English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2013-01-20 (page 2 of 4)

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2:00 AM

@TRiG You’re right. You see how often I don’t used it. :)

Women get runs in their stockings, but men only get holes in theirs.

Hoser.

I find myself too much liking the answers to this closed-unconstructive question:

4

Q: Words based on the names of gods

While the word christen means "to baptise" or "to make Christian", in another sense, it has shed its religious connotations to simply mean "to name" or even "use for the first time". Is there any other word which is based on the name (or epithet) of a god or prophet, (or possibly some other signi...

single-word-requests etymology vocabulary proper-nouns religion

What does this tell you?

That purple would be a nice color for my shed.

No, it is because I like classical references.

Whe’er they may fall.

Or are you implying that it is showing that my sleep-deprived judgement is so warped, that I should perforce hie myself to my sleeping chambers?

By your short hairs?

All my hairs are short. You’ll have to chat up M..ax for the longer strands.

I see.

Why so short?

I don't get it.

Javascript is weird!

if ( 3 = 2 )
{
return;
}

How can this have any effect??

And yet if I remove these lines, the script will properly execute.

@MattЭллен I am going crazy!

Or is it the brackets?

No.

I give up. Stupid Javascript!

2:31 AM

@Cerberus Single equals signs are used for setting variables, for example: var x = 2;

There should be two equals signs there.

Then it will return false, and not an error.

@Mahnax Oh! God, I can never remember when to use doubles and when singles.

But...does an error return "true"?

Never mind, I'll try it.

No.

An error returns an error—true returns true.

Errors are not true, nor are they false. They are error.

user19161

@waiwai I saw your message in the "private room for me and ELU mods". I am there now. We can have the conversation here or there if you like.

So then "return" should never be effected, should it?

Well, if there's an error, then it won't return true or false. That is the problem.

2:37 AM

But the Return should not be executed, should it?

shrugs

It's weird.

I don't think it would be. I think the interpreter or whatever it's called gives up when it encounters the error.

So many weird things.

Consider this.

When I go to a page, then load a different page in the same tab, then click "view source", the old page title remains the title!

Huh.

2:40 AM

It doesn't change to update to the new page.

I am afraid I must away to my studies.

You are excused.

Happy studying.

Dank.

studies

Very good.

You are studying correctly.

Joseph Weissman

2:52 AM

@Cerberus how are you, sir?

user19161

@tchrist @waiwai I was the one who cast the delete votes on Mitch's posts. They were already at negative votes when I cast them! No need to start a private room for this! Also, it is not revenge. Mitch is my friend. I give him upvotes all the time! Also, I visit his posts now and then and open many tabs at the same time, so they were done quickly. QED. Any more questions?

@JosephWeissman Greetings!

What do you think:

Is there some kind of relationship between the modern phenomenon of "owning" knowledge/information/ideas on the one hand, and the desire to be famous on the other?

@JasonBourne Why did you decide to delete so many of his answers?

user19161

@Cerberus Just delete votes, not deletion.

user19161

@Cerberus If you read my above paragraph, everything is there.

user19161

And I don't mind discussing these here, no need for private room.

2:58 AM

His answers did not seem delete-worthy at all.

user19161

Oh, and Mitch can testify how good we are with each other. You can ask him yourself if you want.

Then why this weird act of aggression?

user19161

Aggression?

1

A: Word for more than several, but less than many

All these terms are vague; there is no precise number to them, so there is no accurate comparison. However measure words sometimes have somewhat predictable comparisons. 'several' is definitely more than 'a few', and 'many' is less than 'most'. But between 'several' and 'many'? Those are fairl...

user19161

You have labelled these acts as aggression?

2:59 AM

@JasonBourne All of a sudden voting to delete several answers by the same user.

user19161

@Cerberus It is more of an act of friendship, not aggression.

Call it as you like. It comes off as a bit of an attack? If not that, then why??

Explain yourself.

Joseph Weissman

(That's a complicated question, Cerbie!)

@JasonBourne This answer was perfectly fine. And, even if you disagreed with it, you shouldn't vote to delete, except if it is utterly and totally worthless crap.

