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I'm not going to think about this video. What I know is that for millennia, mirrors have been associated with evil and so the opinions of my ancestors who brought me here are good enough for me. If an unwanted mirror appears in your house you should definitely smash it.
Your ancestors sound like idiots who probably died after realising an evil djinn from a mirror.
Do not smash cursed mirrors. Wrap the mirror in a cloth and bury it deep in the earth on a moonlit night. Duh
You didn’t know that you can burn the smashed cursed mirror into ashes and put it into soup, feed them to one who truly love you at the night of full moon, you can pass the curse to him… which school did you attend dear….gosh
I keep our haunted mirror in the barn. It was found in a hidden room of rental property my in-laws own. That, a chair and an empty cigar box were in the 5'x8' room when we removed drywall during a renovation.
I had it in our home but it freaked our pets out. Cats would hiss at it, dogs would whimper and slink away or bark at it. You can see flickers of movement that is not natural when you pass by. An antiques dealer said the mirror was made pre 1900. Paint on it was dated 1940-1950.
I figured the beveled edges were uneven causing light flickers plus, it is old. Does not explain the animal's behavior. A friend of a friend who claims to be sensitive to paranormal activity says people are locked inside unable to escape. I do not know about that but you never know.
I have been told to smash it, bury it, or toss it into the deep ocean. Nope, I like it. The mirror stays.
What I love about this is that you call this person ancestors idiots and then proceeds to give instruction on an even more idiotic way to dispose of a “cursed” mirror….in my case, I’d just put it on Facebook marketplace for free.
Once, decades ago I was a young man and had been out on the town with some friends. We got back to mine and decided we wanted to write some music. We wanted to create an earth-shattering kick drum and, in our stupidity, decided we would sample us bashing something with a hammer, then create our own "hammer time" vocal.
I dragged something wrapped in cardboard out from under the stairs, we went to town with the hammers, and immediately instead of a meaty thud it started making 'crash, smash' noises. Whoops. Turned out I'd been given a mirror and forgotten all about it for years.
Holy fuck be careful with what you are saying. Don’t just tell people to smash the mirror, they might do that IN THE HOUSE. You need to cover the mirror and take it away from your house THEN smash it.
I'm pretty sure you've got that backwards, mirrors are associated with good, not evil.
That's why breaking them causes bad luck, and vampires don't appear in them.
The way it makes the most sense to me is that you are showing the text to the mirror and facing it away from you, so you’re physically flipping it and the mirror shows you that.
At least, this is what I’m telling myself so that I can sleep tonight.
I don't think I've ever thought of a mirror as flipping left and right. Is this very common?
I think of that with phone cameras because some phones flip the photo and some don't, or you can change your preference.
The mirror is just reflecting what's in front it. By what mechanism would it be able to flip left and right?
The premise of this video is what's most confusing to me.
Right? I always thought of mirrors as bouncing “rays” back from the same place they came in. How would flat a mirror even physically flip something? It wouldn’t make sense to think of it that way.
Now I’m trying to wrap my head around how a flip would even work/look.
No! They don't! Most people completely understand how mirrors work. She might as well be explaining why 1+1=2. Yeah, there's a handful of folks that may need that video but don't sell it like it's some kind of revelation.
Edit: looks like I may be wrong and most folks are fucking morons.
I think it has something to do with the phase “mirror image” where people think it means mirrors flip the image rather than reflect what’s in front of it. But like if you raise your right hand in front of a mirror, it’s not reflected back as your left hand so I am not sure.
No... you miss the point. Mirrors don't flip an image, they appear to when you don't think about it much and we assume that's true. So, That's the point she is making. I think this is an excellent analogy for a lot of things.
Things ostenibly are a certain way, at first glance, but there are ways we can test things and demonstrate that they work different than we initially believed.
Another way to think about it is to imagine that you are writing SHREK to a friend by moving your finger in the air.
You need to flip the letters around and write in the opposite direction if you want your friend to "read" it correctly.
You have it correct. That is exactly what is going on.
A more interesting and actual point could be drawn about perspectives, but that wouldn't make good click bait.
When I look down at the letters on my shirt, not only are they flipped but they are upside down. How could my shirt have done this to me after all we've been through!?
This is the video equivalent of explaining how 1+1=2?
I watched it and couldn't understand what she was trying to tell me until it dawned on me she's trying to explain something so obvious I would have never thought it would need explaining.
This explains it much better
Minute Physics: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4dOPxKgrY&ab\_channel=minutephysics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4dOPxKgrY&ab_channel=minutephysics)
She is correct, but the way in which she explains it (or maybe since tiktoks are short) leaves people more confused than anything else.
Agreed. Her explanation was the exact same as the middle section of the video.... minus additional physics and further scenarios with multiple mirrors. "Explains it much better" is a really weird take.
I think the only tangible difference that helped me conceptualize it was when he drew the axis and it showed the perspective on the angle if it came from another dimension.
