I’m uneasy about this whole thing. (The phrasing is not a deliberate joke.) I think “X is a thing” is a neologism, which I encountered on the internet and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Thing” is a word people use when they haven’t figured out a more specific word to use (which is why I used it in my first sentence; I could have said something like “effort to characterize a word”, but I might get your intent wrong and don’t want to presume, nor want to scrutinize the post carefully enough to choose a term I’d be certain about).
Serious intellectual writings will generally do the work to figure out the right term, and therefore won’t say “thing”. The Buffy characters who talk that way are, by doing so, communicating less sophistication or thorough thinking than they would if they used more specific terms, and this fits their characters.
Looking through the examples, I see some very different categories. Listing a few:
physical objects
historical events
computer algorithms
...
It seems to me that you’re trying to use one word to refer to all these different categories, and then do serious reasoning about the word. This strikes me as a recipe for trouble.
Riffing off your “insertion sort” example, let’s consider “Half-Ass”, a procedure where you do insertion sort but stop halfway through the list. If I were telling people that Half-Ass was a sorting algorithm, I think you could say “That’s not a thing, there are many input lists that don’t output as fully sorted.” But I could code up Half-Ass and run it on my computer. So we might say, Half-Ass as a sorting algorithm isn’t a thing, but Half-Ass as a well-defined, executable procedure is a thing.
It looks like “X, as a Y, is a thing” basically means “X is a member of the Y category”. Then, perhaps, “X is a thing” has an implicit Y, which the audience hopefully correctly guesses.
Using the example of ghosts, “Ghosts aren’t a thing” would be correct when the implicit Y is “observable real-world phenomena”, but possibly incorrect when Y is “reasonably well-defined concepts” or “phenomena in your favorite fantasy universe”. (I note that some adjacent non-neologism phrases would be “Ghosts aren’t real” or “Ghosts aren’t a real thing”.)
There’s even room for debate for something like “Forks are a (real) thing”. Clearly they’re mundane real-world objects; but as HPMOR points out, the physical boundaries of a fork are blurry if you look closely enough, it’s constantly exchanging atoms with its environment, even its parts have probability wavefunctions instead of actual locations, etc. So the implicit Y would have to be something like “observable clusters of real-world phenomena”—but no one is going to spell that out except in very rare contexts.
One thing I could say is, anytime you get really deep into examining a statement like “X is a thing”, you should note that the word “thing” is a signal that the speaker put far less effort into being precise with their word choice than you are putting into analyzing it. Or, if you’re considering “When would I say that X is a thing?”, you’re thinking about it much more carefully than you would in most actual scenarios where “thing” was the best word you could come up with.
It is somewhat interesting to think about how precisely people word their statements, under what circumstances; and interesting to think about the advantages of being able to state imprecise thoughts early in an investigation, versus the advantages of forcing yourself to make your ideas precise (cf. Orwell), and maybe how to gain from both; and there are questions about categories and fuzzy boundaries and stuff (which I feel were adequately explored in e.g. “The Categories Were Made For Man”). But you should be clear about just what it is you’re studying, and it’s probably better to disentangle the issues of (justifiably) lazy communication from the other issues, and study them separately.
But you should be clear about just what it is you’re studying
The post discusses the thingness of things. Seven, for example, seems like a thing—an entity, an object. I naturally mentally relate to seven in many of the same ways that I naturally mentally relate to a table. So the question is, what if anything is in common between how we relate to each of those entities that seem like things?
Half-Ass is a reasonable example of a somewhat non-thing, according to the hypothesis in the post. It refers one fairly strongly to “half” and to “ass” “insertion sort”, but “insertion sort” barely refers one to Half-Ass, and likewise “half”.
Hmmm… perhaps the concept you’re going for is “a thing that my brain thinks is worth remembering (and/or categorizing, naming, or otherwise having a handle for)”? Which, of course, would be highly subjective and context-specific.
