4 ms·
Me: Horses can run faster than people! You: "Faster than people"?! That's a hopelessly vague and unhelpful comparison. No horse can ever go faster than a human
by yesenadam 9y ago
Me: Horses can run faster than people!
You: "Faster than people"?! That's a hopelessly vague and unhelpful comparison. No horse can ever go faster than a human if by "human" you mean a human equipped with whatever tools the human may choose to use, because those tools would include the horse against which you would have it compete. So the comparison only makes sense if you restrict the human in some way.
Me: Um..
:-) The other stuff you say makes perfect sense, but that first bit is more pedantic than fair, I think.
- akkat 9y agoA bit unrelated but there are horse vs people marathons. and many times people win. that is because horses cannot cool themselves like people can
- bloak 9y agoYes, see "persistence hunting". It turns out that although humans may be thrashed by a poodle over short distances they are really rather good at extreme-long-distance races.
- bloak 9y agoYou make a good point. There are many situations in which it's fairly obvious how the comparison ought to be made: the human should not be allowed to use a horse in competing with the horse in "running", and should not be allowed to use a computer in competing with the computer in "guessing sexuality". However, if the competition is in "predicting share price movements" then surely it would be strange not to allow some kind of computational assistance for the human, so in those cases, at least, it gets a bit hard to decide where to draw the line.