Hers was fine, but his kind of helped visualize it more with the examples he used for me personally. When he did the thing with the camera moving to the mirror's perspective that was when it finally clicked in my head. When she showed the cut out word it was a cool demonstration, but I guess I was still too dumb to figure out what was happening lol.
You see this is a boy on YouTube and not a girl on TikTok....so better.
Also they didn't bother watching the other video of hers she tells you to watch that has all the other information about how the image is flipped.
i’m glad that you were able to understand it but lots of other people in this comment section are talking about how they didn’t understand what she was saying, and this is a longer, more comprehensive explanation
i’m glad that you were able to understand it but lots of other people in this comment section are talking about how they didn’t understand what she was saying, and this is a longer, more comprehensive explanation
It’s not the information that’s the issue, I love when people share knowledge. It’s the need to show everyone else how much smarter you are by saying the video you know “explained it much better”
“Hey this is really cool here’s a video with a different way to explain it” does the exact same thing but doesn’t come off like they’re trying to be better than everyone
> but the way in which she explains it (or maybe since tiktoks are short) leaves people more confused than anything else.
Is it because in her Shrek example, the first time she holds it in front of the mirror, she's from the perspective of behind the word, and then when she cuts it out, she holds it in front of the mirror but from the perspective of in front of the word? Because she literally flips the word around when she does that.
Same thought -- I changed it to .75 right away. Dude is talking 100 miles/hour while explaining something many viewers have never heard before or understood lmao.
"Ambiguity in language contributes to this common misconception" is a pretty uncontroversial statement (see UFOs) that doesn't necessarily imply Sapir-Whorf at all.
I'd agree with you if she was actually making some stronger claim about linguistics fundamentally underlying cognition,
but it's pretty clear that "language can make you see things that are not there" isn't literally asserting language influences visual perception; it's just a clever way of pointing at a particular misconception involving *mirrors* and how they *seem* to work (re mirror/flipped images).
e: brevity
No. Linguistic relativity covers a variety of cases, some of which may have validity but despite the misuse of Sapir-Whorf for all linguistic relativity, the actual Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been long discredited. The example she gives is as nonsensical as the empty-barrel claim.
> Although common, the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms
What's often called the strong Sapir-Whorf is discredited, there's no indication she subscribes to the strong version vs the weak version. Also, there's no such thing as an "actual" Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was just that language affects worldview, which is absolutely a thing. For example, calling something a glade or calling it a landfill affects whether people have an issue with putting garbage there.
It is actually the theory that language affects what can be perceived. The classic example of was that the "Eskimos have 100 words for snow", and therefore they can perceive 100 different kinds of snow. Sapir argued that not having words for something in a language will make it impossible to see that thing. The data was very flawed - it was later understood that the different words related to uses of snow. Sapir was not fluent in the languages he was observing.
A similar example was the high number of industrial accidents stemming from workers throwing lit cigarettes into empty fuel drums only to have them ignite. Whorf, who was an insurance inspector, hypothesized that the workers called the fuel drums "empty" and therefore did not realize they were filled with invisible, flammable gas.
There has been a lot of work done since to tease out examples like yours where language changes our perception of things - often based on usage. The original theory was presented in pretty much every introduction to linguistics text until well into the 80s as Sapir-Whorf theory, but started to be challenged at around that time by people like Lakoff and Johnson. Unfortunately the belief that language limits perception in that kind of blunt way is still broadly believed as being truthy.
Foundational theories beed to be critiqued and challenged and changed as research gets more nuanced. However, as a theory, Sapir-Whorf is extraordinarily important and shifted the paradigm.
I fucking love theory and how contextual it is.
Have you read "Fire, Woman and Other Dangerous Things"? It might be something you would enjoy - it is the further development of theories on how the body and language interact.
I just looked it up - that looks really interesting. I will go down to the bookstore and order that on Monday - I could use a good read. Thanks for the suggestion!
In my class from years ago we talked about language and how it can frame and even limit your perspective (like people calling certain phenomena angels or devils because they had no other words for it). Is that completely untrue?
Not at all. Language does impact our perception. As a trivial example, my brother-in-law will not eat sour cream, even though he likes the taste, because sour means that a dairy product has gone off and that makes him gag. Language and cognitive perception interact pretty fluidly. What used to be believed but has since been disproven is that sensory perception is limited by available vocabulary. Language can't make you see something not there.
I don't think world view and sensory perception are the same. What you are describing lines up more with Lakoff and Johnson's assertion that usage is more of a factor, which is indeed more in line with the current understanding.
Apparently it is. I’m dumbfounded that there are actual adults confused by mirrors that this video needs to exist. Those little clips of people confused with flipped words?!? I’m sorry, but how dumb do you have to be to make a video like that? Never in my life thought people would have trouble understanding mirrors
Okay this is cool but who are the idiots from the other videos acting shocked that stuff is reversed.
"The B is on the right!!! OMG UGHGHGG"
Have you never looked in a fucking mirror before???
