Where Did the Yanny/Laurel Thing Come From?
In case you’re wondering about the origin of this, The Times says:
The clip and original “Yanny or Laurel” poll were posted on Instagram, Reddit and other sites by high school students who said that it had been recorded from a vocabulary website playing through the speakers on a computer.
One detail may frustrate some and vindicate others: The original clip came from the vocabulary.com page for “laurel,” the word for a wreath worn on the head, “usually a symbol of victory.”
So you “Laurel” people can do a victory dance. To me, this is like finding out that the actual dress was black and blue. It made me realize that my very strong perception — a perception so strong that I thought others insane for having a different one — can be in some sense objectively wrong.
That’s an open invitation for Trump superfans to explain to me that I’m objectively wrong about Trump too. Maybe that should have been part of the Reader Poll. I’m joking of course. It’s just that, in a world where Trump infects every discussion, we might as well get that out of the way. Exit question, as Allahpundit says: how long before someone asks Trump if he hears Yanny or Laurel?
I originally had this as part of the post, but I quickly worried that including the “right” answers would skew the poll data.
I believed the word was probably “laurel” since there was no reason for it to be “yanny”, which is neither a word nor a common name. And yet although I tried to hear “laurel”, I could only hear “yanny” and couldn’t hear an L sound at all, either at the start or the end of the word. (Note: I haven’t yet tried the frequency-shifting thing; I expect that I will be able to hear “laurel” once I do that).
So one’s preconceptions do not always color what one will perceive.
Robin Munn (bbe66a) — 5/17/2018 @ 8:05 pmharkin already posted it in the other thread.
Dave (445e97) — 5/17/2018 @ 8:09 pmWeird, this post appears to have fallen into a black hole or something, or it was only posted in one of the alternative universes of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics…
Dave (445e97) — 5/17/2018 @ 8:12 pm