@JosephWeissman That's why you seemed the right person, hehe.

I think there may be a relation.

Joseph Weissman

Well, it may be helpful to try to conjure up what "ownership of an idea" meant prior to IP.

user19161

3:02 AM

Maybe I didn't read too carefully, and wanted to get rid of the negative posts quickly @cerb But I can't recall exactly which I cast votes on now.

My position is that it did not exist.

Joseph Weissman

Sure -- an idea belongs to anyone.

user19161

I definitely didn't downvote them. In fact, I have given Mitch many upvotes.

Joseph Weissman

This would seem to be the default, "natural" position to take -- in the absence of someone asserting ownership over it.

user19161

Is Mitch aware of this?

3:02 AM

@JasonBourne Get rid of negative posts? Why on earth? Answers with a negative score serve an important function. And it was even only -1!

@JosephWeissman Yes.

user19161

@Cerberus Oh well. Whatever. But don't label this as aggression.

On the Internet and on television, being known means having (a chance at) gaining power and wealth, or so it is perceived by people.

Joseph Weissman

I'm not sure I grok the connection with "fame" -- note that fame used to basically just mean "reputation." So you get letters from Thomas Jefferson worrying about his "fame" :)

user19161

@mitch Are you around, please pop in here for a while.

@JasonBourne I don't know what else to call it. We have never seen anything happen like this.

user19161

3:05 AM

@Cerberus Look, can you read my above lines again? Everything is explained there already...

@JosephWeissman I mean it in the sense of "being known by the masses".

@JasonBourne Yo.

@JasonBourne That does not explain why you decided to delete answers that were not utter crap, not does it explain why you decided to delete answers by Mitch specifically.

user19161

@Cerberus Haha, read carefully.

I have read your line several times. It explains neither point.

user19161

3:07 AM

@Mitch I am possibly under investigation now as you can see for being perceived to be possibly spiteful against you!

Joseph Weissman

Order in the court!

pounds gavel

user19161

@mitch Basically, I visit your posts now and then as you know and cast votes. That day, I think I saw a whole bunch of negative posts of yours, and maybe in my enthusiasm I cast a whole bunch of delete votes on them!

@JosephWeissman So owning ideas is an important way in which people think they can be known by the masses.

Consider how many websites depend on page views.

Which in turn depend on their ideas.

@tchrist Sure I can.

Not to their face though. I'm too weak.

user19161

@mitch Please tell them I am your friend.

Joseph Weissman

3:09 AM

(Well, it's a bit more than that, right? Ideas and information are increasingly privatized; kept behind paywalls available only to multinational corporations and wealthy universities -- sometimes even when the research is government-funded...)

And, if someone else uses your idea, he too might become known, and hence he profits to some extent from your idea, because people suppose that attention is either-or.

@JasonBourne 1) I don't know who 'they' are, and 2) I think the problem is the -delete- votes.

user19161

@Mitch I think many of them were at minus a few votes each already.

@JosephWeissman Yes...and I often wonder why people want to do this so much, when keeping it behind a paywall, or selling it at extremely high prices, or not selling it at all, usually does not generate much profit. I mean, for some it does, but for most, probably not.

Joseph Weissman

Right.

There's another side of this too, when it comes to software, right?

3:11 AM

What side?

The dark side?

Joseph Weissman

Well, the chaos and disorder of everybody pursuing secret information-technology strategies.

I would suggest this is one of the reasons for the major uptick in turbulence the markets have seen over the past 50 years or so.

@JasonBourne As to that I am very aware that the pattern of upvotes I've been getting lately is directly realted to a conversation we have had. You have upvoted my answers quite a bit. If you had downvoted them in same measure I would wonder, but wouldn't take it personally. Well, not from you at least. I'm worried that you'll leave and so I would lose hundreds (if not thousands) of rep!

Joseph Weissman

(You know, it used to be that you could predict month-to-month economic statistics pretty well -- unemployment and so forth.)

Ah...are you talking about financial strategies?

Joseph Weissman

Well, sure. The quant bubble is really just a symptom of a larger problem here, though.