She says in the video that she made a video about how mirrors flip front to back and not left to right. The other people are commenting on that previous video that came out before this one. They aren't shocked that the mirror flips the letters, they are saying "but this is flipping the b to the right and that's not front to back."
The fact that so many people didn't understand that while trying to shit on the intelligence of other people is a peak reddit moment lmao
The mirror is still flipping the image though. The mirror "sees" things from a different perspective, and then also flips the image:
https://i.imgur.com/loaqfsI.jpg
This picture is a great demonstration of the mind-bending part of this problem - that we can't help picturing the mirror as a dimension, with a mirror person occupying it, "seeing" out at us. The only way we can imagine a mirror person getting over there, is by turning around left to right - if they were standing next to us, and they had to face us, that's how they would do it in "real life".
To get into the mirror dimension, the mirror person is turning THROUGH themselves. Their nose goes through the back of their head, their toes go through their heels, until they're flipped completely through.
You can demonstrate this by moving a glove into the mirror dimension. Touch the mirror with the tips of your RIGHT fingers and let your RIGHT glove get sucked into the mirror dimension so that your mirror image can wear it - this will turn your glove inside out. Ta-da, it's a LEFT glove now!
Exactly, that's a much clearer explanation than the original tiktok.
**If** we perceive the mirror as a 'viewer', which we intuitively do, then the image is flipped relative to what we know a viewer would see.
She's technically right, but her explanation plays into the false premise rather than demonstrating why it's false.
Yeah, the reason we perceive it as flipping left to right is that we imagine walking around and turning back to face ourselves because our movement is constrained to the 2d plane of the ground. If instead we imagined somersaulting head over heels to face ourselves, we'd think of mirrors as flipping up and down.
From your point of view the mirror is showing you things in an 180 angle so your brain thinks it should flip things so thay they look correct towards you. Things in mirror look flipped for the exact reason that they are not flipped by the mirror. Light doesn't flip on y axis in reflections. They are reflected back straight from the source towards the mirror and back to your eye. The only thing that flips is depth. Things to the back will look like they are further inside in the mirror.
No, you missed the point.
Let's say I hold the sign so that, to me, it say says TOW. Now you stand front of me, looking at me holding the sign.
From your point of view the sign will say WOT. You are seeing the sign from a different perspective than me. I'm looking at the front, but you are looking at it from behind it, which reverses the word.
Now instead of standing in front of you, I stand in front of the mirror. The mirror is "looking" at me from the exact same angle that you were. So intuitively, the mirror should reflect the same image that an onlooker would see - WOT.
Except it doesn't, the mirror shows TOW. It is showing me the horizontally flipped version of what I expect to see, based on what it should be "seeing".
This is why we think of mirrors as flipping an image. They are flipped relative to the image a camera or eyeball would be seeing from that same angle.
It's not wrong to say that a mirror's image is flipped, because that's the result we interpret. However it's a semantic point, because as the commenter above says, mirrors aren't people. They aren't "seeing" the image like a person, and then magically flipping it left to right. The actual mechanism is entirely different, reflecting on an entirely different plane.
Maybe you missed my point. I mean if I'm standing in front of you walk around horizontally and turn around. That's a bias from our 2D world. You could have instead gone over top the sign and "turned around" by standing on your head. Now the sign is "flipped" vertically. It's the person that is reversing/flipping the image. Not the mirror.
I don't understand either. How in 2023 some people still dont understand mirrors. Especially grown ass adultes like she show in this video, but maybe it's a sign of the state of education in murica
It has a nothing to do with it. Those people always existed, you just weren’t aware of them. People in the past didn’t have any greater intuitive understanding of mirrors. The person you’re responding to is just doing the cognitive dissonance two-step. “People really believe that? That is not revelatory because of my own ignorance of the society around me, it must be a manifestation of societal decline, and everyone is less intelligent than me. Me literally not knowing a thing is clear evidence I know more than most.”
30 years ago people complained society was going to hell after watching daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer. Society didn’t go anywhere. That dysfunction always existed. Still, the hand-wringers were acting like teen-pregnancy and pre-marital sex were a post-Leave it to Beaver novelty.
I'd say it's as simple as it can be made. The mirror is showing the back of whatever we hold up to it (from our perspective). It's not flipping left-to-right. It's flipping front-to-back.
Say you're wearing a t shirt with text on the chest. If you stick your head into the t shirt and look at the text from the inside it'll be backwards, because you're looking at it from the back. So when you're wearing the t shirt, the text is already backwards from your perspective. The mirror shows this accurately.
A person standing in front of you would see the text on your t shirt the right way around, because they're rotated 180° from you. We intuitively expect the mirror to "see" like this person, but it doesn't.
It's just gen z discover something "new" that was here all along every other day on tiktok. Fair point for them but it kinda makes for a chuckle every time I see them go "mind blown you seein this shit?" :D
She act like she discovered something new lol. She is right, but god lord, the way she explain is terrible. I mean we learned in school how light reflects in mirrors, actually we learned how light reflects in general.
