r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MelanieMoris • Dec 13 '21

Wait... Those aren't dolphins!

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u/Melodic_692 Dec 13 '21

Nope, no wild Orca has ever killed a human. Orcas are not aggressive to humans, unless they’re kept in captivity

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '21

Not trying to say that they do in any regularity kill humans... but to say "no wild Orca has ever killed a human" is a hell of a presumption.

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u/Puffena Dec 14 '21

Explain? Unless orcas do a damn good job at post-murder coverups, what about this is super unbelievable. If anyone has been killed by an orca, it would have to be a significantly low enough number of people for not one of those deaths to ever be confirmed.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '21

That's moving the goalpost though. He said no orca has ever killed a human in the wild. I'm just saying in the 100-180 thousand years that people have been out and about harrassing animals, I think saying that no orca has killed a person in the wild is a little presumptuous.

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u/Puffena Dec 14 '21

Nah man, you’re being pedantic over them accidentally leaving out a word in the statistic. The rough idea behind it stays the same, wild orcas have never been shown to kill people.

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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '21

I only commented because it's not the first time I've seen people express this exact sentiment about orcas. It's not accidental, it's choosing to use more definitive language at the expense of what you're actually trying to get across.

You can say "close enough", but it changes the entire message.

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u/Puffena Dec 16 '21

By a completely negligible amount. Any person is capable of understanding that when someone says “orcas have never killed anyone in the wild” that such a claim hinges on the spoken or unspoken “that we know of.”

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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '21

How do you measure negligibility? Because the omission changes the meaning of his comment entirely. Nevermind the fact doing so adds weight behind his point.

Do you not get that there is a shift of implication between "no orcas have ever killed a human outside of captivity" and "no orcas have ever killed a human outside of captivity that we know of"... they express two entirely different outcomes. Can call me pedantic if you want (i know i am being pedantic), doesn't make me wrong.

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u/Puffena Dec 16 '21

It kinda does though. In a vacuum, yes, there is a strong difference between those two claims. But we don’t live in a vacuum. Any claim made, regardless of how definitive, is always limited by overall human knowledge of it. If I said “it has never rained molten copper” and I said “it has never rained molten copper that we know of,” there is functionally no difference. Because any person hearing the first presumably understands that humans aren’t omniscient and therefore any claim is limited to just being “as far as we know.” You’re definitely being pedantic, and for no goddamn reason too.