stoly

joined 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 minutes ago

What’s interesting about that one is that as best I can tell, it’s only millennials who got caught up on this. Gen X didn’t care and as best I can tell, Zoomers don’t either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago

This is going to go very poorly for X-lover.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

People are just letting the evil out now instead of hiding it like before.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It was a personal attack.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I didn’t realize. I’m horrified.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

In the bugs topic, I also love how virtually nothing called “berry” is a berry and tons on things that you don’t think are berries (watermelon, bananas) are berries. Someone probably defined the term long after it was applied to everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I disagree with the idea that the internet is worse than it used to be. Back in the day, you went into a forum and people were MEAN for no particular reason. People do that now over politics more than anything. Before, that's just how people were.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you are experiencing psychosis, then this will absolutely help you. If you are suicidal, it will not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That is not why they golf though. They want to be seen by the right people in the right places.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That’s because you don’t schmooze with CEOs and senators. “Elite” people tend to golf.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It sounds like you have a mathematics or science background. I’m actually a linguist with multiple degrees and who studied internationally at the postgraduate level. I’m speaking from the perspective of a linguist and referring to the semantic aspects of word usage. Count versus mass / countable versus uncountable is a very fundamental aspect of human language and in any pragmatic usage is very inflexible. When moving into specialist language use, pragmatics fall away and that precise usage can enter the space. My original comment is on the pragmatic use.

I think I may have realized in this thread that linguistic intuition is something that is sometimes counterintuitive to the average person in the way metaphysics can be, and perhaps challenging to acquire in a way that I have forgotten. You were probably the third person to make the same point and I may have been annoyed at having to defend something that is basic and recognized by anyone who studies language in pretty much any capacity.

Cheers

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

Ok this will be my last attempt.

You state that you can count the grains of sand on a beach. I disagree. You can count the grains of sand that you pick up and put into another vessel. Until you do that, the sand also remains an amorphous fluid. Same with water. You can count the water molecules in your glass, but you cannot count the water in the ocean. Scientists can make some really great estimations of how much water there is, but it will never be precise. It should also be noted that nobody anywhere ever outside of a scientific setting would ever speak in that sort of precision, yet you want all human language to operate that way.

Your argument is that if you can count an amount that would fit in your hand, you can count them all. This isn't how things work, though, because there is no method by which every grain of sand on the beach or every molecule of water in the lake can be counted. You're looking for deductive truth when induction is the only thing available.

Your issue isn't with me, it's with human language. I will leave you with these:

If you still disagree, you should try to convince them instead of me.

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