Reply #11: It's not obvious a priori that one should not stare at the sun. The fact has, of course, [View All]

[struggle4progress]

been known for thousands of years, because of unfortunate incidents like this

But most of people who know this fact, do not know it because of innate intellectual superiority -- rather, they know it because somebody else who knew it had the decency to warn them about it

It is true that someone with enough background, including (say) the fact that real damage can be accomplished with lens-focussed sunlight and the fact that the eye contains a lens focussing an image on receptors in the retina, might deduce the danger from that information -- but such a deduction would only be possible for someone fortunate enough to have the educational as a result of other cultural contexts

Most people, of course, are] taught to feed themselves and to speak