3:13 AM

The financial bubble, caused by computerised transactions?

Yes.

Automating things and expecting no negative consequences.

Joseph Weissman

But equally: keeping information caged.

That is indeed a problem.

Joseph Weissman

Castrated.

The caging is bad for humanity, ceteris paribus.

Joseph Weissman

Right.

user19161

3:14 AM

@Mitch No, we are not in cahoots, seriously, you don't need to upvote me at all. I just choose to upvote whoever I like at whatever time. And I open many tabs at a time, and I like to see the same users posts at a time. But I try not to go overboard and do too many a day, so I think that's fine.

In certain cases, it may have positive consequences; the question is, when and how do these positive consequences outweigh the negative ones?

Joseph Weissman

I mean, I get that it's vital that we have a variety of different enterprises pursuing different goals in different ways. It just seems so stupid not to transfer more knowledge around in the process.

Especially when we (via Uncle Sam) are so often footing the bill...

It is in many cases stupid.

Yeah.

@tchrist but you most likely would have remembered it. voting to delete is sort of special. And like you said, those answers are downvotable (if one disagrees; thinks they're wrong), but really -deleteable-? It -does- seem petulant.

If I write great music, and everybody copies it, the up-side is clearly that everybody can profit from it. The theoretical down-side is that I may not be equally motivated to create music if I don't get to exploit it financially.

3:17 AM

To be honest there are some users whose answers I find are commonly downvotable (because of their irrelevance or wrongness).

None in present company.

Joseph Weissman

The real challenge then being to reorganize social relationships so that financial exploitation isn't needed...

But copyright was from the beginning pushed by a few businesses.

@JosephWeissman But how can that be done?

Joseph Weissman

Note that creative people don't really work for the wage. Capitalists found this out early. They'll work for the effective minimum, since they're driven by passions grander than profit anyway.

All I can hope for is to minimise the excesses.

Joseph Weissman

Wind 'em up and let 'em go...

3:19 AM

@JosephWeissman Yeah, exactly. But the common motivation for owning ideas disregards this important aspect of creation.

Joseph Weissman

Creativity and commerce are essentially in conflict.

Yes.

user19161

OK, I think I don't have to say anymore about this right? Anyway, I have nothing to add.

Commerice blunts creativity.

Joseph Weissman

Whether creation of concepts (philosophy), functions (science) or compositions (art)...

Commerce wants to retriangulate everything on the familiar, domesticate, bureaucratize.

(Capital is a vampire...)

3:21 AM

@JasonBourne Just don't delete answers any more unless they're really totally worthless, like a single word, or spam, or something completely irrelevant, OK?

@MετάEd That's what downvoting is for. I still think my answer is right, but in a more limited sense (like Mahnax said, people still use it a lot all over in the service industry, I'm just not very often in that culture, giving or receiving).

@JosephWeissman Triangulate in what way?

@JosephWeissman But it also serves a purpose...

Joseph Weissman

Well, fundamentally: to reduce to a tripartite schema.

OK.

Joseph Weissman

(It's curious that Plato and Freud both articulate a tripartite soul/psyche...)

3:23 AM

Didn't Freud take it from Plato?

@tchrist My question is...how did you get those super powers? HOw do you now that all these delete votes are recent? (my rep shows very few downvotes)

Joseph Weissman

Well, from Greek tragedy, anyway. (Maybe Plato is just a special case here!) At any rate: triangulation, reduction to familial or familiar: Mommy-Daddy-Me. Oedipus.

(Lacanian psychoanalysis arguably does this structurally by reducing desire to the insipid wish to be loved...)

Many things come in threes...

Joseph Weissman

(Triangulation also in the sense of identification, deduction of position from three outstanding or singular points. Tendentially, it's the imposition of an identical interpretation on every case; reduction of any excess that doesn't conform...)

In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline, rather than measuring distances to the point directly (trilateration). The point can then be fixed as the third point of a triangle with one known side and two known angles. Triangulation can also refer to the accurate surveying of systems of very large triangles, called triangulation networks. This followed from the work of Willebrord Snell in 1615–17, who showed how a point could be located from the angles su...

