5 ms·

No, deafness and blindness are disabling because they provide critical long range data. Being able to see is essentially a superpower if you are blind. Same wit

No, deafness and blindness are disabling because they provide critical long range data. Being able to see is essentially a superpower if you are blind. Same with hearing.

throwway120385 10mo ago
Only in that narrow viewpoint. Most people talk about disability in the context of a society because much of what we encounter in our day to day is created by other people. The sights, sounds, smells, and experiences in our world are frequently because of others. So in that context, if the dominant culture makes it a point to create experiences that require hearing or sight to consume, then yes it's a disability. But if we adapt some or all of what we do for people who don't have those senses, then we can make it less disabling.
- suddenlybananas 10mo ago
  While it's good for society to accommodate those with disabilities as much as possible, we shouldn't pretend it isn't detrimental to be unable to see or hear. You don't need to believe obvious falsehoods in order to accommodate people.
  - fwip 10mo ago
    You've set up a straw man here - nobody in this thread is claiming that it's not detrimental to be missing a sense. The point is that disability exists within the context of the world we live in, and the society we've built is one that largely assumes people have both sight and hearing.
    - xigoi 10mo ago
      > Sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness are disabling because the world is not oriented to people with sensory disabilities. Implying that they wouldn’t be detrimental if the world was “oriented” differently.
      - retrac 10mo ago
        Since I'm the person who wrote that I can explain what I meant. I have never had to deal with a giant cat stalking me and being unable to hear it. I do routinely have to deal with intercom systems which I cannot hear, though. The world most humans inhabit is human-made. And the human-made environment can be remade.
      - fwip 10mo ago
        Ah, I see the disconnect. In this discussion, "disabling" is not the same as "detrimental." Disabling is when you are unable to do important activities that others can do. I'm not an expert here on the subject, but this is my understanding. For a simplified example, imagine two government buildings, one with and one without an accessibility ramp. A person in a wheelchair is able to access the former, even if going up the ramp takes longer than the stairs. Not having the option to take the stairs is still detrimental to the person, but they're still able to access those services. The second disables the person, as they're no longer able to access important services because they are unable to take the stairs. Accommodations help keep "detrimental" from meaning disabled. The voice at the street crossing that says "walk", curb cuts, and closed captioning all help people participate in daily normal life, despite having those sensory disabilities. There are other designs that are more holistic as well - for example, if those same government services are accessible online, or the agent makes house calls, it naturally makes the services more accessible to more people. (Note: I'm not saying that this specific example is a good idea - just as an example of "how we design our society affects how people can participate in it.")
        UltraSane 10mo ago
        There are limits to accomodations and a blind person is never going to be a good sniper
        fwip 10mo ago
        Yes, and?
  - lurk2 10mo ago
    I’ve always found this semantic argument somewhat silly as being blind or deaf is an obvious disadvantage in natural contexts, but one of the more compelling ideas here is that the fitness boundary isn’t fixed. It would probably be a fitness advantage if I could sense electromagnetic fields, but no one would describe me as disabled for not being able to sense these fields—unless, perhaps, everyone else could. So what we consider to be a disability does seem to be a function of what we consider to be normal.
    - suddenlybananas 10mo ago
      >So what we consider to be a disability does seem to be a function of what we consider to be normal. Obviously? How could it be based on anything else? People are just much more uncomfortable with making normative statements than they used to be.
      - lurk2 10mo ago
        > How could it be based on anything else? The point is that the capability is measurable but the capabilities we consider to be essential are based on normalcy and thus effectively arbitrary. Eugenicists make the argument that evolution demonstrates that the classification is not arbitrary because deafness and blindness confer measurable fitness disadvantages, but they don’t actually bridge the gap of deriving an ought from an is. > Obviously? If the answers to these problems are obvious to you, perhaps you’d consider writing a book instead of participating in a discussion forum. I would encourage you to review the site guidelines.
    - kazinator 10mo ago
