beauty coma. The recovery usually is a long, and arduous process even when someone wakes up and of course there are health risks even after the patient opens their eyes up. [1]
A few weeks ago I had a discussion with my dad. He told me about a friend of his who had a stroke and fallen into a coma. At the time when we talked the friend was unable to breath on his own since days. My dad was super concerned that the friend in question doesn't have life insurance. It felt as if it was a foregone conclusion to him that his friend is going to wake up, and is going to leave the hospital. His only worry was what is going to happen with him after. Now, how much of this was an understandable psychological coping mechanism, and how much of it was due to incorrect representation of coma patients in media is hard to tell. Sadly later the friend passed away.
Luckily my dad didn't had to make any care decisions about his friend. (Of course) But regular people get thrown into situations like that all the time, all around the world. It's already a very stressful situation as a baseline, and then on top of whatever is happening people have all kind of unreasonable expectations swirling in their heads as they go through it. And all because writers regularly run out of material and have a need to conveniently shake things up in their fictional worlds.
1: https://www.livescience.com/739-comatose-patients-falsely-de...
Wouldn't having life insurance be more relevant for the case where the friend doesn't wake up...?
This happened in a European country (Hungary) There the health care is free at the point of consumption, so there was no question if he will be taken care of. The problem is if you were not paying your health insurance contributions prior to the illness, the tax authority might force you to pay the cost of your care after you are out of the hospital. Or at least that's how my dad explained to me his worry.
Medical debt is not fun, but clearly tertiary to the problem of not breathing, in my opinion.
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
If you filter out naval battles, it doesn't change anything. If you remove battles where they fought in a coalition with other Greeks, their win rate even drops slightly.
There is some evidence they may have had a slight advantage in leadership, because they had more leaders and their units were a bit smaller so they could perhaps operate more independently and seize opportunities on a field of battle (a strategy perfected by Romans). But overall, their strategy was bad even by antique standards - check out the Peloponesian War (with Athens). Spartans just had a good PR.
Dead butterflies is a meme (in the old meaning of viral idea). Spartan military excellence is a meme too.
Meanwhile, we have very little direct access to "reality." In fact, unmediated reality is pretty elusive.. when you stop to think about it. Win rate statistics and other such "objective" views into reality are a pretty sparse source of information.
Plutarch on the Theban victory over Sparta at Leuctra (371).
>For in all the great wars there had ever been against Greeks or barbarians, the Spartans were never before beaten by a smaller company than their own; nor, indeed, in a set battle, when their number was equal. Hence their courage was thought irresistible, and their high repute before the battle made a conquest already of enemies, who thought themselves no match for the men of Sparta even on equal terms.
That battle wiped out the Spartiate class for a generation, killing 400 out of 700. This opened the way for Thebes to liberate Messenia in 370, which was the majority of the Lakonian helots, and it was all downhill for Sparta after that.
They have awful diplomacy, no real coalitions (besides China which is more of a complete one sided economic dependency and a constant source of trouble), a poor military track record besides perfecting sabre rattling and a single small US ship from the 1950s as their most prominent war prize, no one is trying to imitate them, they rely heavily on raw numbers over ability in a defensive posture built up over generations, etc.
I’m trying to think of where the analogies begin…
The meme isn't that Sparta was awesome, the meme is that spartan soldiers and units are awesome.
I don't think most people think that a society that turns it's children out on the street to fend for themselves to toughen the ones that survive is good or worth any awe, but that doesn't mean that people can't look at the end result and think one specific aspect is worth respect.
It cuts both ways. Classic example is Thermopylae. The total number of Greeks is estimated to be between 5200 and 7700, but you very rarely hear any number higher than 300. The Spartan fame was manufactured, for example by historians like Herodotus.
Why does one have to resort to cherry picking to prove Spartan military excellence? Why aren't they self-evident?
Spartan military excellence is likely exaggerated, but it is also likely that there was a significant time period where their soldiers were individually superior to other communities, primarily as a result of better nutrition. Nutrition in early Greek agricultural communities is notoriously awful, while the severe inequality of Spartan society allowed them to maintain a realtively well-fed warrior class.
Individual quality doesn't scale, however, while raw quantity does. The Spartans were able to demonstrate excellence in results on a small scale, such as the conquest of Messina, but as quantity became a more important factor they simply couldn't compete even as they maintained some degree of individual excellence.
There are many things to dislike about Spartan society from a modern standpoint (such as their brutally oppressed slave underclass), but it is important to remember that this is a feature of almost all early agricultural societies.
and they absolutely surrendered!
