Talk:1588: Hardware Reductionism

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 14:26, 9 October 2015 by 173.245.54.91 (talk)
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Is "TRIATHOLON" just a typo, or does it have a special comic value?

At this moment of creation it exists in a limbo in which it is both a typo and a joke, but now that it is has been released for viewers to take measures, the function will soon collapse into just one of the possible states. 162.158.34.197 13:03, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
It's clearly a spelling mistake (not a typo). See http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Triathalon, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/athelete. 173.245.50.149 13:19, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't think this is just parodying left-brain right-brain myths. Rather, it's parodying neural reductionism of all kinds—the currently widespread myth that our selves are determined genetically by brain structure alone, minimizing the role of culture and the way experience rewires the brain. In particular, the part about "phones like yours" makes me think of "women are from venus"–style myths (where, say, a slight correlation is found between gender and size of spacial processing module, etc, and pop-sci media reports it as WOMEN ARE INHERENTLY BAD AT SPATIAL REASONING). Leoboiko (talk) 13:25, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Seems plausible. Care to add? 108.162.216.104 13:39, 9 October 2015 (UTC

Or it could be a riff on the current "Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow" model, which considers the brain as having two distinct (Type 1 and Type 2) types of thinking, often described as two separate actors in the brain, in spite of the fact that they probably overlap a lot in the sections of the brain used. Blackbearnh (talk) 14:16, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

How about the typo of "coment" in the comment about the typo in the comic...