Interesting that you would bring up trees :)

@Cerberus I don't think I've ever had any spats or if anything must be called that it was with @tchrist over elitism which wasn't heated - barely warm.

3:26 AM

@JosephWeissman Okay, limitation and simplification...

@JosephWeissman Yeah I know geographical triangulation! I just wasn't sure what connotations it might have.

user19161

Triangulation (topology)

In mathematics, topology generalizes the notion of triangulation in a natural way as follows: A triangulation of a topological space X is a simplicial complex K, homeomorphic to X, together with a homeomorphism h:K\to X. Triangulation is useful in determining the properties of a topological space. For example, one can compute homology and cohomology groups of a triangulated space using simplicial homology and cohomology theories instead of more complicated homology and cohomology theories. Piecewise linear structures For topological manifolds, there is a slightly stronger notion of t...

Joseph Weissman

Niiiice.

@Mitch Barely warm...but warm is good!

@Cerberus why do you think @JasonBourne was the one doing all the delete votes?

user19161

@Mitch Oh, but I was, but I can't remember how many and at which time exactly now...

3:28 AM

@Mitch I did not even consider him. But then he came forward and said so. Haven't you read it?

Joseph Weissman

Plato articulates a "triangulated" cosmology in the Timaeus -- plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus

@JasonBourne I don't understand homology or cohomology. I also don't understand my lack of understanding. I expect axioms or examples or something, and all people ever give is the carry operation in addition algorithms.

And there is the slave and the triangle...

Isn't that also the Timaeus?

Joseph Weissman

That's in the Meno, I think.

Oh yes, the Meno.

That's it.

Joseph Weissman

3:30 AM

Where Socrates walks Meno's slave through a simple Euclidean proof about squares?

@JasonBourne oh. deleting is mostly for getting rid of junk, not for disagreeing.

Yeah that.

@Cerberus trying to read the transcript...I've missed some things.

Joseph Weissman

In order to demonstrate that we can't really learn -- we can only remember the pure truth we knew before birth :)

@JosephWeissman I always saw that example as the sophistry that people usually accused Socrates of.

3:31 AM

@Mitch It was apparently a misunderstanding about the function of delete votes, and that he voted on many of your questions in a row was apparently a coincidence.

Joseph Weissman

I could have said "reterritorialized" instead of "triangulated" by the way. It's at the edge of the territory that we see in animals something like the pure form of art: color-displays, songs, dances and poses...

@JosephWeissman Of course!

He was leading a long the slave. Most of the information was in the questions, with the slave just agreeing (politely to my ears)

Joseph Weissman

It's the sophistry of philosophy itself, that was wielded against the mystics of every era.

Of course.

Joseph Weissman

3:32 AM

That at least I know what I don't know!

@Mitch That's what Plato always does to some extent.

Joseph Weissman

(Even if I still don't know, e.g., what happens after we die...)

@JosephWeissman there is that tendency to misuse a facility with argument.

@JosephWeissman Still not?? You're about the last person on earth!

Joseph Weissman

Noble lies?

Plato explicitly argues for their necessity.

(In other words, the political urgency of fabulating, misusing argumentation, etc.)

3:33 AM

I think many things Plato wrote we thought experiments rather than doctrinal positions.

@JosephWeissman obscurantism sometimes. of the technically obtuse -and- the purposefully withholding kind.

Not least of all in the Politeia.

What's the difference between Plato and Socrates? Was Socrates just a label for Plato's opinions?

Joseph Weissman

It's unclear.

My sense is that he's Plato's invention.

And basically that his literary friends wrote about him as well.

Like a finstional character that a number of people write about?

Joseph Weissman

3:35 AM

Right -- wrote about the character Socrates that he had invented.

Most scholars are inclined to believe that Socrates existed.

Joseph Weissman

It's true. This is a minority reading for sure.

Consider also Xenophon.

Joseph Weissman

Right -- and Aristophanes.

But consider that Plato slept with a copy of the Clouds beneath his pillow... :)

The question is, if he existed, to what extent does Plato present his own opinions, and to what extent those of Socrates? A puzzle that can't really be solved.