To have a battle, you need two armies. If army A is clearly stronger than army B, B will typically admit defeat without going through the unpleasant process of being slaughtered to the last man. At least if they have reasonable expectations of a life after surrender.
So battles that are actually fought are normally pretty even. That doesn't mean every fighting force is equal to every other. The militarily stronger side gets their way by having a credible threat of settling things by force if needed.
Over time, though, more and more of the artists had learned by copying the golden and silver age work. And then copying those copies.
The end point of which was Rob Liefeld being unable to draw feet and his other atrocities of posture, proportion, or indeed a sense of where a human's organs might reside.
what do you mean by that? this has been debunked [0].
0: Werner Jaeger, Paideia
Those depictions of butterflies are intended to be nonfiction.. naturalism. A precise and true representation of butterflies, an artistic culture that people like Darwin were steeped in.
A fully empirical/popperian approach to knowledge isn't workable. Or rather, it's extremely sparse. You have to accept that you know almost nothing.
If you watch or read any business news, people always readily invent just-so stories about why the stock market moved this way or that. So that's the effect you are describing in full effect.
But making many (hopefully successful) predictions in a row is a good yardstick to keep yourself honest buy. See also Slatestarcodex's annual predictions and scoring. Or Bryan Caplan's string of bets.
(Btw, as long as you are not trying to outguess the markets, it's almost too easy to make mostly successful predictions: just predict whatever the market predicts.)
Eg race relations were pretty bad in the US, but in the UK, culturally still pretty accessible, a black person could always use money to buy status.
"Effusively positive" sounds like it would be deliberately distorting reality in order to present a point. I'm sure there's plenty of appetite for accurate documentaries about Travelers.
One of the Assassin‘s Creed games has an exploration mode, and if you walk by one of the outdoor “classrooms” the narrator will explain that while they show boys and girls learning together, the reality was that only boys were present in the schools, and that the creators here specifically chose to show the way it “should have been“.
They spent some unknown amount of money on this major feature that toured all around their map, tons of real photos and documentary about how they captured the feel, interviews with historians… centering on historically accurate, but when it came to controlling their own wokeness for a second, they had to present the “effusively positive“.
I don’t care what they do, but it was an admission that they didn’t really care about nonfiction, and made me untrustful of the remaining content.
Every time I watch a fictional movie about some social issue I ask myself: I've just watched an imaginary story that never happened played by actors who actually never experienced it. Now what?
Additionally chances are that with the way progressive pushes are going (blackface/yellowface/white actors playing nonwhite characters is swiftly going out of style) the actors may actually experience the themes being explored. I’m pretty sure black people playing black people in movies about black race relations may have personal experiences with such!
We now only have to make sure the chess players are impersonated by real FIDE masters and Queen Elizabeth by someone who has at least 1/8th royal blood.
In general, though, I do not believe that this problem is at all limited to the kind of art that we commonly dub as "fiction". For example, in the 19th century, travel diaries of colonial "explorers" were a very popular form of literature consumed by the educated classes in the colonial metropole, and they consisted almost entirely of distortions, willful or accidental omissions and often outright lies. Yet, they helped shape the view the West has of "oriental" cultures and peoples, with many of these cliches persisting even to the current age (i.e. "Orientalism").
Therefore, following your logic, all scientific works are damaging.
Embellishing stories has kind of a social function: to sugar-coat our vision of life. Reality is scary.
When the author presents a blatant lie just because, it's only annoying. At least for me, that movie and the last one are a scam. Sure, there must be a "profound" explanation of director's intentions.
There is no purpose in those alternate realities, other than being a sadistic fantasy, as another comment points to. Tarantino's universe is very familiar to me. It's based on the series B (or worse) films that we watched as teens.
There is an interesting exploration in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill of the obsessive thoughts that old movies raised presenting extreme situations.
I do enjoy goofy details like Uma Thurman in the plane with a katana in the hand luggage. But this is part of the assumed over-the-top tone. Like you said, it's clearly delineated and presented as fiction. The others not so much. A counterfactual historic movie? Now it seems I'm supposed to learn about the plot before watching the movie, or just avoid Tarantino, because I've had enough of that bs.
That's from Anton Checkov.
That's why it's fiction.
How do you know what actually happened outside of your direct experience? Anything that occurred outside the direct experience of a still-living human is known only through the stories people at the time told each other about it: incomplete, imperfectly remembered, biased towards the accounts of survivors who lived to tell their stories or those powerful enough to have their voices heard, even when all involved have the best of intentions of an accurate retelling. Unless the event made a sufficient impact on the physical world (which is itself going to be a very incomplete picture of events) then events older than ~80 years are accessible to us only through such stories.
