Greg the Grouper
Active Member
My current favorite word is peligroso. I like how it rolls off the tongue.
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Okey, back to topic then ...
Whats your favorite word psi?
Mine is "moist" or "wet" ... mostly cause some people find it unnerving and somewhat unplesant.
My great words thread.
An old gaming buddy of mine is a editor for The Washington Post, who is also an Atheist by the way. We had a conversation about fake news last year where he said basically the same thing you have said here about conspiracy theories. But he also pointed out the increased amount of "fake news stories" which are easily proven false or actually prove themselves false within a few days or so. But by then the damage is already done, so to speak. As if they were just designed to sway public opinion a few hours in a certain way for some unknown reason. Kinda creepy.One of the reasons people like me get so aggressive in dealing with bullshit is precisely that. The bullshit we encounter daily has absolutely no requirement to be true, but any counter to it must be, and even that requires research. Frankly, if it weren't for people like Sparhafoc, AronRa, Potholer54, Nesslig, Calilasseia, and many, many others, they wouldn't ever get countered, precisely because of how hard and demanding real, factually accurate research is, compared to simply extracting some assertion directly from the rectal sphincter and presenting it as Earth-shattering wisdom.
One of the attractions of conspiracy theories for many is the sheer weight of evidence they're presented with when first encountering it, because everybody's citing the same set of facts, and all agreeing with each other. Those debunking them are always behind, and each debunker has a different approach, meaning they're raising different objections to the material presented.
As if they were just designed to sway public opinion a few hours in a certain way for some unknown reason. Kinda creepy.
The way German is constructed is certainly useful to that. It's essentially constructed by construction.Someone once told me that the German language is particularly useful to engineers because what things are called in German often tell you what the thing does..
Greetings,
Kindest regards,
James
Holy shit, dude, Well met! It's been a minute.hey Hack, howzit going?
This covers something I've talked about an awful lot on the blog, because it's such a problem with how we think about things that it leads to all sorts of issues of comprehension; the pitfalls of natural language. Natural language is such a source of wooliness that it becomes incredibly difficult to parse meaning in some contexts. I've always suspected that's one of the reasons escalations in online discussion are so easy because, absent other indicators, words can be really poor communicators of ideas unless you spend a lot of time laying out the semantic map.Do airplanes fly? Seems kinda silly, of course they do, right? OK, then, do submarines swim? Hmmmm. It's something Chomsky uses when he's talking about the uselessness of the Turing Test.
Welcome.
All fine, as long as you do not start talking Geordie
Hey, it's been about 7200 since you replied, I put too much faith in the notification system. 'Faith', it'll screw you every time.Holy shit, dude, Well met! It's been a minute.
I've seen arguments/debates where they're going on and on and you can tell they're talking past each other, either one of both of them seem incapable of realizing they're not on the same page, or even the same book.This covers something I've talked about an awful lot on the blog, because it's such a problem with how we think about things that it leads to all sorts of issues of comprehension; the pitfalls of natural language. Natural language is such a source of wooliness that it becomes incredibly difficult to parse meaning in some contexts. I've always suspected that's one of the reasons escalations in online discussion are so easy because, absent other indicators, words can be really poor communicators of ideas unless you spend a lot of time laying out the semantic map.
I have a favourite saying that's become almost a trope; the map is not the terrain. I usually talk about it in the context of, say, DNA as a code ( the code is the thing we impose on the molecule to aid understanding, not the molecule itself; DNA is a code in precisely the same way that London is a map), but it's just as true of our personal internal models of the language. We each carry a model of every word in our minds, and our models are the map we have of the language, but there's no guarantee that the map I carry is the same as the map you carry. It will have lots of shared landmarks, but the houses will have slightly different occupants.
OK, so I'm stretching the analogy too far. How very unlike me...
I'll be writing more about this in the coming days in the context of how natural language caused problems for the foundations of mathematics, among other things, and I just pulled the trigger on a piece about how formal logic can aid in removing ambiguity to reveal logical structure.