Who's Right About Pluto???

Comments · 1.4K

• DR

  @dr.fatima · 3 years ago · pinned

  ok i don't usually comment on my own videos but all y'all who are taking me up on the prompt/conversation/activity experiment are warming my former teacher heart <3 also wow ive learned so much from everyones input already, this is great

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• GO

  @gooderambles · 2 years ago (edited)

  As a mythology nerd,<br>I find it extremely amusing that the discovery of Eris forced the astronomy field to change the definition of &quot;planet&quot;.<br>Eris is named after the Goddess of Discord, after all, so it&apos;s rather fitting for her namesake to still be the source of infighting centuries later.

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• ES

  @estherscholz8400 · 3 years ago

  I have a BA in Linguistics and the biggest &quot;Pluto&quot; of linguistics imo is the idea that there is a single, static, correct grammar for a given language. People who do serious research about grammar are interested in describing how people talk in reality, not what the best way of constructing a sentence might be. This &quot;pluto&quot; hurts people in a number of ways. <br><br>When Oakland schools tried to teach kids the grammar of Standard English by teaching them to translate from the form of African American English they spoke at home (dubbed &quot;ebonics&quot; a portmanteau of ebony phonics), there was outrage. People accused the school board of &quot;dumbing down&quot; the English curriculum, pointed to it as an example of the soft bigotry of low expectations. When really, there&apos;s no objective sense in which &quot;standard English&quot; is superior to other varieties of English. It just happens to be adjacent to power.<br><br>Or there&apos;s the argument that singular they/them pronouns aren&apos;t proper grammar. You could point out that singular they dates back to Chaucer, albeit in a slightly different context, but that concedes the point that older forms are more &quot;correct&quot; when really, language changes all the time and there is no objective notion of &quot;correctness&quot;. Only prestige and privilege.

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• MA

  @maxranger5710 · 3 years ago

  As a neuroscience student pop-sci Neuro discourse is always wild to me. we understand at most 0.00001% of our most complicated organ’s functions but the impression you’d get is that total mind control is possible using dopamine

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• CU

  @cucuserpent4 · 3 years ago

  Anything people have learned in elementary school about Indigenous Americans definitely falls into the “Pluto Effect” category in my opinion.

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• RA

  @ratchetintellectual · 2 years ago (edited)

  As someone with an MA in sociology who&apos;s research focused on Black political thought, &nbsp;my pluto is Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights movement as a whole. The story we are told in elementary school is that she was simply tired when she was a trained organizer and activist who made a deliberate choice of civil disobedience that was planned. The removal of autonomy from her and other key figures in the movement makes it seem like civil rights and &nbsp;equality falls from the sky when in actuality Black resistance has always been intentional and deliberate. But the question obviously becomes who benefits from having a bunch of kids think she was just sleepy after work.

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• ED

  @edisonhauptman6886 · 3 years ago

  On the subject of Plutos in other fields, I immediately thought about gender getting more complicated once you start actually engaging with sociological, anthropological, and philosophical research. There are tons of attitudes on this, and I&apos;ve noticed a lot of them rely on a fixed idea of gender for the sake of psychological comfort and stability.<br><br>Many of these different attitudes on gender draw lines in various places, but as you learn more, a lot of the lines start to dissolve away as you grapple with the uncertainty in the whole concept. Speaking for myself, it&apos;s become gradually easier (psychologically) to dissolve the lines, but that&apos;s come after a long learning process that the majority of people haven&apos;t done. Thus, most of my conversations about gender can only get to the equivalent of Part 1 of this video—what&apos;s ONE angle that can get people thinking beyond their (usually bigoted) instincts? You can&apos;t lead with the Part 3 piece about uncertainty, because (by definition) you won&apos;t have something that sticks in someone&apos;s head.

