this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Weird News - Things that make you go 'hmmm'
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It's a wonder humans took over the world and not dolphins or some other reasonably smart animal.
Humans are 20% culture, progress, and innovation, and 80% tasty hands and dead weight.
Those hands aren't just tasty, they also have opposable thumbs and allow complex tool use, and perhaps most importantly, complex tool creation.
I think the complex use and creation are probably the exception not the rule. I'm beginning to wonder if most people, especially in the US, could fish ants out of a colony with a stick. I am unfortunately doubtful.
Is incompetence and ignorance widespread? Yes.
Are most things underpinning civilization too complicated for most to understand? Also yes.
But do they have that innate human spirit of creativity and persistence that will enable them to figure it out if it fell on them and their peers to rebuild? Well, no. Not really, probably not.
They'll figure out some of it and make a primitive and misunderstood approximation of civilization. Like a parrot mimicking good poetry, people will not understand the purpose behind the designs that shaped their life. They'll try to follow the notes and say the words, but they won't æ understand. They won't rebuild civilization, they'll be making a barely functional tribe.
Like a phone, which was part of the problem here