• skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Weird how many people seem to think it’s like a competition or something. It’s a descriptive label.

    The whole Pluto thing taught us a lot about the psychology of letting go of something taught at a young age. People getting proper frothing at how they shoulda just let Pluto keep it, just to save themselves the extremely minor cognitive dissonance.

    • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      When people get upset about pluto, I’ll just tell them if pluto is planet, so is Ceres. Which then results in mindless staring because they never even heard about Ceres…

    • Kushan@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Have you seen the lengths people go to in order to not have to change their world view even a smidge? To not have to correct themselves about anything at all? I’ll give you a hint, literally every right wing party in the world doing well is because weak people can’t change a damn thing about themselves.

    • Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      I really doubt more than .001% actually care if it’s called a planet or not, it’s just a meme to pretend that you care. Like pineapple on pizza.

      No one actually cares if you put pineapple on pizza. No one actually cares about Pluto being a planet. But there are many people who see themselves as some sort of white knight defenders of the truth against haters that don’t actually even exist.

    • girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I’d agree with you but the definition is arbitrary and is not of Natural Kind. Even worse, instead of making the definition of a planet more clear it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.

      Honestly, if they just went with defining ‘Major Planets’, ‘Minor Planets’, and asteroids determined by mass and spherical shape, I think everyone would’ve moved on by now.

      • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.

        If this is true, then please tell me what totally non-arbitrary reason there was for Ceres to not be universally considered a planet?

        • girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          I’m not sure what you mean. It should be a planet by the definition I gave before unless I didn’t convey what I was trying to say correctly. It’s definitely large, heavy, and spherical enough to be a planet in my opinion.

          There’s tons of different sized objects in our solar system and it’s distinguishable enough to qualify in this one.