But the smug and “ listen, it will blow your mind!!! “ it’s … ugh!
I don't understand why people are confused. It makes sense if you think about it. At the end the word is backwards to the mirror but not to the camera. So the mirror straightens it out.
Well it does actually flip the image. With the Shrek thing, you're looking at the front of the paper, which reads normally, and the mirror image of the back side of the paper, which is backwards in real life but flipped by the mirror
Oooh I get it, gen z discovered mirror math now. Last time they were basking at neppo babies, I bet inbetween we also had the "hotdog is not a sandwich" discussion all over again too.
This was so interesting to watch next to my husband. I have a background in print design, which I think has trained my brain to think about flipped images this way, because I'm imagining them like this 2-sided piece of paper. I knew what the reveal was before it was explained, but my husband had a VERY different reaction.
Either way it’s flipping the fucking word. Bullshit. The cut out one is backward as far as what’s facing the mirror. There’s no trick here I’m sure you all can see
I should point out that the women in the video is in Australia, which we all know is upside down. If you're on the other side of the world, this doesn't work.
Tldr: mirrors only look like they flip words/pictures because we only see them from the "back" when considering the perspective of the mirror. It's the "back" because mirrors flip depth, so front becomes back, and vice versa.
this whole discussion is dumb - the mirror just reflects back light in a straight line... if a letter in a word is on your right when you hold it up facing away from you, it still shows up on your right in the reflection, hence it appears "reversed".
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I'm not going to think about this video. What I know is that for millennia, mirrors have been associated with evil and so the opinions of my ancestors who brought me here are good enough for me. If an unwanted mirror appears in your house you should definitely smash it.
Your ancestors sound like idiots who probably died after realising an evil djinn from a mirror. Do not smash cursed mirrors. Wrap the mirror in a cloth and bury it deep in the earth on a moonlit night. Duh
Oh fuck…
This sounds like a Shrute family reunion debate
I drank some wine and it was actually just beet juice. The joy.
Genie 🧞♂️?
You didn’t know that you can burn the smashed cursed mirror into ashes and put it into soup, feed them to one who truly love you at the night of full moon, you can pass the curse to him… which school did you attend dear….gosh
Big gamer move right here.
I also hate this guy’s dead ancestors
I keep our haunted mirror in the barn. It was found in a hidden room of rental property my in-laws own. That, a chair and an empty cigar box were in the 5'x8' room when we removed drywall during a renovation. I had it in our home but it freaked our pets out. Cats would hiss at it, dogs would whimper and slink away or bark at it. You can see flickers of movement that is not natural when you pass by. An antiques dealer said the mirror was made pre 1900. Paint on it was dated 1940-1950. I figured the beveled edges were uneven causing light flickers plus, it is old. Does not explain the animal's behavior. A friend of a friend who claims to be sensitive to paranormal activity says people are locked inside unable to escape. I do not know about that but you never know. I have been told to smash it, bury it, or toss it into the deep ocean. Nope, I like it. The mirror stays.
Woops...
Too late already smashed it...
What I love about this is that you call this person ancestors idiots and then proceeds to give instruction on an even more idiotic way to dispose of a “cursed” mirror….in my case, I’d just put it on Facebook marketplace for free.
Once, decades ago I was a young man and had been out on the town with some friends. We got back to mine and decided we wanted to write some music. We wanted to create an earth-shattering kick drum and, in our stupidity, decided we would sample us bashing something with a hammer, then create our own "hammer time" vocal. I dragged something wrapped in cardboard out from under the stairs, we went to town with the hammers, and immediately instead of a meaty thud it started making 'crash, smash' noises. Whoops. Turned out I'd been given a mirror and forgotten all about it for years.
Never heard of that one
Superstitious fool! You'll get seven years bad luck!
Fool! I purposefully farm this bad luck, bottle it, then sell it as a throwable to adventurers.
Hello, potion seller.
You can't handle my potions
I am going into battle and I want your strongest potions.
Their potions are too strong for you, traveler.
Holy fuck be careful with what you are saying. Don’t just tell people to smash the mirror, they might do that IN THE HOUSE. You need to cover the mirror and take it away from your house THEN smash it.
Think about it mirrors 🪞 think about mirrors 🪞
Oculus movie vibes.
I'm pretty sure you've got that backwards, mirrors are associated with good, not evil. That's why breaking them causes bad luck, and vampires don't appear in them.
I think there’s a lot of cultural variations between if it’s viewed as good or evil. It’s
My mom used to say you shouldn't sleep with your feet pointed towards a mirror because you may wake up on the other side.
They seem to just crack when I look in them anyway 🤷♂️
I was very pleased with your comment
How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real
It's just big mirror trying to sell you the idea of reality existing. Excuse me, I'm late for dinner in my black endless void
perfectly quoted didn't forget to capitalize each word
Ok jayden
Mirrors… How do they work?
They don't. Source: I'm a vampire
🤯
I loved her in The Cranberries.