Joseph Weissman

3:37 AM

Right. It goes to what we were talking about before.

@JosephWeissman Don't you?

what industry back then was making all these copies of books?

Joseph Weissman

It would've been manual transcription I would think.

One had them copied by slaves and servants, usually.

So like the 19th c Britsh, the aristocracy were possibly less literate than their help?

3:38 AM

There were publishers who did this, but it was also done privately, from borrowed books.

@Mitch No, the printing press changed all this.

Joseph Weissman

Oh, in the modern era it's all printing press, right?

@JosephWeissman Yes, there was no other way.

The printing press was truly revolutionary.

Suddenly books could be produced in far greater numbers.

And much faster.

Joseph Weissman

One thing to keep in mind is that there's just not much record for Socrates existence apart from literary or critical texts.

And insofar as Plato's dialogues are really literary documents first...

Where one used to have to read an entire book to a room of slaves, which resulted in, say, 30 copies?

Must have taken a long time.

user19161

It has been a very bad week on SE. First two people's upvotes against me were reversed, and then my delete votes on another are investigated. I think I am blacklisted now by TPTB...

3:40 AM

Watching Downtown Abbey the other day, seeing their library, I wondered who in their right mind would read all those long series of books.

Joseph Weissman

I just bought several hundred dollars worth of books from Amazon.

@JosephWeissman Yeah, but that applies to most of what we know or believe about Antiquity.

user19161

But if one sees how many upvotes, downvotes and delete votes I cast altogether, one can see that there is no malice.

@JasonBourne Just forget about it and don't let it bring you down. Happens to the best. Learn from it and move on.

@Cerberus that's why I doubt it... what market would there have been to want to get -30- slaves ata a time to do such long and laborious writing?

3:41 AM

@JosephWeissman That's good, if those are good books!

Sparta was busy punching themselves in the face to toughen up. Was Athens the only book readers?

@Mitch Well, as in any large library, most people didn't read all the books!

user19161

Anyway, looking at my profile, I have cast 221 delete votes.

@Mitch Oh, there was a market. There were publishing houses.

Joseph Weissman

> In origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was plebian. We know, we can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted by crossing.

> Or it appears as declining development. The anthropologists among the criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. [“monster in face, monster in soul”] But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? At least that would not be contradicted by the famous judgment of the physiognomist which sounded so offensive to the friends of Socrates.

3:42 AM

Many, many people wanted to buy, say, Virgil.

Joseph Weissman

> A foreigner who knew about faces once passed through Athens and told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum -- that he harbored in himself all the bad vices and appetites. And Socrates merely answered: "You know me, sir!"

@Cerberus yes, but this large library looks like hardly -anything- is useful.

All over the Empire, Virgil and many other writers were used in teaching children.

@Mitch Why do you think so? And what is useful?

Joseph Weissman

(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

user19161

Oh by the way, I admit that I cast many delete votes on Nortonn S as well.

Joseph Weissman

3:43 AM

Socrates as Zizek. Kind of interesting, right?

Haha.

user19161

First he is being suspended, and second his questions aren't great. QED.

@JasonBourne Just so you know, I don't think anything of it. If Waiwai thinks it is actionable, just have him ask here and we can vouch for your lack of malice and we'll have him reverse things (if that is appropriate).

I'm lucky I have only a handful of zeroes, and only one -1...

user19161

@Mitch Oh, there is no need to reverse or verse anything. Maybe I shouldn't have delete voted too quickly. Also, sometimes I don't think too long before clicking the mouse.

Joseph Weissman

3:45 AM

--Is ugliness not still a refutation among us today...? :D

But @MετάEd: I just might repost the sir/madam' answer if it does get deleted. I truly believe that in most American culture that no one uses sir/ma'am and that people would be discouraged if they did use it.

A refutation of what?

Joseph Weissman

(We only want the most beautiful thoughts -- and so the weakest, the most vulnerable, the utterly fragile...)

@JosephWeissman so poetic...that I don't know what it means!

Oh.

Why are beautiful thoughts weak?

3:46 AM

Wait, what?