If you think deliberate fiction is damaging because the human mind doesn't fully distinguish it from truth, even when it knows it to be fiction, then you must hate accounts of "what actually happened" even more: They are often incorrect and yet label themselves as truth, so the human mind is even more likely to take as "truth" something that is incorrect. If the human mind does not always distinguish fiction clearly, then it is even less capable of discerning incorrect accounts of what actually happened from those that are more accurate.
Let's take Inglorious Bastards as an example: What is more damaging, a dark comedy that presents itself as a fiction loosely inspired by actual events? Or a selective sampling of events that presents itself as the truth in denying events like the Holocaust-- something made ever more possible as time passes and those with direct experience die off?
Butterflies in this case are an excellent example of the problems of non fiction as well: The dead butterflies accurately depict what a butterfly looks like by using a pose that shows its full detail a bit better. But in providing that detail it loses the nuance of how a butterfly would look in the wild. And yet a pose from the the wild would give less information about its full visual detail, and no single pose from the wild could fully encapsulate its natural state. This is for one small living thing that we can observe now, today. How much more incomplete of a picture must we have of older events?
If you are disregarding fiction for the reasons you gave, you must also disregard nearly all aspects of prior accounts of human events as being similarly flawed and even more pernicious for their claims of being the truth.
In this case you never know what will get noticed an upvoted to the attention of others. Some repetition for of various viewpoints, especially when made with different nuances, is a good thing.
Some stories will help you overcome chalenges in your life, others will nurture your respect for people, others remind you people you love.
You choose the lies you believe in, hopefully you find ones that help you live your life.
To paraphrase a common aphorism - all stories are false, but some are useful.
All words are a lie. All narratives are built of symbols and cliches and agreed upon fictions in an attempt to point to reality. Reality is a thing we cannot touch or experience directly and is always filtered by our tools, experiences and perceptions. Even math might be merely a model, one where we convince ourselves integers actually exist (where does one thing become separate from another when reality seems to be built of atoms with probabilistic shells of elections and waves of electromagnetic interactions?)
As for being harmful? Well, fiction and non-fiction narratives are all powerful tools for shaping how we perceive of our reality. They can be harmful or helpful. Some of our favorite fictions are things like justice, freedom, liberty, or any conception that we all have rights.
Additionally, when we tell fictions we are crafted a world we can aspire to. We make gods and heroes to imagine what it would be like to be better. We make villains and demons to remind us of what we should avoid. Without these I do not believe we would be in a better place. One could even call these noble lies.
Of course, this does mean fiction can be dangerous and should be selected carefully. Ayn Rand has a peculiarly powerful hold over people because her fictions are good at making a deep impression on people. Vacation Bible Schools and overtly Christian education are aimed at controlling the narrative young minds receive. Then there's the constant mythologizing of history done to legitimize modern political stances (e.g. Civil War was some sort of lost cause about state's rights, Mayflower was the first "real" colony, founding "fathers" were near perfect, etc.).
Narratives are powerful. Worth noting Plato came to your same conclusion in his Republic. Essentially deeming all myth and plays and stories as too dangerous to be allowed.
I'm having a hard time believing that you believe that. e.g. Take the words "All", "words", "are", "a", and "lie"—they are all lies?!
I can't think of a way most of these words could even conceivably be a lie; a lie is most usually a statement or sentence, or built from those. To say that words "are a lie"..well, I think I must misunderstand you, yet reading the rest of your comment, it seems you meant the literal meaning. Although mostly you talk of narratives and fictions.
Also, it seems you are using "a lie" to mean "false", the way people sometimes do, although they are two very different things. "All words are untrue/false" doesn't sound so impressive, I guess, or "No words are true" etc.
Arguing about whether it's a lie (i.e. intentionally deceptive) or "just" untrue in a non-legal setting seems pedantic.
Words lie to us. They make all appearances at being the thing we are referencing without a lick of their reality. Worse, we sometimes forget that words are just agreed upon fictions and use arguments about those fictions instead of getting at the reality of the matter.
No-one thinks the word "pipe" is a pipe, nor does it claim to be a pipe.
And amid your claims of words being totally unreliable and deceptive, you seem to think I will know exactly what you mean by your words. Etc. Let's agree to disagree.
All ten of your last ten comments are you attempting to teach strangers, without having been asked, despite not being an expert, based in your beliefs, without evidence.