Suppose you were teaching CS students, and it was for some reason very common for your students to make that specific error of replacing “i < length(A)” with “i < length(A)/2″, because … maybe you’re working with a high-level language, but you’re implementing this part in assembly for speed, and the language runtime actually represents the integer N as 2*N because of pointer tagging and it’s common for students to forget that part; or maybe this is a compiler bug, triggered in rare but known circumstances (e.g. when the compiler decides to put the length into a certain register which is treated specially). Then you find it useful to know how Half-Ass behaves, so you can better test and diagnose your students’ programs, or create a test case to detect systems with the buggy version of that compiler (perhaps for white-hat or black-hat security purposes).
In those scenarios, does Half-Ass seem like more of a “thing”? And if those scenarios were real, but also there were plenty of “civilian” programmers who’d never used that language or that buggy compiler and probably never will, would it be valid for those programmers to say “No, I don’t think that qualifies as a thing”?
It [Half-Ass] refers one fairly strongly to “half” and to “ass” “insertion sort”, but “insertion sort” barely refers one to Half-Ass, and likewise “half”.
Hmm, you seem to be attaching significance to the words I used in the name. I would have thought that “whether something qualifies as a thing” was mostly independent of whatever words people had come up with when trying to name it. (The most descriptive name would be “insertion half-sort”, incidentally.)
In those scenarios, does Half-Ass seem like more of a “thing”?
IDK, but I like the question.
I’d say that what does seem like a thing is [insertion f-sort] where the fraction f is a parameter. Then [insertion 1/2-sort] is like [this particular instance of me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink], and [insertion f-sort] is like [me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink, in general].
Unless there’s something interesting about [insertion 1/2-sort] in particular, like for example if there’s some phase transition at 1⁄2 or something. Then I’d expect that it’s more of a thing (for example, that there’d be further interesting special properties of [insertion 1/2-sort] that we haven’t discovered yet, or that there’d be analogies to other phase transitions).
In the compiler example, the compiler representing N as 2N is more of a thing.
[insertion 1/2-sort] is then a somewhat meaningless coincidence of other meaningful things. You have your symptomatic cluster of phenomena: the CS student complains that a check fails, but when they print out the list, it seems sorted (though only the first part of the list actually printed, before the summarizing ellipsis....), the algorithm is clean and obviously right, etc. There’s some thingness I guess, in that there’s an insight to be had. But it’s a cavern which, when entered, turns out to be pretty clearly two other caverns connected by a tunnel. (I admit that the dynamical story here is unrefined, and I’d be interested in a better picture.)
I’m uneasy about this whole thing. (The phrasing is not a deliberate joke.) I think “X is a thing” is a neologism, which I encountered on the internet and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Thing” is a word people use when they haven’t figured out a more specific word to use (which is why I used it in my first sentence; I could have said something like “effort to characterize a word”, but I might get your intent wrong and don’t want to presume, nor want to scrutinize the post carefully enough to choose a term I’d be certain about).
Serious intellectual writings will generally do the work to figure out the right term, and therefore won’t say “thing”. The Buffy characters who talk that way are, by doing so, communicating less sophistication or thorough thinking than they would if they used more specific terms, and this fits their characters.
Looking through the examples, I see some very different categories. Listing a few:
physical objects
historical events
computer algorithms
...
It seems to me that you’re trying to use one word to refer to all these different categories, and then do serious reasoning about the word. This strikes me as a recipe for trouble.
Riffing off your “insertion sort” example, let’s consider “Half-Ass”, a procedure where you do insertion sort but stop halfway through the list. If I were telling people that Half-Ass was a sorting algorithm, I think you could say “That’s not a thing, there are many input lists that don’t output as fully sorted.” But I could code up Half-Ass and run it on my computer. So we might say, Half-Ass as a sorting algorithm isn’t a thing, but Half-Ass as a well-defined, executable procedure is a thing.
It looks like “X, as a Y, is a thing” basically means “X is a member of the Y category”. Then, perhaps, “X is a thing” has an implicit Y, which the audience hopefully correctly guesses.
Using the example of ghosts, “Ghosts aren’t a thing” would be correct when the implicit Y is “observable real-world phenomena”, but possibly incorrect when Y is “reasonably well-defined concepts” or “phenomena in your favorite fantasy universe”. (I note that some adjacent non-neologism phrases would be “Ghosts aren’t real” or “Ghosts aren’t a real thing”.)
