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If you tied a rope tight around the Earth’s equator and then added a single yard of slack, would the extra material make any noticeable difference to someone standing on the ground? Yes, actually. The answer comes as a surprise to most people, but the additional bit of rope raises it high enough off the ground for our eyes to easily discern it, and our feet to easily trip over. That fact might seem trivial, but the early 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that this chasm between human intuition and physical reality revealed something important about the fallibility of our thinking. After all, if something that seems obvious to almost everyone can be totally false, what else might we be wrong about? This video from the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz breaks down the mathematics behind Wittgenstein’s knotty example, and asks whether it should make us all feel a bit less certain about even our most deeply held beliefs.
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Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
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Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
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Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
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Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
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Anthropology
For an Amazonian female shaman, ayahuasca ceremonies are a rite and a business
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Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
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Sports and games
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