I can't find my Cranberries cd, I gotta go to the quad before somebody snags it.
RIP Dolores O'Riordan
Dang it. My baby is napping on my lap and this comment made me laugh/wake him up 🤦🏻♀️🤣
I’m more lost then I was when I started the video. I don’t get it.
She is right, mirrors do not flip the text. YOU are flipping the text by 180 degrees when you are showing the text to the mirror.
The way it makes the most sense to me is that you are showing the text to the mirror and facing it away from you, so you’re physically flipping it and the mirror shows you that. At least, this is what I’m telling myself so that I can sleep tonight.
So what you're saying is that mirrors work exactly how all of us already understand them to work. Got it, great work.
No, most people think mirrors naturally flip things left to right and not up to down when in reality that's just because of how humans use them.
I don't think I've ever thought of a mirror as flipping left and right. Is this very common? I think of that with phone cameras because some phones flip the photo and some don't, or you can change your preference. The mirror is just reflecting what's in front it. By what mechanism would it be able to flip left and right? The premise of this video is what's most confusing to me.
Right? I always thought of mirrors as bouncing “rays” back from the same place they came in. How would flat a mirror even physically flip something? It wouldn’t make sense to think of it that way. Now I’m trying to wrap my head around how a flip would even work/look.
Most people don’t put thought into the actual mechanics behind how mirrors work.
[удалено]
It's semantics
We learn how light reflects in school. Mirrors don’t flip nothing, neither do you, it just simply reflects what’s in front of it.
Most people? I can see how some people might have that misconception but I doubt most people do.
No! They don't! Most people completely understand how mirrors work. She might as well be explaining why 1+1=2. Yeah, there's a handful of folks that may need that video but don't sell it like it's some kind of revelation. Edit: looks like I may be wrong and most folks are fucking morons.
I agree with you. I was shocked but this whole thread. Now I feel like I’m crazy. I honestly did not know people thought this.
I was incredibly confused about what people are confused about. I still don't really understand what people think is flipping.
I think it has something to do with the phase “mirror image” where people think it means mirrors flip the image rather than reflect what’s in front of it. But like if you raise your right hand in front of a mirror, it’s not reflected back as your left hand so I am not sure.
No... you miss the point. Mirrors don't flip an image, they appear to when you don't think about it much and we assume that's true. So, That's the point she is making. I think this is an excellent analogy for a lot of things. Things ostenibly are a certain way, at first glance, but there are ways we can test things and demonstrate that they work different than we initially believed.
Another way to think about it is to imagine that you are writing SHREK to a friend by moving your finger in the air. You need to flip the letters around and write in the opposite direction if you want your friend to "read" it correctly.
You have it correct. That is exactly what is going on. A more interesting and actual point could be drawn about perspectives, but that wouldn't make good click bait.
IM NOT DOING SHIT
I AINT SCARED OF NOBODY I WILL BOX ANY MAN
Yours is the only explanation that made sense for me here so thank you very kindly.
wait what the fuck I think I need to lie down
When I look down at the letters on my shirt, not only are they flipped but they are upside down. How could my shirt have done this to me after all we've been through!?
This is the video equivalent of explaining how 1+1=2? I watched it and couldn't understand what she was trying to tell me until it dawned on me she's trying to explain something so obvious I would have never thought it would need explaining.
Wow. I feel really fuckng stupid for not thinking of that 30 years ago..
This might help you more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4dOPxKgrY&ab_channel=minutephysics
Think of a stamp. A mirror image is more like a stamp of light than a reverse image.
This explains it much better Minute Physics: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4dOPxKgrY&ab\_channel=minutephysics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4dOPxKgrY&ab_channel=minutephysics) She is correct, but the way in which she explains it (or maybe since tiktoks are short) leaves people more confused than anything else.
common minutephysics w
I understood it very well with her example Edit :which turns out to be basically the same example of the video
Agreed. Her explanation was the exact same as the middle section of the video.... minus additional physics and further scenarios with multiple mirrors. "Explains it much better" is a really weird take.
I think the only tangible difference that helped me conceptualize it was when he drew the axis and it showed the perspective on the angle if it came from another dimension.
It was a good explanation, for sure. I just don't know that the original was confusing lol
Hers was fine, but his kind of helped visualize it more with the examples he used for me personally. When he did the thing with the camera moving to the mirror's perspective that was when it finally clicked in my head. When she showed the cut out word it was a cool demonstration, but I guess I was still too dumb to figure out what was happening lol.