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• CO

  @corporalmaladict · 3 years ago

  As a literature, symbolism and meaning through language and mythologies nerd, I think the reason Pluto brings up so many feelings is related to the emotional and storytelling values we&apos;ve placed on it, often in the realm of childhood. The simplicity, mythological names, and early experience of learning about science in a way that allows for telling stories about the universe, about the vastness of space, imprints meaning onto Pluto. It&apos;s planethood is a symbol about the wonders of science and space as well as the simple miracle and joy of learning. It also has the like &quot;littlest furthest away&quot; symbol, small but mighty, last but not least, smallest of the siblings symbol attached to it which occurs in all kinds of folktales and types of storytelling. It can be an underdog character or a personal representation. People get attached to the stories we tell ourselves about things and about categories like &quot;Planet&quot;. Honestly, you could probably write a whole mythology a la Roland Barthes about Pluto and still not run out of all the different kinds of meaning and significance possibly ascribed to all of its characteristics.

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• FA

  @facetsofus2008 · 3 years ago (edited)

  As a high school physics teacher, I’m becoming aware of many “Plutos” in education and science education. Many strategies of teaching are loosely based on research, but just as often based on “this is how we’ve always done it”. To make it more confusing, the education research isn’t accessible to most grade school teachers, and schools are so nebulous with so many people and conflicting interests that implementing that research feels daunting.

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• AN

  @AnarchistArtificer · 3 years ago

  End of video comment:<br>This is slightly different angle that you described, but I&apos;m a biochemist and I&apos;ve seen quite a few cases where my field has been bad at coping with uncertainty. <br><br>Example 1: a section of DNA that codes for a protein is a gene. Genome is the word we use for the complete set of DNA in an organism, which includes both genes, and also DNA that doesn&apos;t code for a protein. We used to call non-coding DNA &quot;junk DNA&quot; because it seemed to be left over remnants that doesn&apos;t do much. We knew that some of it has some regulatory function, but it&apos;s only in recent years that I&apos;ve noticed an attitude shift where it&apos;s increasingly seen as wrong to call it &quot;Junk DNA&quot;, because actually, there&apos;s a lot more (apparently) functionally important non-coding DNA than we realised.<br><br>Another example where we&apos;re not yet at that point is in structural biology, in how we talk about protein structure. A protein is a chain of amino acids that folds in a particular way to give it a particular structure, which allows it to fulfill a particular function. Amino-acid sequence determines 3D structure, which determines function, so modelling structures is a big part of trying to understand how it all works together. <br><br>One big tool that&apos;s helped here has been X-Ray crystallography, where we crystallise a protein, shoot some X-rays at those crystals to see what pattern the diffracted X-rays make, then do some mathema-magic to get some puzzle pieces we can put together to get a protein structure, and if it&apos;s a high enough resolution, we&apos;ll say we &quot;solved&quot; the structure.<br><br>The problem is that crystallising a protein freezes it in place and some proteins have functionally important bits that are highly flexible and not captured very well by X-ray crystallography. &quot;Intrinsically disordered&quot; is one of the phrases we use here, and whilst ostensibly there is an understanding that these regions can and do often have functional value, it feels like this term is implicitly dismissive. Intrinsically disordered regions or proteins are harder to study, so people don&apos;t. This means that in the large and impressive Protein Data Bank (PDB), the bulk of our data is on nice, easy to crystallise proteins that have known homologs in other species. The PDB is one of the sources that Deepmind&apos;s protein machine learning program, AlphaFold, was trained on, so as bioinformatics techniques are becoming more powerful and commonplace, it feels like there&apos;s a real risk of reinforcing our existing biases because we&apos;re so desperate to pretend they don&apos;t exist. Sabine Leonelli&apos;s 2016 book &quot;Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Approach&quot; provides an excellent overview on this.

