Yeah, I define control to be influence which will continue even if the source pushes in another direction. It feels useful to differentiate between “I have influence on my friend by mentioning we could go out, but will just drop it if it looks like he doesn’t want to” and “I am explicitly planning to go out, and even if he tries not to, I will keep generating attempts to try and make him go out, attempting to control the variable of whether we go out”.
You’re absolutely right that the notion of control as you define it is confused[1], but this strikes me as reason to not use that definition and throw away an entire word.
For an example of why this word is useful, Control vs Opening compares some fairly toxic things that come out of control. I imagine in your ontology, you could map plex!control to gordon!attempted-forced-influence, but it seems like an important enough thing that I want a single word for it.
(I am arguing about definitions, but literally purely about them in the sense of “hey i want a word for this, this word can be used to mean something important”)
Yeah, I define control to be influence which will continue even if the source pushes in another direction. It feels useful to differentiate between “I have influence on my friend by mentioning we could go out, but will just drop it if it looks like he doesn’t want to” and “I am explicitly planning to go out, and even if he tries not to, I will keep generating attempts to try and make him go out, attempting to control the variable of whether we go out”.
You’re absolutely right that the notion of control as you define it is confused[1], but this strikes me as reason to not use that definition and throw away an entire word.
For an example of why this word is useful, Control vs Opening compares some fairly toxic things that come out of control. I imagine in your ontology, you could map plex!control to gordon!attempted-forced-influence, but it seems like an important enough thing that I want a single word for it.
(I am arguing about definitions, but literally purely about them in the sense of “hey i want a word for this, this word can be used to mean something important”)
outside of weird simple physics/math environments, at least