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Comment by flir | Hacker News Reader

Have you read The Analytical Language of John Wilkins by Borges? It crops up here occasionally. If not, I'd totally recommend it.

When you draw up rules for an FAQ you're delimiting a box and saying "the stuff inside the box is part of my model, and the stuff outside it is not". The person suggesting you put advice about raising suckling pigs in your Emacs FAQ (picking the most extreme example I can think of) is suggesting you redraw the box - change the model. I'd still say the decision to redraw the model or not is a political decision. I'd also say that saying "no" is obviously the right decision. But still political.

I admit my definition of political (any action or decision that affects how people relate to each other or how resources and opportunities are allocated) is maximalist. We could, at root, be talking about different things.

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I haven't read it, but I'll add it to my reading list!

I suppose I have to agree with you that the statement itself is political, given your definition. In which case I'd simply re-phrase my argument. We used to have political neutral zones, where we agreed that we'd try to avoid overt political discussion, and we'd politely ignore those little statements that are "still political". In your example we would all be able to agree that "no" is obviously the right decision regarding the FAQ additions, and we'll all politely ignore the fact that we have differing opinions about the politics of raising suckling pigs. Neutral territory where we can put aside our differences and focus on something bigger.

We've lost a lot of those spaces, which is sad because those neutral zones are critical for the functioning of any ideologically diverse group of people. We have a word for a space where everyone must agree, and must all say all the correct phrases: cult.

We need to build communities, not cults. And to do that we need to be able to agree to disagree about things.

(Back when I was doing a lot of Ruby "Matz is nice and so we are nice" seemed to me to be about the best community code of conduct you could hope for!)

It's worth it. Goes straight at the philosophical underpinnings of software, maybe even knowledge, with a hacksaw. It's not much longer than its own Wikipedia page: https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.ht...

Foucault wrote: "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought [...] breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other."

This is good too: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/

But it all sums to "the map is not the territory".

Broadly agree with the thrust of what you're saying, disagree with some of the fine detail.

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