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Annoyance comments on Rationality Toughness Tests - Less Wrong
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Comments (17)
The structural modifications to the human throat that permit easy speech make us vulnerable to choking. If I recall correctly, most animals can breathe and swallow at the same time. Human infants are also capable of this. But the larynx slowly shifts so that we can modulate our airflow in sophisticated ways, and one consequence of this is that swallowing is no longer safely compatible with simultaneous breathing.
Voted up from -1 because this plausibly is just an honest misunderstanding.
Though Annoyance, you should keep it in mind whenever you're tempted to interpret someone's remarks in a way that seems surprising / non-sequitury... I guess to you the world just seems like an endless stream of people saying crazy things, and so you can't distinguish your own misunderstandings of them within that.
As for alternative kinds of 'choking': regarding animals, see the concept of a "'coon trap", sometimes called a "monkey trap". It's a specific example of flight-or-fight leading directly to a maladaptive response.
In an inverse of the situation with literal choking, young humans are also vulnerable to it, but adults (usually) aren't.