this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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The Monkey's Paw
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Done, but you find that most of them are not interested in human things, or if they are interested in such things, they do not have the human frame of reference or standards.
For example, if you ask a robin to find a shiny coin and bring it back to you, it will not understand why you would want this or why it should do this, and simply ignores you on the grounds that you are not providing it with food, sex, or territory, and so it has no reason to continue the discussion.
More abstractly, if you were to, for example, ask an owl about the weather, its criteria for whether the weather is good or not is simply based on how good it is for finding prey. It does not care about temperature, wind, or humidity in the same way that you do.