2026-01-08: Wyatt S Carpenter says:
  I have no verbatim comments to write down here at this time, but two of the people who have read this post have reacted with, approximately, "yeah, isn't that obvious?". Let us call them commenters. Dear reader, I have no idea what kind of schooling these people got where this was obvious to them. I don't think most people have even heard of the concept of a "philosophical atom". It wasn't until I was taking early modern philosophy classes in college and learning about corpuscularism (a different type of materialism popular at that time; like atomism but the atoms are divisible) that enough distinctions had been drawn to me that I was able to put this together. Well, maybe those commenters also did that. I don't really know their educational backgrounds. Also, maybe in the day of class where people customarily tell children about Democritus, the teachers added "but now we know he was wrong lmao gottem idiot" instead of "wow and he was mostly right, that's cool" like they did to me.
  One of these commenters, Gio Boff, I read this post aloud to while he was cooking. One of them, Matt Pearson, whom I know through Alex Chang, apparently read it online. Others have also apparently read this post and not had this reaction.
  Anyway, here are two diverging instincts I had about the situation, which I write down here to instantly forget, because I don't really care and the situation is not notable. First of all, it is often said that if you explain something well it will seem obvious. Secondly, it must be admitted that my intellectual tastes are often very simple, and based around discovering that Thing Y is not the same as similar Thing X — an endless source of amusement.