I see this a lot in media criticism. People complaining about "plot holes" or something just not making sense, meanwhile it was explicitly pointed out or explained. I'd blame people being on their phones or something, but the truth isn't that sympathetic.
I see. But 30 dollars in change are heavy and impractical to carry around. Even if it's the same value, I'd have to prefer the Bills. My wife is rather petite and has to carry around a lot of change and says it's tiresome at times.
There was another article a couple weeks ago that said less than half of us adults can read at a 6th grade level. 6th grade is before you really get into metaphor and subtext. That's just reading for plot.
Some people legitimately might be bad at reading.
The people on text based sites are probably better than a whole chunk of people that don't even post.
That was a really fun read. I lost some faith in humanity but it was the wavering variety anyway that comes and goes with the social tides. Tide goes in, tide goes out.
I’m so dumb. Here I am, thinking I fully understood the metaphor, and yet I read “breasts” as “beasts” and was very confused when people started mentioning boobs.
I tested in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension all through school. I also regular miss things when I read and have to go back and realize I'm a dumbass. If my comprehension is better than 99% it's very concerning.
The real issue is the person who gets it doesn't spell out the path of the metaphor from "which has greater mass" through to "which has greater value". It's like a text version of a sitcom plot where someone doesn't say the obvious thing that would stop the entire argument
i like how my interpretation is completely different to everyone else.
naturally, if you were to be carrying a unit of monetary value, you would probably want the one that requires less space, and weight, though the primary factor here is weight. (mass if you want to fucking tumblr me)
30 dollars in bills is more valuable than 30 dollars in coins because it's more portable.
Yes, there's some reading comprehension issues here, but there's also bad writing.
The original question is about size, but the Philosopher, for some reason, makes a detour into mass. This detour goes nowhere, and just ends up as a distraction to the point he's trying to make. He could have just said, "Suppose you were to have $30 in coins instead, which would have more value, the coins or the bills?" No introduction of "mass" for no reason, just a straightforward analogy that different things can have the same value. Or, he could have kept the idea of size: "Suppose you needed to carry $30 in coins instead, would you need a bigger wallet? ... Ah, but which wallet's contents would have the greater value?"
It's also distracting that he says "you were to have $30 in coins as well". That makes it seem like it's important that Anon now has $60 instead of $30. If the idea was to compare $30 in coins to $30 in bills, a better wording would be "instead". Then you're comparing two situations in which Anon has $30, instead of a situation where he now has $60 instead of his original $30 but half of it is now in coins.
The way it's written is like a trick question where the obvious answer is wrong. The obvious answer is right, it just feels like it's wrong because it's badly written.