Well, that's interesting.

[conuly]

I am firmly (firmly) of the belief that saying "temperature" when you mean "fever" is wrong, possibly even morally wrong.

And yet, I also believe that prescriptivism is wrong, possibly even morally wrong.

Well, it's easy enough to see how I reconcile this. Like most people, I'm fully capable of holding two totally contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time, without exploding. Really cool, huh?

That is the sort of thing that people will rail against. It's just silly, illogical (and not "illogical" like Spock seems to think) thinking, and It's Simply Not Right.

People do a lot of that sort of thing. People are prone to amazing leaps of mislogic, and amazing amounts of superstition (the current fad for antibacterial everything is, as far as I'm concerned, no less superstitious than crossing your fingers, especially when the evidence all shows that it's detrimental to make the world sterile), and all sorts of "bad" things.

But it occurs to me that there's probably a reason for all this. I mean to say, the human mind has lasted us a fairly long time, and it hasn't let us down yet, it might not altogether be wrong to have all these "flaws". Don't know what the advantage might be to any of them, but until any of us actually has a firm idea of how the human mind works (not likely), I'd rather avoid catagorizing them as good or bad facets of how we think.

Does that make sense? It made sense in my head, but it's currently in the 100s over here and my brain might be frying.

Comments

[rho]

My guess is something like this. Let's say there are 100 superstitions, along the lines of "doing this will stop me getting eaten by a lion". 99 of these superstitions are rubbish. 1 of them actually works. Then you have two people, one who follows all the superstitions and one who follows none of them. For the first 99, the second person has the selective advantage since they wouldn't be wasting their time on the silly superstitions. But then the 100th comes along, and the second person gets eaten by a lion. All the advantages accrued from the first 99 become meaningless.

If you don't have any good way of determining between superstition and reality, then you're better off erring on the side of caution, so that's how the human brain has evolved. If you can tell the difference you're better off actually acting on that, but the scientific method is a modern invention and we've had no time to evolve to make the most of it.

At least, that's my guess. I might be totally wrong.