I will never understand status symbols. Paying more money for designer clothes because they’re more comfortable or last longer, yes. Paying more money for them to impress others- no.
I don’t understand why people are so easily impressed by superficial stuff like nice clothes. It’s easy for anybody to put on nice clothes.
I don’t understand what fashion seems to have against comfortable clothes.
I don’t understand how anyone can be so sure their religion is right as to try to convert others to it. What if it turns out that they’re right and you’re wrong? You don’t have any proof either way…
Pi is simple. It’s just the number you’d get if you divided the circumference of a circle by the diameter of the circle. Why it shows up in so many places that seem unrelated to circles- I don’t claim to understand that.
Now that someone else has said this, I can admit it- I don’t understand pointers.
I don’t understand the quoting rules in Bourne shell programming, either, but I suspect those may be beyond human comprehension. I just look for an example that gets it right and modify it to do what I need it to do. I don’t try to understand why they’re using single or double quotes there. I suspect this may be like trying to understand why quantum mechanics is the way it is, and you could go insane from trying to understand it.
I don’t understand string theory. I doubt very many people do.
Try thinking of it in tribal terms. Status equals power. Fashion equals status. Being comfortable in uncomfortable clothes conveys comfort in any situation. That’s alpha female (or male) behavior.
OK, maybe I don’t get it either.
I will never understand the love of three-bean salad.
Fear of clowns. I mean, they’re not particularly entertaining or anything, but I don’t understand why so many people seem to be so scared of them. Most fears that I don’t have I can at least understand why someone would have them, but not this one.
But why would you want to have status if you had to wear uncomfortable clothes and do other stuff you don’t like to do to get it?
The next time you’re out on the African savannah and staring down a really hungry big cat, you’ll understand the value of having close friends who can hurl big rocks.
I’ve always assumed it had to do with the fact that they are extremely loud, garish, obnoxious, pushy and respect no personal boundaries. Couple all that with possibly someone having one forced upon them (like as a really small child) and it’s easy for me to see how it might go. Kid thinks this horrible thing must be evil and, over the years, a fear develops from finding out others are equally repulsed (see there must be something to this!), lack of further interaction (obviously, you stay the hell away, thus your opinion never changes) and early trauma (scared = that Poltergeist bit under the bed).
And this comes from someone who used to collect clowns. At one time I’d had up to 5,000. I know. :eek:
Thanks for the reminder of another. I don’t get the desire to procreate. I realize that kids are needed to keep the human race going, but I seem to lack the biological imperative to make them. I guess that ties into my not understanding people that think the human race should go forever. I don’t really see what would be so bad about in ending in a generation or so.
I can’t understand how it is that Christians, Muslims and Jews all worship the same God, a God that preaches peace, tolerance and respect for your neighbour/brother, yet cannot, in over 2000 years, find a way to live peacefully with each other.
No, seriously, this completely astounds me. I can think of no more concrete proof that the time for these faiths has passed.
How can religion inspire so much war, violence and hatred but not somehow inspire tolerance? I just don’t get it. Or, more specifically, I don’t get how adherents to these belief systems can just gloss this over, look the other way and carry merry on, as though it were of no matter.
Hate to be a stick in the mud, but many of the relplies aren’t really in the spirit of the OP.
For example “Man’s inhumanity to man” Sure you can fail to ‘accept’ it but surely you understand it on a technical or biological level? People are slightly evolved competors for resources and space. It’s only natural that some of that competition stays with us.
Religion is another example. I am against it and I don’t understand it in the way that GorillaMan doesn’t understand it… But I DO understand why it exists and why it persists, and why people are religious. It isn’t baffling on that “I am one hundred percent baffled by this” level.
I am talking about scientific or technical concepts that are just way way too abstract and/or complex for you ever to mentally understand.
ETA: I don’t accept religion but I understand it. I don’t understand Science/M-theory/Quantum physics etc… but I accept it.
It’s incompatible with how zips work. At the bottom a zip is permanently connected. If you zipped from the top, the top of you pants couldn’t open. you wouldn’t be able to get them on.
Sorry Lobsang, I didn’t mean to miss the boat. However, I really don’t understand it. At least, not when it’s actually executed. I can acknowledge the struggle and not always being able to overcome our baser instincts, but what baffles me are those people who embrace this shortcoming and suggest we should all devolve to that sort of level. Which is why I referenced that particular thread.
