“Sandwich” is still more tightly defined than their version of “chemical”, and is still a useful concept that “carves reality at the joints” even if it’s a bit fuzzy about which side of each joint it’s cutting on.
You’d have to go all the way to “bad stuff” to get a comparably bad definition.
I wonder if we should bet about something here. It seems plausible that we would make different predictions about how much agreement there would be on what is a “chemical”, if you were to explain about the structure, manufacturing, and acquisition of a given substance.
this does still have issues, if someone is horrified by riboflavin but makes sure to have plenty of vitamin B12. I’m expecting that people who are “chemical avoidant” ordinarily implement rather surface-level pattern matching of what qualifies, but if you provide them with detailed explanations of how specific names actually arise, they might match on the explanation rather than the name. still, I expect they’ll have a high rate of weird edge cases.
“Sandwich” is still more tightly defined than their version of “chemical”, and is still a useful concept that “carves reality at the joints” even if it’s a bit fuzzy about which side of each joint it’s cutting on.
You’d have to go all the way to “bad stuff” to get a comparably bad definition.
I wonder if we should bet about something here. It seems plausible that we would make different predictions about how much agreement there would be on what is a “chemical”, if you were to explain about the structure, manufacturing, and acquisition of a given substance.
this does still have issues, if someone is horrified by riboflavin but makes sure to have plenty of vitamin B12. I’m expecting that people who are “chemical avoidant” ordinarily implement rather surface-level pattern matching of what qualifies, but if you provide them with detailed explanations of how specific names actually arise, they might match on the explanation rather than the name. still, I expect they’ll have a high rate of weird edge cases.