It seems likely that the reason you feel insulted is that you know that it's true and don't want to face it
> All ten of your last ten comments are you attempting to teach strangers, without having been asked, despite not being an expert, based in your beliefs, without evidence.
So I looked.. ready to face an unpleasant truth about myself. I was pleasantly surprised that "All ten" is nothing like true.
1. > Yup, better would be "pronounce a surname from a non-English speaking culture in a way that sounds reasonably correct."
Here I was agreeing with the parent.
2. > > "A" as in the "au" in "caught"
> Not an expert, but I can't offhand think of a language where this is even approximately how a is pronounced—which ones are you thinking of?
Parent and others evidently agreed as they soon changed the line to "A" as in "ah" (like "ah, I see"). Someone replied to my comment with a helpful link, my next comment was to quote from their link what I'd learnt from it, in the hope others could learn that too.
Hmm I notice most of these threads now have your comments added, the kind of comment which more nearly fits your description of mine, I have to say.
The next two comments are in this thread, me objecting to "All words are a lie".
4. My next comment was in response to an AskHN, Why is Martin Gardner no longer popular
> Well, first I'd want to confirm or not the assumption in the question: Isn't he? Popular compared with when? etc.
I see you have replied to that one too now, in part :
"HN has too many people who attempt to look wise by doubting things without cause, when the actual wise thing is not to discuss your doubts, but to address them
Unfortunately, the normal behavior is invisible, so people randomly admonishing one another gains the false appearance of being regular...
> Popular compared with when?
The past.
The sentence makes this clear and unambiguous, as does our lack of time travel. "
Ok.. that's getting creepy and silly. Please stop commenting on my comments. Your initial damning criticism of me seems to apply much more nearly to you, as is extremely common when advice or insults are given on this planet. Bye. I will report you immediately if you continue doing this. It's nowhere near OK. Stay away from me.
(I looked at 5 further recent comments of mine, none of them at all fit your description. There's a few like "That's a fascinating book, and led to a fascinating wikipedia rabbit hole, thank you!" I'm puzzled how you came up with your "All ten", I think you didn't even look. Very strange.)
I have to strongly disagree here. Since it was soo absurd, it was obviously a work of fiction. A surreal funny one at that. A gang of jews that blows up Hitler? Yes, a movie can do that. Anyone taking it literal, has definitely other problems in life.
But I do have a problem with movies, that pretend to be historical authentic - but are not. And are therefore effectivly rewriting history. And sadly most, if not all "historic" hollywood productions fall into that category.
This is where I see the problem - when the lines get blurry.
If we're all lucky, more people will start realizing that it doesn't stop at Hollywood, and there's no reason to expect the documentary was absolutely correct and without bias either (in some respects documentaries can be much worse since they often purport to be unbiased and correct).
It is just not a real historic story and it does not aim to be one. So I do take a bit offense at the characterization from the parent poster as a abomination.
I actually share some of the sentiment - that it is not wise to numb and confuse the mind only with fiction. But fantasy and fiction is a very core part of what makes us human. Or do you take offense that your dreams at night are not real? Having fantasy and imagination is a good thing. It only becomes problematic when people cannot seperate fantasy from reality anymore. And yes, that is a big problem.
This isn't just "not unpopular" but universally, intrinsically understood.
“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” ― Pablo Picasso
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZZBfZyJ-2s
> …and therefore damaging.
This claim that "all fiction is damaging" is inconceivable to me. How does one develop empathy if one is incapable of imagining anything other than what they've directly experienced?
Does nobody read with a critical eye? I know sometimes I have to give up on a story or series if the things I'm asked to accept pass a boundary, and they're kept consistent.
> Every mutilation applied to actual events - in the service of making them supposedly more entertaining - clouds our understanding of them.
It's impossible to convey with absolute accuracy any event. I would hazard that any representation no matter how accurate it tries to be will be riddles with inaccuracies or assumptions that are represented through bias.
We're screwed from the outset because we're incapable of accepting all the possible stimuli of a situation (and so are recording devices), and any event is also only a part in a series which adds context.
To that you add that it's impossible to impart your own experience without bias (and the imparting of personal experience is the only way to get details other than what we can record automatically), which adds quite a bit to any event.
Everything is something we're getting through a skinner box, and whether marketed as fact or fiction, you have to make choices on what is true or not. Painting fiction with a broad brush as negative likely won't help in the end. All you're doing is taking the inputs that tell you up front they're not necessarily true in the sense of real events (even if they may try to make you think about fundamental things in ways you didn't consider, which is useful) and removing them to prioritize things that are also untrue in some way, but don't have the decency to own up to it.