There’s even room for debate for something like “Forks are a (real) thing”. Clearly they’re mundane real-world objects; but as HPMOR points out, the physical boundaries of a fork are blurry if you look closely enough, it’s constantly exchanging atoms with its environment, even its parts have probability wavefunctions instead of actual locations, etc. So the implicit Y would have to be something like “observable clusters of real-world phenomena”—but no one is going to spell that out except in very rare contexts.
One thing I could say is, anytime you get really deep into examining a statement like “X is a thing”, you should note that the word “thing” is a signal that the speaker put far less effort into being precise with their word choice than you are putting into analyzing it. Or, if you’re considering “When would I say that X is a thing?”, you’re thinking about it much more carefully than you would in most actual scenarios where “thing” was the best word you could come up with.
It is somewhat interesting to think about how precisely people word their statements, under what circumstances; and interesting to think about the advantages of being able to state imprecise thoughts early in an investigation, versus the advantages of forcing yourself to make your ideas precise (cf. Orwell), and maybe how to gain from both; and there are questions about categories and fuzzy boundaries and stuff (which I feel were adequately explored in e.g. “The Categories Were Made For Man”). But you should be clear about just what it is you’re studying, and it’s probably better to disentangle the issues of (justifiably) lazy communication from the other issues, and study them separately.
The post discusses the thingness of things. Seven, for example, seems like a thing—an entity, an object. I naturally mentally relate to seven in many of the same ways that I naturally mentally relate to a table. So the question is, what if anything is in common between how we relate to each of those entities that seem like things?
Half-Ass is a reasonable example of a somewhat non-thing, according to the hypothesis in the post. It refers one fairly strongly to “half” and to
“ass”“insertion sort”, but “insertion sort” barely refers one to Half-Ass, and likewise “half”.Hmmm… perhaps the concept you’re going for is “a thing that my brain thinks is worth remembering (and/or categorizing, naming, or otherwise having a handle for)”? Which, of course, would be highly subjective and context-specific.
Suppose you were teaching CS students, and it was for some reason very common for your students to make that specific error of replacing “i < length(A)” with “i < length(A)/2″, because … maybe you’re working with a high-level language, but you’re implementing this part in assembly for speed, and the language runtime actually represents the integer N as 2*N because of pointer tagging and it’s common for students to forget that part; or maybe this is a compiler bug, triggered in rare but known circumstances (e.g. when the compiler decides to put the length into a certain register which is treated specially). Then you find it useful to know how Half-Ass behaves, so you can better test and diagnose your students’ programs, or create a test case to detect systems with the buggy version of that compiler (perhaps for white-hat or black-hat security purposes).
In those scenarios, does Half-Ass seem like more of a “thing”? And if those scenarios were real, but also there were plenty of “civilian” programmers who’d never used that language or that buggy compiler and probably never will, would it be valid for those programmers to say “No, I don’t think that qualifies as a thing”?
Hmm, you seem to be attaching significance to the words I used in the name. I would have thought that “whether something qualifies as a thing” was mostly independent of whatever words people had come up with when trying to name it. (The most descriptive name would be “insertion half-sort”, incidentally.)
IDK, but I like the question.
I’d say that what does seem like a thing is [insertion f-sort] where the fraction f is a parameter. Then [insertion 1/2-sort] is like [this particular instance of me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink], and [insertion f-sort] is like [me picking up my water bottle and taking a drink, in general].
Unless there’s something interesting about [insertion 1/2-sort] in particular, like for example if there’s some phase transition at 1⁄2 or something. Then I’d expect that it’s more of a thing (for example, that there’d be further interesting special properties of [insertion 1/2-sort] that we haven’t discovered yet, or that there’d be analogies to other phase transitions).
In the compiler example, the compiler representing N as 2N is more of a thing.
[insertion 1/2-sort] is then a somewhat meaningless coincidence of other meaningful things. You have your symptomatic cluster of phenomena: the CS student complains that a check fails, but when they print out the list, it seems sorted (though only the first part of the list actually printed, before the summarizing ellipsis....), the algorithm is clean and obviously right, etc. There’s some thingness I guess, in that there’s an insight to be had. But it’s a cavern which, when entered, turns out to be pretty clearly two other caverns connected by a tunnel. (I admit that the dynamical story here is unrefined, and I’d be interested in a better picture.)