I think the signficance of the symbols might not be so monolithic or atleast interesting dynamics can be discovered when differences onthem are studied and that concepts would benefit from being divided into smaller chunks for this discussion.
Say that there is a community that has access to 3 kinds of berries and has 2 types of members. There is a “poisonous berry” that kills anybody that eats it. Then there is a “safe berry” that anybody can eat. Then third type kills one type of member while the other type can eat fine. Say that amout of people that are “allergic” is a small minority (say 1%). If the safe and the allergen berries are very close in coloration and identifiable characteristics I could understand why the hunter gatherers would lump them into the same concept. However using this concept in cooking etc will probably result in food that would be unreasonably risky for a allergic person to attempt to bite.
Now anybody could be allergic to anything, it might no tbe feasible to be paranoid about the environemnt and make all the catalog all the tiniest differences. But people can also get lucky in that if the safe and allergen berry are saliently different then the allergics looking after their own survival would be relatively straightforward (gatherers might put them in different buckets to begin with etc). I am reading/guessing that the “information conveyance” property is important in that it is value/survival ambivalent while allowing people to maximise for value/survival.
In a way because anybody could have a lot of weird idiosyncraties then critising that society does something inconvenient for you is not neccesarily a basis to change society per se. On the other hand if a little eye-squinting could prevent poisonings, not bothering to do so could be extremely cruel. If the squinting feels like pointless pedantry to the non-allergic gatherer, it can feel like inefficiency. I could also see that one way to deal with the situation is to forbid allergic persons to eat any food with berry. This means in effect that berry-pickers don’t benefit allergic persons nutrition and the amount of dishes with berries mixed in could become a point of contention.
However the main theme is that which for some actor is a non-signficant thing that can go either way is a very signficant thing with high impact to another and having agent-principal relationships over these kinds of situations. Treating the allergen berry to have one single universal lethality level is likely to just lead to confusion and disarray. While the downsides to getting gender wrong isn’t always lethal, there is difference of imposing/accpeting a cost rather than not knowing it exists.
I think the signficance of the symbols might not be so monolithic or atleast interesting dynamics can be discovered when differences onthem are studied and that concepts would benefit from being divided into smaller chunks for this discussion.
Say that there is a community that has access to 3 kinds of berries and has 2 types of members. There is a “poisonous berry” that kills anybody that eats it. Then there is a “safe berry” that anybody can eat. Then third type kills one type of member while the other type can eat fine. Say that amout of people that are “allergic” is a small minority (say 1%). If the safe and the allergen berries are very close in coloration and identifiable characteristics I could understand why the hunter gatherers would lump them into the same concept. However using this concept in cooking etc will probably result in food that would be unreasonably risky for a allergic person to attempt to bite.
Now anybody could be allergic to anything, it might no tbe feasible to be paranoid about the environemnt and make all the catalog all the tiniest differences. But people can also get lucky in that if the safe and allergen berry are saliently different then the allergics looking after their own survival would be relatively straightforward (gatherers might put them in different buckets to begin with etc). I am reading/guessing that the “information conveyance” property is important in that it is value/survival ambivalent while allowing people to maximise for value/survival.
In a way because anybody could have a lot of weird idiosyncraties then critising that society does something inconvenient for you is not neccesarily a basis to change society per se. On the other hand if a little eye-squinting could prevent poisonings, not bothering to do so could be extremely cruel. If the squinting feels like pointless pedantry to the non-allergic gatherer, it can feel like inefficiency. I could also see that one way to deal with the situation is to forbid allergic persons to eat any food with berry. This means in effect that berry-pickers don’t benefit allergic persons nutrition and the amount of dishes with berries mixed in could become a point of contention.
However the main theme is that which for some actor is a non-signficant thing that can go either way is a very signficant thing with high impact to another and having agent-principal relationships over these kinds of situations. Treating the allergen berry to have one single universal lethality level is likely to just lead to confusion and disarray. While the downsides to getting gender wrong isn’t always lethal, there is difference of imposing/accpeting a cost rather than not knowing it exists.