Let's Socratise this Mr Weissman!

Joseph Weissman

Well, I'm tempted to say it's perfectly generic, even an "evolutionary" principle -- increasing beauty imparts fragility...

(I'm really still just aping Nietzsche. He says something like this somewhere.)

I suppose beautiful things are a bit more likely to be fragile...but not necessarily so.

Because strength in itself can also be beautiful.

Joseph Weissman

It's easier for me to see this when we conjoin ethics and aesthetics into a unified practice; this is what I see Nietzsche really being up to.

user image

Joseph Weissman

3:49 AM

Integrating ethico-aesthetics into science -- "instrumenting" it.

That may be true to some extent...but didn't he also praise the strong?

@Cerberus Oh, I'm just imagining, looking at the look of the library that they are mostly long series (many sections all bound the same style) and in my modern experience, those would be encyclopedias -or- long detailed -long- histories of details of history in boring repetitive pleonastic redundant repetition...in my imagination.

In the show they're just empty props....

and probably in real life too!

Joseph Weissman

Sure. The most beautiful passages in Nietzsche are where he shows how the weak have imposed their way of life upon everyone...

But again, this is ethics, not morality.

There's not a transcendent good/evil distinction.

It's about modes of existence, ways of living.

@Mitch There will be many multi-volume works of reference, yes. They serve their purpose adequately, and hardly anyone would read them cover to cover.

Joseph Weissman

(Beyond good and evil doesn't mean beyond good and bad!)

3:51 AM

nods

libraries (and book collections of actual people I know) have a chaotic look, that looks if not read at least planning to be read.

@Cerberus but that is my naive expectation

Joseph Weissman

amazon.com/Archive-Fever-Freudian-Impression-Postmodernism/dp/…

@Mitch I emigrated to Texas in 1992. I can tell you that sir and ma’am are still in common use in that state. I expect the same is true in neighboring states.

@Mitch Don't forget that backs were normally not colourful, not until ca. 1900–1950ish. Completely different from current practice.

Many dark colours.

@MετάEd The answer made an exception for southern states.

Joseph Weissman

So, @Cerberus, have you thought anymore about whether everything is simulated?

3:56 AM

@JosephWeissman I think that is circularly based on social choices. What people find beautiful may turn out to be 'weak' in some cultures. If it was the Christian meekness that N. was talking about, that was a particularly narrow culture that only a particular stratum of of European society proposed (and all may have supported in words) but other parts acted quite differently.

Joseph Weissman

We only really talked about the cultural technology version of the thesis, and didn't delve into Bostrom (who posits that the universe itself might actually be simulated...)

@MετάEd I think I made some mention of 'except in the South'.

@Mitch Yes, but with grave reservations even there.

And I am here to tell you it is alive and well.

@JosephWeissman You said many things that I couldn't quite follow, but I agree that those three or four models are all of some worth and usefulness.

@JosephWeissman It may be simulated; why not?

Of course it would be fair for you to point out that the South != Texas. Texas is sometimes a whole nother thing.

3:57 AM

A different country, huh?

@Cerberus sure, but I wouldn't expect to be all bound identically in large sets. The collected works of Addison, the collected works of Sheridan, ...that might explain it.

@MετάEd It is entirely dead in the Northeast.

Joseph Weissman

@Mitch sure -- just in passing, Deleuze does this wonderful reading of the "majority" where he shows that it's a kind of null or empty mass -- that people confusedly identify and resonate with but which is effectively void, lacking substance and coherence.

@Mitch When I moved from Iowa to Texas, I also moved about 20 years backward in time.

@Mitch There will be those, yes, and reference works, but also backs that look very much alike from a distance but are subtly different from up close.

@MετάEd Fer sure. When I am anywhere in the South (I've never been to Texas) I am always shocked to hear Sir and Ma'am.

Joseph Weissman

3:59 AM

This is in the Abecedaire, a series of interviews with Deleuze, that now have English subs -- I think this is in "G for Gauche" ("Left"); you can find most of them on YouTube

@MετάEd Really? That's what it felt like? What is the most fundamental thing that's different, you'd say?

@MετάEd !!

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