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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Moreover it's worrisome that someone who knows Witten and Tao personally doesn't have even grade-school media literacy.

Maybe I don’t have the required level of literacy but I understand « The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally » as the union of the « know personally » and « aware of generally » sets.

In most understandings of English, "and" is used as the conjunction operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_conjunction (set intersection). If you were expressing a disjunction (a union), you'd use "or" or "as well as" or something similar. Obviously it's possible to eventually puzzle out from context what OP meant, but I made the same mistake as the person you're replying to when reading the comment quickly.

Is it so?

What about “I want to thank both you and the original article author”? Should it be “or” instead of “and”?

> In most understandings of English

This seems a reach to me. I think your confusion is not unfounded and is not uncommon, but I think it's also extremely (and moreso?) common to read the sentence as the author intended. It took me 0ms to puzzle out the meaning because the intended meaning was the natural assumption of my brain.

Besides that, it seems a bit absurd to me to say that "and" and "as well as" have entirely distinct meanings. They're not totally interchangeable, but there is overlap.

Thanks! This is the sense in which I had intended the sentence. I wish that I knew Terrence Tao and Ed Witten! The smart people I know personally I wanted to keep anonymous....

Claims to know*

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