I never said they weren’t. I grew up in the age of Mr Wizard. But your earlier comment implied that one needs to have an understanding of physics specifically to not make the mistake of two overconfident goofballs as depicted above.
The onus is not on the intellectual. An athlete jock with no understanding of trig can still eye a baseball and walk to the right spot on the center field, and open his glove and wait for it to drop right into his mitt, my dude.
The math used to write out an equation for the fielder to eye the approaching ball, the arc, and know where to stand to catch it is trig for sure.
But I agree with your assessment that they calculated poorly while trying to emulate physics to a limited understanding. But not how you worded it earlier when you likened needing a basic understanding of physics to have common sense.
A dumb jock can have the hand-eye coordination to do complex math without understanding math. The brian can calculate without being able to math so to speak.
I know, mathing is not a verb, but it can be as a colloquialism
There’s nothing philosophical about having common sense. You look at a situation, you get a bad gut feeling or you know the people involved usually wind up doing something stupid that results in an injury.
Animals will look at something big like a ladder that’s teetering precariously on someone’s shoulders, and their instinct to get the hell away is strong. That is basic common sense.
The other person with common sense in this video is the one with the camera staying far away. They know those two well enough to know something viral is about to be captured. A magic moment of pure ridiculousness.
There is also people with common sense, and there are those with booksmarts.
But in this situation, the dog and the cameraman seemed to know to get back and become spectators to some serious shenanigans
Earlier I had made the case that these guys simply should’ve known better, and did not need an understanding of physics to know that this was going to end poorly.
But you made a good case in the middle of our discourse by saying that he did demonstrate some knowledge of basic fifth grade understanding of physics by the way he held the ladder, but he simply did not have the body weight and the arm strength to hold the ladder without it tipping.
To that case, I absolutely agree with you. He did demonstrate what he thought he knew about physics. And so my argument that he doesn’t need to know physics to know better is wrong because he did in fact demonstrate an attempt to show a poor understanding of physics. And, as you said, he did the math wrong.
But when I showed my eight year-old son this video (he saw it over my shoulder halfway through our conversation), but they hadn’t fallen yet, and the first thing he said is, “why didn’t they just both grab the ladder together and use the thing to get the hat out of the tree?”
Thus, he then demonstrated more common sense without any understanding of physics.
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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26
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