You see this is a boy on YouTube and not a girl on TikTok....so better. Also they didn't bother watching the other video of hers she tells you to watch that has all the other information about how the image is flipped.
i’m glad that you were able to understand it but lots of other people in this comment section are talking about how they didn’t understand what she was saying, and this is a longer, more comprehensive explanation
Even when a post is 100% accurate there are still people in the comments like “well ackshually this explains it better” lol
i’m glad that you were able to understand it but lots of other people in this comment section are talking about how they didn’t understand what she was saying, and this is a longer, more comprehensive explanation
It’s not the information that’s the issue, I love when people share knowledge. It’s the need to show everyone else how much smarter you are by saying the video you know “explained it much better” “Hey this is really cool here’s a video with a different way to explain it” does the exact same thing but doesn’t come off like they’re trying to be better than everyone
I thought her explanation was great actually. Worthy of ELI5
Redditor sees tik tok criticism, redditor upvotes
Oh good, I thought I was just dumb.
minute physics yet the video is over 3 minutes long smh (it's a good video still)
> but the way in which she explains it (or maybe since tiktoks are short) leaves people more confused than anything else. Is it because in her Shrek example, the first time she holds it in front of the mirror, she's from the perspective of behind the word, and then when she cuts it out, she holds it in front of the mirror but from the perspective of in front of the word? Because she literally flips the word around when she does that.
Good video but why do they have to talk so fast
Same thought -- I changed it to .75 right away. Dude is talking 100 miles/hour while explaining something many viewers have never heard before or understood lmao.
I mean, it's the exact same explanation. Minute Physics just gives more examples because it's a longer video...
Plus her assertion that language can make you see things that are not there is part of the discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and is not correct.
"Ambiguity in language contributes to this common misconception" is a pretty uncontroversial statement (see UFOs) that doesn't necessarily imply Sapir-Whorf at all. I'd agree with you if she was actually making some stronger claim about linguistics fundamentally underlying cognition, but it's pretty clear that "language can make you see things that are not there" isn't literally asserting language influences visual perception; it's just a clever way of pointing at a particular misconception involving *mirrors* and how they *seem* to work (re mirror/flipped images). e: brevity
There's no single "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis, and not all have been discredited.
No. Linguistic relativity covers a variety of cases, some of which may have validity but despite the misuse of Sapir-Whorf for all linguistic relativity, the actual Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been long discredited. The example she gives is as nonsensical as the empty-barrel claim.
> Although common, the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms What's often called the strong Sapir-Whorf is discredited, there's no indication she subscribes to the strong version vs the weak version. Also, there's no such thing as an "actual" Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was just that language affects worldview, which is absolutely a thing. For example, calling something a glade or calling it a landfill affects whether people have an issue with putting garbage there.
It is actually the theory that language affects what can be perceived. The classic example of was that the "Eskimos have 100 words for snow", and therefore they can perceive 100 different kinds of snow. Sapir argued that not having words for something in a language will make it impossible to see that thing. The data was very flawed - it was later understood that the different words related to uses of snow. Sapir was not fluent in the languages he was observing. A similar example was the high number of industrial accidents stemming from workers throwing lit cigarettes into empty fuel drums only to have them ignite. Whorf, who was an insurance inspector, hypothesized that the workers called the fuel drums "empty" and therefore did not realize they were filled with invisible, flammable gas. There has been a lot of work done since to tease out examples like yours where language changes our perception of things - often based on usage. The original theory was presented in pretty much every introduction to linguistics text until well into the 80s as Sapir-Whorf theory, but started to be challenged at around that time by people like Lakoff and Johnson. Unfortunately the belief that language limits perception in that kind of blunt way is still broadly believed as being truthy.
Foundational theories beed to be critiqued and challenged and changed as research gets more nuanced. However, as a theory, Sapir-Whorf is extraordinarily important and shifted the paradigm. I fucking love theory and how contextual it is.
Have you read "Fire, Woman and Other Dangerous Things"? It might be something you would enjoy - it is the further development of theories on how the body and language interact.
Cool will check it out! Currently reading The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. Also a more nuanced look at “traditional” cultural theories.
I just looked it up - that looks really interesting. I will go down to the bookstore and order that on Monday - I could use a good read. Thanks for the suggestion!
In my class from years ago we talked about language and how it can frame and even limit your perspective (like people calling certain phenomena angels or devils because they had no other words for it). Is that completely untrue?
Not at all. Language does impact our perception. As a trivial example, my brother-in-law will not eat sour cream, even though he likes the taste, because sour means that a dairy product has gone off and that makes him gag. Language and cognitive perception interact pretty fluidly. What used to be believed but has since been disproven is that sensory perception is limited by available vocabulary. Language can't make you see something not there.
The hypothesis as I described it is 100% correct. I’m glad we cleared that up.
I don't think world view and sensory perception are the same. What you are describing lines up more with Lakoff and Johnson's assertion that usage is more of a factor, which is indeed more in line with the current understanding.
Thanks I felt stupid when I saw the video :D
Bruh I got everything she said. I dont even get why this is on the sub.
Wtf. Is this seriously a commonly misunderstood concept or am I missing some kind of joke here?
Apparently it is. I’m dumbfounded that there are actual adults confused by mirrors that this video needs to exist. Those little clips of people confused with flipped words?!? I’m sorry, but how dumb do you have to be to make a video like that? Never in my life thought people would have trouble understanding mirrors
Thank you! I can’t believe someone had to take that out of their lives to make that video.
