Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 4451-4455 (the 1st through 5th of February, 2021)
Farideh:
Comic's up.
What Willow is talking about reminds me of something that was mentioned in one of the Hitchhiker's books:
--- Quote from: Mostly Harmless (Douglas Adams) ---In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.
--- End quote ---
The patterns are what is important, not what you use to find them.
shanejayell:
Well, whatever floats your boat, Willow....
Gnabberwocky:
We are slowly learning that Willow is much wiser than we were originally led to believe.
Second thing: the debate inside the comic right now reminds me a lot of Wil and Penelope.
Elder Sign:
I'm glad Clinton appears to have a high tolerance for this line of discussion, because heavily-introverted and Elliot-level-anxious me would have been all "please back off and get TF out of my face" a long time ago. And I'm not really sure about the "please" bit.
Gus_Smedstad:
I strongly, strongly disagree with Willow's reasoning here.
The problem with using made-up things to "make sense of the world" is that it's almost never "constructive." Rather than "making sense of the world," people make things up that aren't true because it fits what they want to be true.
There's a phrase for people who take patterns that aren't really there seriously. It's "conspiracy theorist." That leads to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress, and hundreds of people storming the US Capitol building.
There are lots of people who use religion to "make sense of the world," and the end result is that lots of them insist on dictating the actions of others, by restricting things like birth control or abortion. Or insisting that homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to marry. In parts of the world where religion is more extreme, it means things like the death penalty for "disrespecting Islam."
Astrology isn't so obviously toxic, but if you take it seriously, you're still making decisions based on things that are imaginary.
In a broader sense, believing in patterns that aren't real generally prevents you from delving deeper and actually understanding what's going on. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a great talk about the number of great minds throughout history who gave up lines of inquiry because they already had a pat answer: the gods did it.
So, no. Willow's completely wrong. It does matter, and her argument is specious.
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