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Tag: words

Language Erodes

19 July, 202226 July, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 9 Comments

Saying that "language evolves" is no enough to dismiss complaints about the misuse of words, since "language erodes" is just as valid, but without the suggestion of progress. Read more (9 min, 2300 words).

Cat Couplings Revisited

18 July, 202117 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 9 Comments

I folliow up on "Cat Couplings" from 2019 with a bunch of new examples and further thinking on how and why cat couplings work. Read more (13 min, 3300 words).

Ahistorical Siblings

27 October, 202017 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 10 Comments

What are the equivalents of the word "ahistorical" for other disciplines? Read more (6 min, 1400 words).

Picking Apart Eugenics

17 February, 202017 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 13 Comments

A quick-and-dirty piece on what the hell people mean by "eugenics", promted by the fallout from a tweet by Richard Dawkins.
Read more(7 min, 1700 words).

It’s Not So Only

28 January, 202017 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 10 Comments

Are mental illnesses actual illnesses or are they unusual preferences? Or maybe this is a non-issue because it's only about words? Well, that's not so only. Read more (8 min, 1900 words).

Cat Couplings

30 October, 20196 May, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 15 Comments

"I prefer honest argumentation to dishonest rhetoric." Do I mean that rhetoric is essentially dishonest, or am I talking about the kind of rhetoric that's dishonest? That's a cat coupling. Read more (7 min, 1800 words).

Anatomy of Racism

16 November, 201817 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 8 Comments

I pick apart the concept of racism and find out that it's a self-driving cycle, a knot in idea-space, a bag of unrelated phenomena and an ideology that shares important properties with consciousness, intelligence and explosives. Read more (32 mins, 10700 words.)

Beliefs as Endorsements

23 February, 201817 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 1 Comment

If all claims are mixtures of "is" and "ought", what does it mean to "believe" them? In practice it comes to mean endorsing models, while emphasizing the "is" aspect (and downplaying the "ought") for rhetorical purposes. Unfortunately this ruins the word for neutral, non-rhetorical use. Read more (8 min, 1900 words).

Wordy Weapons of Is-Ought Alloy

12 February, 201817 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 3 Comments

Our words' relationship to reality is far more complicated than we realize. Thus, when we say things we think we state facts but we also endorse certain uses of words. That has consequences, which causes public discourse to become a war zone where we fight for control over our common pool of mental and social equipment. Read more (13 min, 3300 words).

The Big List of Existing Things

12 September, 201717 January, 2022 ~ Jnerst ~ 14 Comments

We feel there should be a clear answer to the question of whether some thing exists or not. I argue that often there isn't, because follwing our self-contradictory intuitions leads us to weird places. Instead we should interpret talk about what exists as talk about how we best represent the world.
Read more (12 min, 3100 words)

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