samirillian

It's well-known that the hard sciences are awash with fake papers, but apparently when a hard science journal gets fooled, it proves nothing.

Honestly, I hate this. It's a stunt and bad manners. All the extenuating circumstances are known at this point. Philosophical inquiry is of course by its nature susceptible to charlatans, that's unavoidable.

This is an old article, according to Wikipedia the charges have been dropped

Okay, now can I read the intercept version of this story.

No comment on human exceptionalism per se but I think you have the logic a little backwards. The "higher" process would be to act according to reason, not according to one's dopamine receptions.

From the Wikipedia on the Pleiades:

> Its light is dominated by young, hot blue stars, up to 14 of which can be seen with the naked eye depending on local observing conditions and visual acuity of the observer.

Not sure where you got this claim that there are only 6 visible stars

Seems like they could just put something sturdier on the corners of the phones, feel like that's how they usually get cracked

Well you don't do much for your argument about reading by claiming that seeing measles in person is what convinced you.

Lol, for the record, this is why I didn't make a claim one way or the other.

My personal theory is that if you're an extrovert, you were more resistant to the quarantine, because you couldn't see your friends, and there's some connection between that and getting the vaccine, like you'd probably already been ignoring the other rules, playing down the whole thing on a subconscious level. Something like that. It makes perfect sense to me in a weird way that's hard to describe the precise causality of, but that somehow sounds more likely than extrovert = narcissist = doesn't believe scientists.

edit, some possible causalities:

- the study was somehow biased to define as extroverted people who ignored quarantine

- extroverts who ignored quarantine were more likely to get COVID, which they believed gave them a similar level of immunity

- my aforementioned moral equivocation, like, if I'm ignoring this it's because people telling me what to do must be wrong, etc.

I don't know that much about it, but the impression I got from studying TLA+ was that machine-executable code was distinctly not mathematics, and that programs are never provable. Am I wrong? Or is this just the kind of sensational snake-oil that HN readers are susceptible to buying.

Imagine the tattoos

Fun fact, the guy the FBI claims was behind the Anthrax attacks was apparently a fan of Hofstadter:

> A week later, just after 1:00 a.m. on the morning of November 8, the FBI stated that Ivins was observed throwing away "a copy of a book entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, published by Douglas Hofstadter in 1979" and "a 1992 issue of American Scientist Journal which contained an article entitled 'The Linguistics of DNA,' and discussed, among other things, codons and hidden messages".

> the founding axiom that most folks will have is that the "normal" ethical view is the "correct" view.

I half-see your point here, and there are many other points to be made about ethics (which I still think Nietzsche does best) but I feel like you're brushing away Chomsky's argument. He looks at morality like language. It's just that normal does indeed have an apparently wide range, which according to his theory is actually quite limited. I like this idea. Similar to the limits of reason itself; from one perspective the human condition limits us to a frustratingly small territory of what is thinkable at all. Morality is narrow because humans are alike. This is a claim about the human condition itself, not about the moral majority.

The only real exception i can think of is psychopaths, but I think that they do live up to their name.

I agree, though it's consistent with the extremes to which non-harm gets taken in many Eastern religions, which according to the article were a strong influence on his ethics. Not eating root-vegetables, etc.

What negative responses do you expect? Don't feel like there are a lot of HN dualists out there.

I've thought the same thing, haha. I was thinking about going the other way though, with dor for and/or and or for xor. We already have doff and don, which for some reason seem like similar constructions.

Also they look cool. Also they're a platonic solid. The golden ratio is built into pentagons, they're tricky to construct with a compass, basically they're cool

No we can't revive these terms, that would be prescriptivism.

Okay, originally I just had to read 1984, to comment on an hn thread, now I need a 4 year linguistics degree. Increasing appeals to authority, when the previous one fails you.

You seem to be arguing that descriptivism is just what linguistics "does", therefore it does not inherently contradict prescriptivism? Because they have two separate roles. And if descriptivists stayed in their lane, and allowed prescription where obviously necessary (like when teaching a language) then we wouldn't be having this argument in the first place.

But if descriptivists turn around and say "therefore thou shalt not prescribe"، then we do have a problem, and descriptivists are indeed naive, they are the real prescribers of an ill-conceived political program.