A great example of this is the scene from John Wick where Wick and a villain are in a crowd firing at each other with noone noticing.
There is a video with the gun sounds recreated to be more realistic:
> Only those firearms subject to the National Firearms Act (NFA) (e.g., machineguns, short–barreled rifles and shotguns, silencers, destructive devices, and firearms designated as “any other weapons”) must be registered with ATF.
> Firearms registration may be required by state or local law. Any person considering acquiring a firearm should contact their State Attorney General’s Office to inquire about the laws and possible state or local restrictions.
https://www.atf.gov/questions-and-answers/qa/how-does-person...
But because movies anti-educate people on this subject it probably won't go anywhere.
Research [2] shows suppressed small arms are still well over 100dB (e.g. landing airplane loud) at peak impulse.
[1] https://youtu.be/1VWcGwPJQfc?t=30
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/William-Murphy-18/publi...
Note that if you do want a mostly-silent, fairly-reliably-lethal ranged weapon, crossbows are probably a better option.
Actors are doing their best to portray how humans behave, but some subset of humans observe a large portion of what “normal” behavior is through a screen. At some point, did humans begin imitating the actors to a large degree, while the actors continued imitating the humans? In other words, did art begin imitating art?
This thought was brought on by watching old movies. Either actors were much worse back then, or people behaved differently, or both. And to what degree did those actors shape today’s behavior?
Another very damaging myth is that kung fu will save you from muggers. Muggers may have no objections to stabbing you, and if they attack they often attack from surprise. Or really, that a fight looks anything like in a martial arts movie. Go watch a fight in a Karate or Judo championship. It's quite boring, contestants are quite evenly matched and move with respect to each other.
(Source: been there, done that, sparred and competed both against world class olympic martial artists as well as complete beginners.)
Preaching martial arts as a form of discipline or structure is fine as long as you don’t attach “self defense” to it. As soon as you’re teaching self defense, the content needs to change and very few studios tackle it well.
If your curriculum doesn’t teach:
* Pre-incident indicators
* Local law, when is violence justified
* De-escalation branching into explosive violence with maximum damage
* The goal is to escape safely, not submit your opponent (your opponent likely has friends, even if you don’t see them)
* The difference between defending blunt weapons, bladed weapons (don’t put yourself in the blender), and firearms
* Avoiding training “scars” from drilling (like handing a gun back to your opponent after a disarm, which I have second hand knowledge of someone doing in a real confrontation and dying)
* Coarse motor skills > fine motor skills (your adrenaline is pumping, relying on a technical fine motor skill to save your life isn’t going to go well)
You’re not prepared for street violence. Your self defense class is liable to get you killed if you ever need to use it.
So far my favorite honest take on self defense is Kelly McCann’s street combatives series. I’m sure there is better content out there.
Anyone believing that, would also have to believe, that ANY woman can get YOU, if she is persistent enough. And most would clearly object to that, but yeah logic consistency is not usually a theme of movie romances or of the target audience.
"Another very damaging myth is that kung fu will save you from muggers"
But if you know kung fu (or any martial arts) on a high level, then yes, it usually will save you from muggers. Because martial arts at its core (unless we are talking only about the sports turnament situation) is about situational awareness ALL the time. Meaning you do not get close enough to a person, that might stab you, in the first place. You are aware of dangers. Of people posing threats. You check the persons and places around you for signs of trouble. So you are in control of the situation - so you can be calm. Even when there is indeed trouble. But if fear and anger are not controlling you, you can control the situation and diffuse it. (and knowing that you can take someone out in a moment, helps with the confidence, unless it feeds your ego seeking such moments)
Otherwise yes, martial arts masters bleed as anyone else. I think some world champion of kickboxing was killed in a bar fight. And the mystic glorifications of kung fu and co does lives on in the movies, but in reality it mostly vanished by real bullets
He always stressed the importance of having the laces on your shoes tied, and practicing your wind sprints.
This is itself an example of "art imitating art" as per upthread. English speakers use the word "sifu" as part of its own independent cultural tradition. They use it even in contexts where it makes no sense, surrounded by Mandarin references - notably in Kung Fu Panda and less notably here: http://gowdb.com/troops/6582 - because they are sure it's "Chinese".
But if you learned the word by studying Chinese you'd spell it shifu. The English word comes from exposure to southerners who make no distinction between "s" and "sh". But distinguishing those two sounds is not a problem for English speakers.
> This is itself an example of "art imitating art" as per upthread.
In contradiction to your comment, this is an example of my correctly using Sifu's title, exactly as he spells and pronounces it.