      If it were a fitness advantage if you could sense electromagnetic fields, then why have you evolved over billions of years to get where you are, without it? But wait, you do sense electromagnetic fields in the 380 to 750 nm wavelength range, and remarkably well, to great profit. The only fitness advantage that matters for evolution is whatever gets you to pass down your genes, versus someone else not passing down theirs. If sensing low-frequency electromagnetism, or static magnetic fields, were advantageous in the context of everything else that you are, for passing down your genes, you would have it by now. Migratory birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field for navigation; if you needed to migrate thousands of kilometers every year (due to lacking other advantages to make that unnecessary), you might evolve that.
- UltraSane 10mo ago
  Sight and hearing evolved to incredible acuity because they give enormous survival advantage.
wizzwizz4 10mo ago
Meh, my formidable powers of foresight aren't really a superpower. Few people listen until things have progressed far enough that they see the things, too, by which point there are rarely many interventions available. And every time we do intervene early, that's "you said this would happen and it didn't happen!", making it harder to convince people the next time. And when things do turn out more-or-less as predicted, I "made a lucky guess" because "there was no way you could have known that". In the land of the blind, why would anyone pay attention to this weirdo's ramblings about "rain-clouds"? Obviously they're just feeling changes to temperature, pressure, and humidity. Oh, and they know what shapes things are? Wow! So does everyone else who's touched the things. Sure, that "how many fingers am I holding up?" party trick is pretty neat (probably cold reading), but not something we should make policy decisions on the basis of. You underestimate the extent to which humans are social creatures. See also: H. G. Wells's story The Country of the Blind. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind
- UltraSane 10mo ago
  Vision is absolutely a superpower if everyone else is blind. Just think how far you can shoot something with a rifle and scope. Guns are useless to blind people. A person who can see has an enormous advantage over a blind person in a fight. Try to imagine a military where everyone is blind fighting against another where everyone can see.
  - philipswood 10mo ago
    In a blind culture there probably are no guns at all - so your hypothetical sighted-person-amongst-the-blind would need to be able to make his own. Then again, just throwing rocks might be pretty effective.
    - UltraSane 10mo ago
      A slingshot or bow and arrows would be amazingly effective if everyone else was blind.
mikepurvis 10mo ago
Maybe, but that isn't really what the GP post is talking about. At the level of mythology, the eye-earth is place where people of that group belong without judgment or limitation. No different from Harry Potter or Narnia or any other fantasy place one might imagine going where they can be with their people. In any case, I'm not sure this even survives transposing to other senses that humans are weak in, such as smell (like prey animals) or magnetic direction (like migratory birds). A human who randomly had these would indeed be seen as superpowered, but that wouldn't become a statement that all regularly-abled humans are now disabled for missing the "critical" long range sense.
- kazinator 10mo ago
  I wonder whether all the animals of Eyeth are also deaf, and how they are doing? Deaf predators must have a field day sneaking up on deaf prey. As life evolved on Earth, so did the senses that life forms possess, and that happened for a reason. If you hare missing some senses, there is a sense in which you are set back millions of years of evolution. It's not just about human society, but biology. Someone with no sensory disabilities, sent into the wilderness, has better chances of survival than someone with such disabilities, other factors being equal. That has nothing to do with society, which is absent from that scene. Civilization is the best place for people with disabilities, even if it is geared toward those without. For that matter, it's better for animals with disabilities. People help disabled pets lead quality lives; wild animals with disabilities don't live long.
  - UltraSane 10mo ago
    Thank you for writing this so I didn't have to.
  - kayodelycaon 10mo ago
    I’d like to add a quick sidenote . I wouldn’t read too much into the logic of mythological worlds and realms. Their purpose is narrative, not scientific. They don’t even need to be internally consistent. No one expects Greek mythology to make scientific sense. Other mythologies should be seen from a similar perspective and understood that they are narrative, not logical. Applying a scientific viewpoint to such mythologies results in a new narrative. The scientific view is always wrong unless scientific correctness is part of that world’s narrative. I add this because a lot of people don’t know narrative purpose. To put it briefly: Other peoples worlds aren’t wrong when they don’t match “what makes sense in the real world”.