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• PA

  @packman2321 · 3 years ago

  Other people have mentioned gender, but honestly the number of frames we define just because their obvious are insane. The ones I know most about probably being:<br>1) Children/Adults<br>2) Disability<br>3) Twinship.<br><br>3s not to big a deal for most people, but it does end up importing a whole load of unquestioned, inaccurate assumptions about genetics into science, propping up behavioural and psychological sciences with evidence of &apos;twin concordance&apos; rather than actual genetics and simplifying discussions of genetics down to similar linear heritability, through the Equal Environment Assumption and its many flaws.<br><br>1 and 2 are a bit more interesting. School does a lot structurally to maintain our notions of childhood and (dis)ability [grouping kids into age groups, assigning work to those groups and segmenting off various disabled populations as well as just being so crowded compared to home neighbourhoods, churches, clubs etc. as to push people into very rigid categories]. This tends to feedback into how people talk about growing up. Like literally yesterday, I came across a report claiming that children relied more heavily on rigid category frameworks, but that doesn&apos;t actually seem to be true once you exclude school. Basically, the environments we construct for children teach them lessons that we don&apos;t intend and reify these ideas of &apos;boys do this, girls do this, adults have authority in this space&apos;<br><br>Then of course you layer legal stuff on top of that with both childhood and disability being these structures that have protectionalism as their default, but if you actually look at the laws these systems often advocate for (take the various restrictions of children online or the limits on how much disabled people in the US can have in their bank accounts to receive benefits) a lot of these laws actually serve to deny rights to growing swathes of individuals and solidify power structures, which then of course radiate through the tendency to infantalise minorities more generally (though I&apos;m not making ur-oppression argument here, ageism and disableism are oppressive matrices interacting with other ones, not underlying principles). I&apos;m a critical theorist rather than a lawyer, so there&apos;s probably stuff here I don&apos;t know about, but it&apos;s always struck me as odd that the discussions here always centre limiting access rather than building spaces or content that&apos;s less &apos;dangerous&apos;, more accessible and has robust frameworks for supporting and dealing with abuse.<br><br>This protectionalism also folds back onto adults because it tends to demonise adults who aren&apos;t the independent or stoic authority figures these power systems demand.<br><br>So yeah, that&apos;s a bit of a rough outline. The basic gist is that we&apos;re way too accepting of the supposed neutral definitions of comptence and authority in society and that sucks for everyone, but I could probably have phrased it better.

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• LO

  @locsoluv94 · 3 years ago

  So my field of expertise is music. I found it very entertaining that you started the video with Holst.<br>So I first learned about instrument classifications from my music teacher in 3rd grade. He taught my class something that came up later in my life in 12th grade physics. It was the chapter that we were learning about musical instruments in relation to sound waves and the harmonic series. In the textbook, it listed the piano as a string instrument. But me and everyone else in that third-grade music class knew that that was wrong. The physics teacher called the music teacher (who was now working in the high school) and he explained how instrument categorization actually worked.<br>It&apos;s not about what the instrument is made of. It&apos;s about how the sound is made. For example, the saxophone is made of brass, but it&apos;s not a brass instrument. It&apos;s a woodwind because it uses a reed to make sound. In the same way, the piano is not a string instrument because it has strings inside. It&apos;s a percussion instrument because the strings are struck with hammers. (Perussion is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater.)<br>So yeah, many people either learn or assume one thing about an instrument&apos;s classification when that&apos;s not the case. So this is one of my profession&apos;s &quot;Pluto.&quot;<br>Some food for thought while I&apos;m on this topic. A brass instrument produces sound by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player&apos;s lips. asically, when you buzz your lips together, that causes the air to vibrate thus creating sound. That sound is then carried through tubes and physics does the rest.<br>Brass instruments aren&apos;t always made of brass or metal. Shofar are made of horn, conch; shell, didgeridoo; wood. But the insteresting thing is one that often is not considered at all.<br>The human voice makes sound with air from our lungs passing through two lips (larynx aka the vocal cords) which buzz together causing the air to vibrate which then travels through our throat and resonate out our mouth and/or nose. The way that sound is made when we sing is the same way that sound is made when we play a brass instrument. The location of the &quot;lips&quot; are just different. Therefore, I propose that the human voice is a brass instrument.

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