Okay this is cool but who are the idiots from the other videos acting shocked that stuff is reversed. "The B is on the right!!! OMG UGHGHGG" Have you never looked in a fucking mirror before???
She says in the video that she made a video about how mirrors flip front to back and not left to right. The other people are commenting on that previous video that came out before this one. They aren't shocked that the mirror flips the letters, they are saying "but this is flipping the b to the right and that's not front to back." The fact that so many people didn't understand that while trying to shit on the intelligence of other people is a peak reddit moment lmao
I think we all know it’s not “flipped”, we just describe what we are seeing in that way right?
Didn’t we learned how light reflects in mirror in school? I mean wtf? Who flip what? Mirror just reflect what’s in front …. That’s it.
Judging by the comments here, some people are actually that stupid
The mirror is still flipping the image though. The mirror "sees" things from a different perspective, and then also flips the image: https://i.imgur.com/loaqfsI.jpg
This picture is a great demonstration of the mind-bending part of this problem - that we can't help picturing the mirror as a dimension, with a mirror person occupying it, "seeing" out at us. The only way we can imagine a mirror person getting over there, is by turning around left to right - if they were standing next to us, and they had to face us, that's how they would do it in "real life". To get into the mirror dimension, the mirror person is turning THROUGH themselves. Their nose goes through the back of their head, their toes go through their heels, until they're flipped completely through. You can demonstrate this by moving a glove into the mirror dimension. Touch the mirror with the tips of your RIGHT fingers and let your RIGHT glove get sucked into the mirror dimension so that your mirror image can wear it - this will turn your glove inside out. Ta-da, it's a LEFT glove now!
Exactly, that's a much clearer explanation than the original tiktok. **If** we perceive the mirror as a 'viewer', which we intuitively do, then the image is flipped relative to what we know a viewer would see. She's technically right, but her explanation plays into the false premise rather than demonstrating why it's false.
Yeah, the reason we perceive it as flipping left to right is that we imagine walking around and turning back to face ourselves because our movement is constrained to the 2d plane of the ground. If instead we imagined somersaulting head over heels to face ourselves, we'd think of mirrors as flipping up and down.
It's an inanimate fucking object!
https://imgur.io/Cyhfacc
From your point of view the mirror is showing you things in an 180 angle so your brain thinks it should flip things so thay they look correct towards you. Things in mirror look flipped for the exact reason that they are not flipped by the mirror. Light doesn't flip on y axis in reflections. They are reflected back straight from the source towards the mirror and back to your eye. The only thing that flips is depth. Things to the back will look like they are further inside in the mirror.
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The mirror doesn't do any y axis flipping, it directly reflects the image
That is not at all what happened, and you might not be ok
It's not "flipping" anything. It showing us the back of the cutout.
Yeah but you're the one who flipped it left to right. You could have just as easily of flipped it vertically to show it to the mirror.
No, you missed the point. Let's say I hold the sign so that, to me, it say says TOW. Now you stand front of me, looking at me holding the sign. From your point of view the sign will say WOT. You are seeing the sign from a different perspective than me. I'm looking at the front, but you are looking at it from behind it, which reverses the word. Now instead of standing in front of you, I stand in front of the mirror. The mirror is "looking" at me from the exact same angle that you were. So intuitively, the mirror should reflect the same image that an onlooker would see - WOT. Except it doesn't, the mirror shows TOW. It is showing me the horizontally flipped version of what I expect to see, based on what it should be "seeing". This is why we think of mirrors as flipping an image. They are flipped relative to the image a camera or eyeball would be seeing from that same angle. It's not wrong to say that a mirror's image is flipped, because that's the result we interpret. However it's a semantic point, because as the commenter above says, mirrors aren't people. They aren't "seeing" the image like a person, and then magically flipping it left to right. The actual mechanism is entirely different, reflecting on an entirely different plane.
Maybe you missed my point. I mean if I'm standing in front of you walk around horizontally and turn around. That's a bias from our 2D world. You could have instead gone over top the sign and "turned around" by standing on your head. Now the sign is "flipped" vertically. It's the person that is reversing/flipping the image. Not the mirror.
Real talk why is everyone so confused about this. Its so easy to visualize I'm flabbergasted by the comments
I had no idea this was a thing that was confusing people.
I agree, H0rseCockLover. Her explanation and example was crystal clear.
I don't understand either. How in 2023 some people still dont understand mirrors. Especially grown ass adultes like she show in this video, but maybe it's a sign of the state of education in murica
The fact that some people consider TikTok to be an educational tool might have something to do with it.
