Sunday 9 November 2014

Specific Versus Generalized, exaggerated

I admire the high resolution article on 6th Nov 2014 by Jerry Coyne critiquing the article by, Andrew Brown: "If you hate the belief, you hate the believer" 
Jerry Coyne shows his eye for detail and demonstrates how to make comments that are specific, to the point, accurate.
I wonder if there is a comparison with image resolution? There is a good illustration on Wikipedia:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution#mediaviewer/File:Resolution_illustration.png
I wonder if early human language was like ZX-81 resolution?

         It is so easy to make generalized, exaggerated, conflated comments like, “I hate you” which most often means, “I hate the thing you did just there” or “I am furious at being told to do that”
Mostly "I don't like you" is a vague, amorphous, rude way of saying,"There is something that you have done or an idea that you hold that I don't like" or "I don't trust you not to harm me, I suspect he is looking for an opportunity to steal from me or do something harmful such as scheming against me" Maybe it is mostly the case that people have mixed feelings about others. Love and hate, amusement and boredom, admiration and revulsion, like and dislike.
           If a super intelligent brain surgeon who has an IQ of 160 is driving a car and breaks the highway code at some point, due to being distracted by solving some three dimensional trigonometric equation then does it make sense for the person who is at risk of injury to shout,”You idiot” ? It would be more accurate to say,”That was idiotic behaviour” but maybe more specific & helpful to say,”Don’t get distracted from driving, concentrate, watch out, keep your mind on the task in hand”
         I think it is interesting to look at the changes that the Coran has made to the Babble stories, however I hate the idea of hell that is proposed in the Coran. I think it is hateful to propose that hell is real. It makes me angry when I hear people make such proposals but then I focus on what I have read that says it is wildly unlikely that there is any afterlife let alone one of suffering. Also having thought of the worst case scenario of hell and then seen that it probably doesn't exist, annihilation seems preferable, a relief rather than a gloomy disappointment. So then I can laugh at the stories of religion and pity those who are blinded by it. Their religion is only one aspect of them. I like some of the Islamic melodies & architecture etc.
             If I love one aspect or point of a film it doesn’t mean I love it all equally, just as if I loathe one scene it doesn’t mean I have to reject the whole thing. However it is maybe just part of life that our first comments about something give a vague impression to what we witnessed; “loved it, great, abysmal” and only later do we fill in details once we are more focused on it.
(It can sometimes be funny to deliberately exaggerate but can also be done destructively)
It is just too easy to make distorted, over the top comments in the heat of the moment. Later we hope the other person will ignore it as nonsense. The,”I’m annoyed that you forgot to put the bin out” becomes,”You always do that. You’re hopeless” but could have been,”Please try harder” Does it matter?
    When some one says,"You fool" it is possible to reply, "In what way exactly ? What is it about what I have done that you are displeased about ? What did you want me to do, how exactly did you want it done"
    By making generalized, exaggerated comments maybe it can be compared to  using a sledge hammer to drive in a pin or an axe to do brain surgery instead  a scalpel

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