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Overnight News Digest: Slide into the weekend with Betelgeuse, Bad Bunny, and Sue Bird [1]
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Date: 2022-08-12
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse… This supergiant star experienced a huge mass ejection of its visible surface back in 2019 – something never before seen in a normal star’s behavior. Hubble observations are giving clues about this stellar mystery:
https://t.co/iyfQbYt0Bt pic.twitter.com/bfsqX0iGrZ
The book “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal,” by Justin Gregg, contrasts human thought with animal intelligence. The people come up short … Gregg’s clever and provocative book is full of irreverent notions and funny anecdotes — the creative upside to being a human animal. But our ability to abstract from our immediate experience means we can take that creativity too far. [...]
Such rhetorical contortions are probably the consequence of what he derides as our obsession with causal inference. Nonhuman animals get by just fine on “learned associations.” They link actions with results, without having to understand why something is happening. Humans, though, are “why specialists.” We need to look for causal connections — leading to some incredible achievements but also to some bizarre practices. Gregg points to the old medieval remedy of rubbing a rooster’s keister on a snakebite wound.
Gregg studies animal behavior and is an expert in dolphin communication. He shows how human cognition is extraordinarily complex, allowing us to paint pictures and write symphonies … But this compulsion to learn can be superfluous, he says. We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” Our collections of dead facts, Gregg writes, “help us to imagine an infinite number of solutions to whatever problems we encounter — for good or ill.”
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