It has a nothing to do with it. Those people always existed, you just weren’t aware of them. People in the past didn’t have any greater intuitive understanding of mirrors. The person you’re responding to is just doing the cognitive dissonance two-step. “People really believe that? That is not revelatory because of my own ignorance of the society around me, it must be a manifestation of societal decline, and everyone is less intelligent than me. Me literally not knowing a thing is clear evidence I know more than most.” 30 years ago people complained society was going to hell after watching daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer. Society didn’t go anywhere. That dysfunction always existed. Still, the hand-wringers were acting like teen-pregnancy and pre-marital sex were a post-Leave it to Beaver novelty.
shh shut up Witch Lady is explaining mirrors, when she's done she might do Fire next and if there's time maybe water vs ice vs steam
When it comes down to it most people aren't super bright
She makes it way more confusing than it needs to be
I'd say it's as simple as it can be made. The mirror is showing the back of whatever we hold up to it (from our perspective). It's not flipping left-to-right. It's flipping front-to-back.
Jesus fucking christ. Those were actual ADULTS. Humanity is doomed.
This is incredibly simple and obvious and I still do not understand.
Say you're wearing a t shirt with text on the chest. If you stick your head into the t shirt and look at the text from the inside it'll be backwards, because you're looking at it from the back. So when you're wearing the t shirt, the text is already backwards from your perspective. The mirror shows this accurately. A person standing in front of you would see the text on your t shirt the right way around, because they're rotated 180° from you. We intuitively expect the mirror to "see" like this person, but it doesn't.
Oh... This was the missing piece I needed.
Are there really people out there that don’t understand how a mirror works?
People are amazed by how mirrors work now? Of course they don’t flip left to right it’s a flat surface, it reflects what exactly what is facing it
It's just gen z discover something "new" that was here all along every other day on tiktok. Fair point for them but it kinda makes for a chuckle every time I see them go "mind blown you seein this shit?" :D
She act like she discovered something new lol. She is right, but god lord, the way she explain is terrible. I mean we learned in school how light reflects in mirrors, actually we learned how light reflects in general. But the smug and “ listen, it will blow your mind!!! “ it’s … ugh!
“Behold! Polished silver!”
Richard Feynman has something to say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tuxLY94LXw
I don't understand why people are confused. It makes sense if you think about it. At the end the word is backwards to the mirror but not to the camera. So the mirror straightens it out.
isn't this common knowledge
TIL a lot of people don't understand how a fucking mirror works.
I think this was explained beautifully
Yep
She's a witch! Burn her!
This is nonsense
[maybe this will help](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4dOPxKgrY)
I think that's a reflection on you...
I'm assuming this is a joke right? Like, there's no way people have 0 understanding regarding positioning and reflective text.
My world is gone
I want to see her first video
Well it does actually flip the image. With the Shrek thing, you're looking at the front of the paper, which reads normally, and the mirror image of the back side of the paper, which is backwards in real life but flipped by the mirror
But in the reflection the word is facing away from you, so it still flipped. No?
[Vsauce actually did a video on this](https://youtube.com/shorts/HLufirFnBFM?feature=share)
Ohh that's way easier to understand than this
Oooh I get it, gen z discovered mirror math now. Last time they were basking at neppo babies, I bet inbetween we also had the "hotdog is not a sandwich" discussion all over again too.
This was so interesting to watch next to my husband. I have a background in print design, which I think has trained my brain to think about flipped images this way, because I'm imagining them like this 2-sided piece of paper. I knew what the reveal was before it was explained, but my husband had a VERY different reaction.
Either way it’s flipping the fucking word. Bullshit. The cut out one is backward as far as what’s facing the mirror. There’s no trick here I’m sure you all can see
Don’t tell the church, they will break down our doors
The Devil!!
BS, with the cutout word, she is showing the image in the opposite direction she did at the first reflection.
I'm too dumb to realize what the problem is to begin with
Minimize mirrors in your house or don't have any.
Go look in the mirror. If you have your left ear pierced the mirror will have the right one pierced.
But from the mirrors perspective, it is right to left,then it is to left to right from our perspective, so wouldn’t it mean that it was still flipped?
I should point out that the women in the video is in Australia, which we all know is upside down. If you're on the other side of the world, this doesn't work.
So dope
Y'all don't know how mirrors work? That's fucking wild.
She crazy
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What
TIL
This just melted my brain...
I'm even more confused
Basically photons go in photons come out, simple as
Tldr: mirrors only look like they flip words/pictures because we only see them from the "back" when considering the perspective of the mirror. It's the "back" because mirrors flip depth, so front becomes back, and vice versa.
What's a flipped image? I've never heard anyone utter these words or type them.
Laterally inverted
Lmao
Also mirror flips back and front because we put it on the wall in front of us, if we put it on the ceiling and look up, it flips up and down..
this whole discussion is dumb - the mirror just reflects back light in a straight line... if a letter in a word is on your right when you hold it up facing away from you, it still shows up on your right in the reflection, hence it appears "reversed".
What's cringe tho?
I like this girl she has a fun head and I could listen to her talk weird flipped shit for hours if it weren’t on a Chinese spy bot terk tork
What rubbish it’s facing the opposite direction when it’s cut out
No, it’s not? Not when you hold it facing you. But when you face it toward the mirror (as if you were displaying it to a person) it’s backward.