> English speakers use the word "sifu" as part of its own independent cultural tradition.
In contradiction to your comment, I am using the word "sifu" as part of a cultural tradition which came to America from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong. I'm an English speaker; you are wrong.
> They use it even in contexts where it makes no sense, surrounded by Mandarin references - notably in Kung Fu Panda and less notably here: http://gowdb.com/troops/6582 - because they are sure it's "Chinese".
This may be true, but in contradiction to your first sentence (which I may fairly consider the rest of the paragraph to continue), this is not an example of that.
> But if you learned the word by studying Chinese you'd spell it shifu.
In contradiction to your comment, if you learned the word from a Cantonese speaker you would spell it sifu, which is how it's pronounced. Cantonese is one of the languages called "Chinese", so you are wrong here.
> The English word comes from exposure to southerners who make no distinction between "s" and "sh".
The "southerners" you're referring to include the Cantonese, surely. Who pronounce that word /sifu/, not /ʃɚfʊ/, and spell it accordingly. This is precisely like saying gyoza should be spelled gyatze, or gato should be spelled chat. Meaningless!
> But distinguishing those two sounds is not a problem for English speakers.
Irrelevant.
> In contradiction to your comment, I am using the word "sifu" as part of a cultural tradition which came to America from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong.
This isn't a contradiction; you're agreeing with me.
> The "southerners" you're referring to include the Cantonese, surely. Who pronounce that word /sifu/, not /ʃɚfʊ/, and spell it accordingly.
You might be surprised to learn how the Cantonese spell 师傅.
It's a lazy way to up the emotional connection between the two characters.
If I recall, more recent movies like Deadpool actually begin to work against it by the hero and damsel being in a long term relationship.
As for the rest, I heartily agree. I've been thinking about that here lately, how we watch movie fights and they are typically highly choreographed and often visually beautiful forms of dance that likely have nothing at all to do with what real violence looks like.
Not that I want to promote real violence, but I wonder what impact that has on human psychology and how unrealistic it makes some of our expectations when dealing with actual reality when it fails to match up to what we have fed our brains via various forms of media.
However... I have an illustrates copy of "Origin of Species," with Darwin's original drawings. It's quite beautiful. Naturalists of the day used a style of drawing. It was utilitarian, good for identification purposes. But, it's almost impossible not to see it as an artistic tradition too.
Point taken though. This style originates in science, and they had reasons for their style.
That's not how any phones ever worked even back when they used dial tones.
- Entomologist rates ant emojis: https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/
- Which emoji scissors close: https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html
- A thread of rating every horse emoji: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832
- Ranking the "Ringed Planet" emojis: https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817
- Reviewing Steam Loco Emojis: https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790
- Talk about Telescope emojis: https://mobile.twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607...
- Would you survive a skydive with an emoji parachute? (my own post): https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/
It's also a great example of what I'd consider good HN content. Not necessarily useful or anything, but it certainly tickled my curiosity.
I've actually seen some really large butterflies that look pretty much like the "pinned wings dead butterfly" when it flies. I tried to film it, but couldn't get a good shot.
I found this article interesting when it came out, but after seeing living butterflies that look exactly like it says they shouldn't, I'm not going to spread the idea that all these butterfly images are wrong.
I have seen thousands of butterflies in my life, and yes, most of them have their forewings much further back. Not that I ever paid too close attention, even after reading this article for the first time. It was just a striking image when I saw these huge butterflies on holiday in December 2019, and they looked like a stereotypical animated movie aesthetic butterflies with the "wrong" wings, and I thought it was amusing.
I'm sure it's a _possible_ position in which to find many species, but it seems like at best a rare one.
I've got some pictures of red admirals (it painted ladies, not sure) resting in "dead" pose on brambles somewhere that I took only because I'd seen this article.
My father grows milkweed to support a population of monarchs. They also flap their wings open and closed while resting.
Even if the species isn't endangered or anything, isn't that kind of messed up? Not a great way for a kid to learn empathy.
My seven year old enjoyed taking close up photos of butterflies a couple days ago using my phone. All the while saying sweet things to them, treating them as friends that she didn't want to frighten. She'd be offended with the idea of catching them to kill them and stick a pin in them to then admire their beauty in all its deadness.
Edit: A web search turns up that butterfly populations have declined by more than 30% in Europe/USA in the past 25 years or so, and were in decline for long before that. One estimate is that they have declined by more than 80% in Western Europe since the late 19th century, with many species disappearing entirely.
Raising butterflies is quite a common class project in UK primary schools.