I should’ve been more specific. But I was afraid I’d end up off on a tangent and derail your thread. More to the point, are things like; being an ass online just because [general] you can get away with it, littering, talking during a movie, poking a stick at a pissed off and chained up dog, badmouthing your teacher who is only trying to help, etc., just to name a few. I honestly can’t wrap my mind around that. I apologize for throwing out something so broad though. Mea culpa.
No Problem. I’m sorry for being a bit of a nazi with my thread. I meant to say something along the lines of ‘but carry on as you are, it’s not really a problem’ in my previous post, but in the process of editing it I forgot to add that little nicety.
To the matter of people being asses - I kind of understand it on a psychological way. I believe people who are asses just don’t have any appreciation for how their behaviour is being perceived by others. They think they are being cool by being asses to authority.
I think that psychologically humans are very imperfect. We are apes trying to live with an oversized brain in an ‘evolved’ society.
And we LOOONG ago lost the ‘survival of the fittest’ aspect of our own species. for a long time it’s been survival of the most sexually active, who also happen to be the least ‘civilized’ in most cases.
It might be a low-brow film, but IDIOCRACY has that one message with a hint of truth
My coat has side pockets that zip down, and the zipper to close the coat has to be hooked up every time - I can’t see any reason why we couldn’t combine the two.
On topic - trigonometry. I’ve done fairly well in two courses because I can generally plug numbers into a formula and find the correct answer, but I don’t think I’ll ever “get” all the notations and symbols and why it works.
I’m a little skeptical that you have a hard time understanding it. Nothing personal, but you even stated in this very post the understanding: Procreation = the persistence of our species. You, in all honesty, can’t fathom the fact that there might be some inborn instinct on the majority of the population to desire having offspring? Besides, even if you personally don’t see the lure of having kids, surely you’ve met people who genuinely love being parents, and love children. It’s a very strong, innate human element that seems to be the essential factor in life and evolution. There’s a practical side to that libido, y’know.
Anyway, things I cannot, nor ever think I will be able to grok:
How the universe came into being.
What, exactly, is time and space?
How are we self-aware? Why do we feel like an individual? Why am I me, at this time, on this planet, in this body? Why didn’t my consciousness manifest in something else, somewhere else, somewhen else? I realize that eventually, if we are to exist, we have to exist as a conscious singularity, but how does this work?
Anthropic principle. If it did, you 'd be asking the exact same question.
Wherever/whenever you end up, you’ll be able to ask “Why here? Why now?” Because ‘Here’ and ‘Now’ are not… (wait, am I having an epiphany?) fixed - Every when and where was a here and now for the people there then.
Right, I get the anthropic principle. I’ll just never be able to completely understand the mechanism behind it. What does it all add up to. Not to get overly metaphysical, but our consciousness has always been a point of profound fascination for me. What if there is only one true consciousness, and it manifests itself in every living thing through-out the universe. I am really you, and you are really a beetle somewhere in Africa, and that beetle is really some alien thing on some planet in another galaxy 6.8 billion years ago.* It’s just that there is an illusion of being an individual, because of the anthropic principal. That assuming there’s something more to out self-awareness than just an illusion of our brains. But no matter the atoms and material my body replaces and recycles, I always feel like me. The thing is, we can’t prove otherwise. We’ll never know for certain what is true reality behind feeling sentient.
*I don’t necessarily believe this to be true, but it’s an interesting thought none-the-less.
I don’t understand how the universe could have expanded faster than the speed of light without violating the Theory of Relativity. I accept that it did, but I don’t understand it. When I was an astronomy teaching assistant, I specifically asked my students not to ask that question in my discussion sections, and told them I didn’t understand it.
It could be done like coat zippers, where the zipper isn’t permanently hooked at one end. I think having the zipper go upward makes more sense, given that the pants have to be attached down there anyway, but it could work.
Ah, it may be my isolation from a lot of pop culture at work here. Never seen Poltergeist or It. I wasn’t allowed to watch stuff like that as a kid, and now I’m just not motivated enough to go rent them on DVD. I used to try to catch up on watching stuff I missed as a kid, but all I learned was that a lot of these things don’t age particularly well. (Maybe I would have been allowed to watch It at age 15, but my parents had control of the TV (no remote yet, but they picked the channel to watch), and I never found out about it.)