No, deafness and blindness are disabling because they provide critical long range data. Being able to see is essentially a superpower if you are blind. Same with hearing.

throwway120385 10mo ago

Only in that narrow viewpoint. Most people talk about disability in the context of a society because much of what we encounter in our day to day is created by other people. The sights, sounds, smells, and experiences in our world are frequently because of others. So in that context, if the dominant culture makes it a point to create experiences that require hearing or sight to consume, then yes it's a disability. But if we adapt some or all of what we do for people who don't have those senses, then we can make it less disabling.

suddenlybananas 10mo ago
While it's good for society to accommodate those with disabilities as much as possible, we shouldn't pretend it isn't detrimental to be unable to see or hear. You don't need to believe obvious falsehoods in order to accommodate people.
- fwip 10mo ago
  You've set up a straw man here - nobody in this thread is claiming that it's not detrimental to be missing a sense. The point is that disability exists within the context of the world we live in, and the society we've built is one that largely assumes people have both sight and hearing.
  - xigoi 10mo ago
    > Sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness are disabling because the world is not oriented to people with sensory disabilities. Implying that they wouldn’t be detrimental if the world was “oriented” differently.
    - retrac 10mo ago
      Since I'm the person who wrote that I can explain what I meant. I have never had to deal with a giant cat stalking me and being unable to hear it. I do routinely have to deal with intercom systems which I cannot hear, though. The world most humans inhabit is human-made. And the human-made environment can be remade.
    - fwip 10mo ago
      Ah, I see the disconnect. In this discussion, "disabling" is not the same as "detrimental." Disabling is when you are unable to do important activities that others can do. I'm not an expert here on the subject, but this is my understanding. For a simplified example, imagine two government buildings, one with and one without an accessibility ramp. A person in a wheelchair is able to access the former, even if going up the ramp takes longer than the stairs. Not having the option to take the stairs is still detrimental to the person, but they're still able to access those services. The second disables the person, as they're no longer able to access important services because they are unable to take the stairs. Accommodations help keep "detrimental" from meaning disabled. The voice at the street crossing that says "walk", curb cuts, and closed captioning all help people participate in daily normal life, despite having those sensory disabilities. There are other designs that are more holistic as well - for example, if those same government services are accessible online, or the agent makes house calls, it naturally makes the services more accessible to more people. (Note: I'm not saying that this specific example is a good idea - just as an example of "how we design our society affects how people can participate in it.")
      - UltraSane 10mo ago
        There are limits to accomodations and a blind person is never going to be a good sniper
        fwip 10mo ago
        Yes, and?
- lurk2 10mo ago
  I’ve always found this semantic argument somewhat silly as being blind or deaf is an obvious disadvantage in natural contexts, but one of the more compelling ideas here is that the fitness boundary isn’t fixed. It would probably be a fitness advantage if I could sense electromagnetic fields, but no one would describe me as disabled for not being able to sense these fields—unless, perhaps, everyone else could. So what we consider to be a disability does seem to be a function of what we consider to be normal.
  - suddenlybananas 10mo ago
    >So what we consider to be a disability does seem to be a function of what we consider to be normal. Obviously? How could it be based on anything else? People are just much more uncomfortable with making normative statements than they used to be.
    - lurk2 10mo ago
      > How could it be based on anything else? The point is that the capability is measurable but the capabilities we consider to be essential are based on normalcy and thus effectively arbitrary. Eugenicists make the argument that evolution demonstrates that the classification is not arbitrary because deafness and blindness confer measurable fitness disadvantages, but they don’t actually bridge the gap of deriving an ought from an is. > Obviously? If the answers to these problems are obvious to you, perhaps you’d consider writing a book instead of participating in a discussion forum. I would encourage you to review the site guidelines.
  - kazinator 10mo ago
    If it were a fitness advantage if you could sense electromagnetic fields, then why have you evolved over billions of years to get where you are, without it? But wait, you do sense electromagnetic fields in the 380 to 750 nm wavelength range, and remarkably well, to great profit. The only fitness advantage that matters for evolution is whatever gets you to pass down your genes, versus someone else not passing down theirs. If sensing low-frequency electromagnetism, or static magnetic fields, were advantageous in the context of everything else that you are, for passing down your genes, you would have it by now. Migratory birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field for navigation; if you needed to migrate thousands of kilometers every year (due to lacking other advantages to make that unnecessary), you might evolve that.
UltraSane 10mo ago
Sight and hearing evolved to incredible acuity because they give enormous survival advantage.