I think most kids are smart enough to understand the difference between insects and the higher forms of life that are capable of experiencing suffering.
Recently my daughter befriended a tiny ant while at the blacktop at the local rec center. She was sort of taking a time out from interacting with her human friends for a bit.
Then one of her friends came over and squished the ant, thinking it was funny, saying "it's just an ant" when my daughter complained.
It really bothered me. Not the death of the ant, obviously. (so what, I step on them all the time)
I don't know if you have kids, but I think there was something a bit off about that girl and her choice to kill the ant. Maybe you would consider her "smart." I didn't.
I observe a correlation between overattachment to animals and lack of empathy toward other humans.
In other words, people with "fur babies" are far less likely to have well-formed consciences.
“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
― Emmanuel Kant
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13607-he-who-is-cruel-to-an...
I'm sure there are people with unhealthy attachments to animals, and who knows the extent of their issues and how they manifest. But a child who rejects a hobby that, at its core, is the deliberate killing of animals that they find beautiful, isn't that. As a parent, I say it is exactly how a child should be at that age.
He's close to 3 now, so he's exploring life & death. Previously, if we accidentally stepped on a snail, we'd hide it from him. Now, we talk it through and say "Oh no, we accidentally stepped on the snail! Let's apologize to snail and say sorry snail, I didn't mean to step on you. I'll try to be more careful next time." I use the opportunity to explain how the ants & wasps will come and eat the snail now to clean it up. That we try not to kill any insects, plants, or animals unless we plan to eat it.
We have close family with a 5 year old that actually takes very much the opposite approach, even singing a song to kill the ants. Internally, I was horrified, but kept my mouth shut. My son picked it up and was deliberately stepping on ants the next time we were outside. I just reaffirmed the fact that this is the ants' home, and that we should be kind and not hurt ants like that. Can we apologize to the ants please? Now the ant's mama and daddy are going to be sad because they'll miss him, etc.
He's young. I just want him to grow up appreciating and respecting all life. I figure if we can continue being kind to small life, it will extend to our friends as lockdowns lift. So far so good.
Perhaps you could try to acculturate your son without deliberately lying to him. The only true claim this sentence makes is that, when you step on an ant, the ant's mother exists.
Pretend play is important. My seven year old understands the distinction between humans, bugs, and toys. But she still pretends, and uses the latter as "empathy practice." This is normal, healthy child development.
There is a time and a place for reminding children that bugs probably don't have feelings per se, and that dolls and stuffies especially don't. If you remind them constantly, and never let them go into "pretend mode" without spoiling it with such reminders, let's just say I recommend you avoid situations that put you in much contact with kids.
How do you deal with termite infestations?
The best advocates for healthy duck and deer populations are people who enjoy killing and eating them.
Butterfly populations are declining throughout the developed world, it seems like a safe bet to me that more amateur lepidopterists would serve as an advocacy group for arresting and reversing that decline.
Any individual butterfly is not long for this world, after all. Killing it and mounting it isn't a threat to its species; no one caring if they live or die is.
I do feel that it should be possible to use new technologies to share/capture what a butterfly looks like and then for others to view that. The actual killing and mounting shouldn't have to be a pre-requisite for being a lepidopterist, I feel.
Previous discussions:
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 164 comments
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 28 comments
Edit: To be more specific. Most butterflies hold their wings in this position at rest. Illustrated in 2D it looks “dead”
Moths do happen to hold their wings flat and if you look at field guides are usually illustrated this way.
People who actually spend time observing butterflies would directly contradict the author’s assertion.
The reason field guides show butterflies this way is because that’s how you usually see them. Butterflies hold their wings up most of the time, not flat as the author suggests.
So when illustrated in 2D you see the wings looking “dead”.
Or you know… all the scientists and naturalists are just wrong and this artist is right.
Edit: The reason this article is troublesome is because it’s another case of spreading misinformation.
If I were going to post a long article about butterfly physiology (which is basically what this purports to be) I would first do research. I’d take the hypotheses “butterflies are illustrated wrong” and see where the current data stands. If I found the data wanting, I’d at least couch the argument along the lines of “the current data is u unconvincing, so here’s my theory”
Instead the author cherry picked images that support her narrative, and failed to do any research on the subject, going so far as to say “In field guides and other butterfly reference materials, one frequently sees images of such pinned butterflies because, I presume, it is easy to photograph a dead butterfly” when actually the images have been drawn from live butterflies.
