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Even though the comic is a comic, it's not about actual fertility goddesses making food, it's about prehistoric people making up ideas like that while they expr

Even though the comic is a comic, it's not about actual fertility goddesses making food, it's about prehistoric people making up ideas like that while they expressed their gratitude for the abundance of nature. Look, I'm a REAL person. You know how I get apples in apple season? I walk to a park near my house where there are decades-old apple trees. I don't know who planted them. Nobody today does anything to care for them. They just do what trees do. And the majority of the apples fall on the ground because nobody picked them. And I walk over to the park and I pick apples and eat them. Oh, but I had to WALK there you say. And I had to WORK to have a home in this town. And we have to have a working society in order to pay the City to keep the park from being sold to a developer who would cut down all the trees. Or that I have to do the work of EATING the apple, like chewing it and so on. I mean, this is just endless. It's quite simple: Either "no such thing as a free lunch" is falsifiable and I've falsified it with real evidence OR it's unfalsifiable because you'll claim that any tangential aspect of existence that can be called "work" makes the apple not free. Either way, the aphorism is no good. "Too good to be true" is a better aphorism because it isn't used to imply that everything good always has a catch. It doesn't say "Anything great is too good to be true", it just asserts that things that seem great can be too good to be true (they have some catch). And that's useful because we should think about all the catches and context of things. But that doesn't mean we should become cynics who just deny that anything great is ever possible.

leereeves 5y ago
That's a literal interpretation, but it's an expression, not a scientific law. People often say something like "That never happens" about things that are simply very rare. Seeing the rather literal tone of the conversation, I responded with an equally literal interpretation of the comic. Of course I know that the "local fertility goddess" is a figurative expression for the abundance of nature, but "no such thing as a free lunch" is also figurative, and "the pot calling the kettle black" isn't actually about a talking pot.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  I was NOT doing a literal interp. That would mean getting hung up on what counts as "lunch" and not recognizing that it's a metaphor. That's not what I was doing. Everything I've posted is about critiquing what I see as the implications and ramifications and arguments of the metaphor, recognizing it as the aphorism that it is.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    It's a literal interp of "there's no such thing", whereas I interpret it as hyperbole, much like "nobody does that anymore" or "I looked everywhere...". Yes, there are a few free lunches. That doesn't make it bad expression, just not a literal one. "The idea that everything in life should have a price", as you said, is hyperbole too. There are lots of things that no one is trying to put a price on, but let's not go down that road. > Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden. Yes, but food isn't one of them in a world with 7 billion people. Compared to the population, food isn't abundant, and managing to feed so many people is one of the greatest human achievements; it's all thanks to the work of hundreds of millions of people, not nature's abundance.

leereeves 5y ago

That's a literal interpretation, but it's an expression, not a scientific law. People often say something like "That never happens" about things that are simply very rare. Seeing the rather literal tone of the conversation, I responded with an equally literal interpretation of the comic. Of course I know that the "local fertility goddess" is a figurative expression for the abundance of nature, but "no such thing as a free lunch" is also figurative, and "the pot calling the kettle black" isn't actually about a talking pot.

quadrangle 5y ago
I was NOT doing a literal interp. That would mean getting hung up on what counts as "lunch" and not recognizing that it's a metaphor. That's not what I was doing. Everything I've posted is about critiquing what I see as the implications and ramifications and arguments of the metaphor, recognizing it as the aphorism that it is.
- leereeves 5y ago
  It's a literal interp of "there's no such thing", whereas I interpret it as hyperbole, much like "nobody does that anymore" or "I looked everywhere...". Yes, there are a few free lunches. That doesn't make it bad expression, just not a literal one. "The idea that everything in life should have a price", as you said, is hyperbole too. There are lots of things that no one is trying to put a price on, but let's not go down that road. > Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden. Yes, but food isn't one of them in a world with 7 billion people. Compared to the population, food isn't abundant, and managing to feed so many people is one of the greatest human achievements; it's all thanks to the work of hundreds of millions of people, not nature's abundance.