wizzwizz4 10mo ago

Meh, my formidable powers of foresight aren't really a superpower. Few people listen until things have progressed far enough that they see the things, too, by which point there are rarely many interventions available. And every time we do intervene early, that's "you said this would happen and it didn't happen!", making it harder to convince people the next time. And when things do turn out more-or-less as predicted, I "made a lucky guess" because "there was no way you could have known that". In the land of the blind, why would anyone pay attention to this weirdo's ramblings about "rain-clouds"? Obviously they're just feeling changes to temperature, pressure, and humidity. Oh, and they know what shapes things are? Wow! So does everyone else who's touched the things. Sure, that "how many fingers am I holding up?" party trick is pretty neat (probably cold reading), but not something we should make policy decisions on the basis of. You underestimate the extent to which humans are social creatures. See also: H. G. Wells's story The Country of the Blind. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind

UltraSane 10mo ago
Vision is absolutely a superpower if everyone else is blind. Just think how far you can shoot something with a rifle and scope. Guns are useless to blind people. A person who can see has an enormous advantage over a blind person in a fight. Try to imagine a military where everyone is blind fighting against another where everyone can see.
- philipswood 10mo ago
  In a blind culture there probably are no guns at all - so your hypothetical sighted-person-amongst-the-blind would need to be able to make his own. Then again, just throwing rocks might be pretty effective.
  - UltraSane 10mo ago
    A slingshot or bow and arrows would be amazingly effective if everyone else was blind.

mikepurvis 10mo ago

Maybe, but that isn't really what the GP post is talking about. At the level of mythology, the eye-earth is place where people of that group belong without judgment or limitation. No different from Harry Potter or Narnia or any other fantasy place one might imagine going where they can be with their people. In any case, I'm not sure this even survives transposing to other senses that humans are weak in, such as smell (like prey animals) or magnetic direction (like migratory birds). A human who randomly had these would indeed be seen as superpowered, but that wouldn't become a statement that all regularly-abled humans are now disabled for missing the "critical" long range sense.

kazinator 10mo ago
I wonder whether all the animals of Eyeth are also deaf, and how they are doing? Deaf predators must have a field day sneaking up on deaf prey. As life evolved on Earth, so did the senses that life forms possess, and that happened for a reason. If you hare missing some senses, there is a sense in which you are set back millions of years of evolution. It's not just about human society, but biology. Someone with no sensory disabilities, sent into the wilderness, has better chances of survival than someone with such disabilities, other factors being equal. That has nothing to do with society, which is absent from that scene. Civilization is the best place for people with disabilities, even if it is geared toward those without. For that matter, it's better for animals with disabilities. People help disabled pets lead quality lives; wild animals with disabilities don't live long.
- UltraSane 10mo ago
  Thank you for writing this so I didn't have to.
- kayodelycaon 10mo ago
  I’d like to add a quick sidenote . I wouldn’t read too much into the logic of mythological worlds and realms. Their purpose is narrative, not scientific. They don’t even need to be internally consistent. No one expects Greek mythology to make scientific sense. Other mythologies should be seen from a similar perspective and understood that they are narrative, not logical. Applying a scientific viewpoint to such mythologies results in a new narrative. The scientific view is always wrong unless scientific correctness is part of that world’s narrative. I add this because a lot of people don’t know narrative purpose. To put it briefly: Other peoples worlds aren’t wrong when they don’t match “what makes sense in the real world”.