She then states this whole thing as fact rather than what it is, her conjecture (which when put to scrutiny can be shown false)
Now this is a simple article about butterflies, so isn’t really a big deal. The problem lies when this same behavior and thinking deals with subjects that are especially important like climate change, vaccines, etc. This is where misinformation starts. In this case Facebook, Twitter, etc could amplify “butterflies are illustrated wrong” just like they amplify “vaccines are bad” and “climate change isn’t real”.
In a real butterfly resting, the trailing edge of the forewings is not perpendicular to the body’s axis.
> it is the leading edge of the forewings that is nearly perpendicular to the body. … but it’s atypical for the trailing edge of the forewings to be perpendicular to the body
Look closely at the photos and you will see that the leading edge of the forewings is nowhere near perpendicular and the trailing edge is nearly perpendicular (much more so than the leading edge)… in direct contradiction of the above authors statement.
Disclaimer: my partner painted it.
In general, for bare-eye identification you want to look at size, general conformation (eg Vespinae have a generally more robust build and a markedly blunt postpropodeal gaster vs Polistinae and solitaries, while sawflies don't have a "wasp waist" abdominal petiole at all), body and leg markings, and in some cases proportions of facial features, although that's often more useful in identifying a family or a genus than a species. With a living, active animal, many features can be hard to spot, so knowledge of locally common species is also useful in guiding identification, as is behavior - the four-toothed mason wasps that build nest cells in my porch stair rails look at a glance a lot like bald-faced yellowjackets, but behave totally differently, which can be enough to distinguish even without a chance at a close look.
If you have photos or even just an accurate description and still want a specific (from photos) or at least familial ID, I might be able to give you one from them; I'm only an interested amateur and not as familiar with true hornets since there are few to be found in the Nearctic, but I've been an interested amateur for long enough to be both well supplied with references and reasonably practiced at identification. Feel free to email me at any of the addresses in my profile, or just reply here, and I'll be happy to take a look.
Failing that, if you do have photos, BugGuide and iNaturalist are good options for identification, although my experience with the latter suggests difficult IDs aren't likely to find much traction there - that might, as some have argued, be an effect of the platform's gamification, but I think it may be more just that hymenopterologists are likely no more common there than elsewhere.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/25949441@N02/9377845729/
But yeah, I expect I’ll be seeing dead butterflies everywhere now.
The larger point still stands that butterflies don't hold their wings this way at rest, and it's true of hymenopterans as well; you often see specimen wasps mounted with all four wings fully spread, where the living animal at rest invariably holds the rear wings against the front such that only the latter are really visible. The only time this isn't the case is in flight or when the wings are otherwise in use (eg nest fanning on a hot day), but you need a very fast shutter to freeze that motion, and all you'll see with your bare eye is a blur.
Basically: Some might get their wings into unusual position mid-flight, but the angle of the photo also plays in a great deal - the depicting addressed in the article is from directly above.
So, sure, if you're depicting a buttery in a completely different pose to the examples in the article, it might be right.
And by the way, yes, some people like it.
But the biggest problem with the article is that even when lots of people blindly assume that is right, the main idea is wrong. It happens often when people try to use their philosophical ideas to explain nature. Yes, butterflies can spread their wings. If you try to force the wing opened in a impossible position it just will break.
For some of these (like the pillow) its obviously just a decorative motif. Dead butterflies are pretty. So are cut flowers, mounted antlers, wood, and scrimshaw.
Point is that a non-butterfly expert that does not spend their life researching would only relate to depictions of butterflies, not their true form.
I also find this very similar to old photos where people looked stiff and lifeless. As photography became more mobile and accessible, photos became more lifelike.
(And if you liked the article, you're probably enjoying articles wrong.)
I look forward to reading it, once it comes up for air.
Not a relaxed posture reflective of nature, but does allow more visibility and analysis.
Wing position and form is how I'd differentiate them. Moths have a delta form at rest and don't close their wings together vertically?
Looking at sources, the current state of play appears to be that butterflies are (mostly) (sorta) monophyletic in Papilionoidea, and moths are paraphyletic in "Lepidoptera except Papilionoidea", but it's all rather messy and nobody's all that sure.
This isn't as unusual as it might sound, actually. You see much the same in Hymenoptera, for example - large insect families just aren't all that comprehensively studied in the first place, not least because many of their members can be quite hard to find, and what prior taxonomic work there was has been undergoing pretty radical revision since the advent of (relatively) inexpensive genomics and the consequent feasibility of molecular taxonomy.
One of those posts where you see an argumentative title, get ready to fight it with your lifetime of experience, before realising that maybe the butterfly expert knows best.
Quite interesting how so many people have got it wrong all this time.