I get heated about this lol. If you really meant well, I'm not sure what to say. Try reading a comment before responding to it. My original comment was about the validity of an Orwell analogy, a point which you have absolutely refused to engage.

Calling you a troll was my most charitable reading of your obtuseness, because if you weren't willfully so, you must be either unconsciously so, or, well, just bad at reading.

If I'm a phrenologist, so is Orwell, and newspeak is not a valid analogy.

First of all, I have read 1984, and I wouldn't take issue with the analogy if I hadn't. Whether you have read any other books, I cannot say.

Second, you say Orwell isn't a linguist, and language just happens, but then you explicitly reference his fictional account of a prescribed language. Clearly, Esperanto is a prescribed language. So prescribed languages do exist, and political forces can shape languages, you just don't think that happens with English. Well I do. People reference so-called "descriptive" dictionaries and grammars, yet don't those texts themselves inherently acquire a prescriptive force, insofar as they originate at elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge and UChicago? Just as Dante's works acquired a prescriptive force for the Italian that was once highly regional, but needed standardization to support the nation-state.

I think descriptivism is an incredibly naive position to take when talking about modern languages that have agglomerated for explicit social, political, and economic projects, and I think that was Orwell's point.

Similar to David Foster Wallace's essay on English, we can either naively push the descriptivist line, or we can accept that "the powers that be" do indeed shape our language, and try to have our own voices heard, for what English ought to be.

So we can rail against the Newspeak that some editor on Wikipedia is supposedly forcing on us. We can say it's literally 1984. It's ungood! And we can happily return to talking about grokking and gatekeeping and unaliving, and undocumented immigrants, and unhoused people, and utilizing the new library, believing these words are good because they happened and that they happened because they're good.

> What's the point of arguing about the correctness of a phrase when it does a perfect job of conveying meaning?

See this is what I mean when I say that your position is closer to the Newspeak ethos. What's wrong with ungood, after all? It does a perfect job of conveying meaning.

Okay now you're just trolling me. The question that starts with "I have a question for you." Did you look at the Orwell link.

> Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Language is indeed consciously shaped. Look at the history of Italian. It doesn't just happen, and Wikipedia definitely doesn't just happen.

And if you disagree with Orwell, fine, just don't trot him out in support of your points. Which was my original point.

You literally didn't answer my one question, yet you keep asking more. Even Socrates answered questions when asked.

I could engage your other points, but why bother

My main point is only that comparing this to newspeak is totally backwards.

Well this guy on Wikipedia, who clearly cares more then you do, for one. Dictionaries, style guides, people like Orwell, the French do have a ministry to maintain the language.

I've answered your question, now I have one for you: Did you even glance at the link?

I'm sorry, these epistemologically relativist arguments lead to utterly absurd conclusions. How does wikipedia work at all? How can we ever make judgements about anything?

It's bad Cartesianism. Just because we can't know something absolutely doesn't mean we can't know anything. Just because language changes doesn't mean there's no such thing as correct and incorrect usage.

I don't agree with your 1984 analogy at all.

A better source might be George Orwell's actual, explicit opinions on politics and the English language:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Orwell certainly did not take an "anything goes" approach to language, which is essentially what you and others argue for, in the mistaken belief that you're somehow striking a blow at totalitarianism. From my perspective, your position is much closer to the Newspeak ethos than that of someone who actually cares about correct usage.

I think you're posing a false dichotomy here. I, as a person who is still fuzzy on how to recycle, did not feel blamed. I agree with the general sentiment; nobody knows the rules! We should've had a whole class on shit like this in high school. Obviously, there are larger problems caused by unfettered capitalism at work, but increasing recycling and composting infrastructure, hand-in-hand with public education on how to use that infrastructure, would make things better, and probably add some intangible benefits, like feeling some degree of agency over the process, which would have positive externalities like making people feel like they might have some greater agency over the bigger, structural problems, which might lead to greater political/economic change.

It's not a strawman, it's a reductio ad absurdum.

Let me get this straight. The hill you're dying on is never destroy anything under any circumstances, no matter how useless, aesthetically repulsive, or morally reprehensible, because those things are merely subjective, but not destroying things is objective.

So like a Nazi furry Funko pop, we can't get rid of that.