I’m finding myself stuck on the question of how exactly the strict version would avoid the use of some of those negating adjectives. If you want to express the information that, say, eating grass won’t give the human body useful calories...
“Grass is indigestible” : disallowed
“Grass is not nutritious” : disallowed
“Grass will pass through you without providing energy” : “without providing energy” seems little different to “not providing energy”, it’s still at heart a negative claim
Perhaps a restatement in terms of “Only food that can be easily digested will provide calories” except that you still need to then convey that cellulose won’t be easily digested.
Probably there are true positive statements about the properties of easily digested molecules and the properties of cellulose which can at least be juxtaposed to establish that it’s different to anything that meets the criteria. But that seems like a lot of circumlocution and I’m less than entirely confident that I even know the specifics.
Perhaps part of the point is to stop you making negative claims where you don’t know the specific corresponding positive claims? Or to force you to expand out the whole chain of reasoning when you do know it (even if it’s lengthier than one would usually want to get into).
On further consideration, and by analogy to “is immortal” being functionally equivalent to “will live forever” (so if it’s interchangeable wording, does that mean that “is immortal” is actually equally a positive statement?), formulating “indigestible” as words to the effect of “will pass through your body largely intact and with about exactly as many calories as it started with” occurs to me.
I find that editing my writing to use positive statements does make it better. I feel doubtful I could easily take it to the extent of making all positive statements. This might be an interesting use of LLM rewrites: negative->positive rephrasing feels like something within GPT-4′s capabilities, and it would let you quickly translate a large corpus to read & evaluate. (I dislike the current name Abs-E and by analogy to E-Prime, suggest ‘E+’ - short for ‘English-positive’.)
This would also combine well with ‘Up-Goer-Five’ style writing. In fact, I think Up-Goer-Five writing is already mostly E+ writing because of the need to say what something is rather than is not.
“Grass will pass through you without providing energy” : “without providing energy” seems little different to “not providing energy”, it’s still at heart a negative claim
That one seems easy to do if you go more quantitative. What is ‘energy’? I mean, by e=mc^2, some grass embodies a lot of energy. You mean calories. “Grass provides 0 calories” is a positive assertion, which is more correct and still reasonably natural English. “Oh, I meant for humans”. Fine, your first two versions failed this (‘indigestible’ for whom, exactly?) but easily revised: “Grass provides 0 calories to humans.” 0 is not a negation, but a specific number, and so is valid, and correctly expresses the intent while not being overly universal and implying false things about herbivores.
“Only food that can be easily digested will provide calories”
That statement would seem to also be obviously wrong. Plenty of things are ‘easily digested’ in any reasonable meaning of that phrase, while providing ~0 calories. Water, for example. Or artificial sweeteners. Minerals like calcium. (Chiral molecules, if you want to go really exotic.)
On further consideration, and by analogy to “is immortal” being functionally equivalent to “will live forever” (so if it’s interchangeable wording, does that mean that “is immortal” is actually equally a positive statement?)
This example might be considered a benefit of the style. People can mean rather different things by ‘immortal’ if they are simply defining it by negation as ‘not dying’. One common definition is ‘not aging’ (ie. the probability of annual mortality being the same each year indefinitely); the other common one is some sort of ‘indestructible and will exist to the end of the universe’. The former is fairly ordinary and mundane and describes, say, naked mole rats; the latter is purely imaginary and found only in fictional works like comic books or sacred scriptures. If the former, you might say something like ‘has constant mortality rate’, and if the latter, ‘existing forever’.
So banning ‘im-mortal’ (which etymologically, turns out to be what you’d assume: Latin in—mortalis, “not-mortal”) could be useful. (You do see IRL people sometimes object to longevity discussions on dumb grounds like “you can’t become immortal, what about accidents?!”...)
“Only food that can be easily digested will provide calories”
That statement would seem to also be obviously wrong. Plenty of things are ‘easily digested’ in any reasonable meaning of that phrase, while providing ~0 calories.
I think you’ve interpreted this backwards; the claim isn’t that “easily digested” implies “provides calories”, but rather that “provides calories” implies “easily digested”.
Well, debates about what modal operators are meant by ‘only’ aside, I am doubtful that claim is true either! First, as a parallel consider grass again: to digest grass, ruminants need an extremely long intestinal system which takes multiple passes (including throw it up to the mouth to chew it again, for hours on end, chewing their cud again and again) and requires tons of microbes to digest it over multiple days; again, under any ordinary understanding of the phrase ‘easily digested’, it is not easy for cows to digest grass. Yet they still get all the calories they need to live on from it. So, for cows, grass ‘provides calories’ and yet is not ‘easily digested’. This is also true for humans: eating plants and raw uncooked foods ‘provide calories’, but are not ‘easily digested’; in fact, they provide much less net calories than they should because so many calories go right back into the digestive process.* (And this is one of the major theories for the importance of fire & cooking in human evolution: ‘the expensive gut tissue’ hypothesis.) You could also point to things like ‘poisonous berries’: you eat them and enjoy calories as their simple carbohydrates easily digest… until you then lose a bunch of calories by being sick and sh−ting yourself all day long. Easily digested, without a doubt but did they provide calories? They did—but only for the first few hours. So, this brings out that when you talk about ‘easily digested things’ which ‘provides calories’, you are implicitly including the caloric costs of digestion & side-effects and it’s really net calories you are talking about. Which will also be context-specific (eg. presumably there are wild animals like birds who will be immune to the berry poison and are the intended consumers, and for them the berries deliver full caloric value).
* see also: the malnourishment of ‘raw foodists’, which manifests in symptoms like menstruation stopping.
I’m finding myself stuck on the question of how exactly the strict version would avoid the use of some of those negating adjectives. If you want to express the information that, say, eating grass won’t give the human body useful calories...
“Grass is indigestible” : disallowed
“Grass is not nutritious” : disallowed
“Grass will pass through you without providing energy” : “without providing energy” seems little different to “not providing energy”, it’s still at heart a negative claim
Perhaps a restatement in terms of “Only food that can be easily digested will provide calories” except that you still need to then convey that cellulose won’t be easily digested.
Probably there are true positive statements about the properties of easily digested molecules and the properties of cellulose which can at least be juxtaposed to establish that it’s different to anything that meets the criteria. But that seems like a lot of circumlocution and I’m less than entirely confident that I even know the specifics.
Perhaps part of the point is to stop you making negative claims where you don’t know the specific corresponding positive claims? Or to force you to expand out the whole chain of reasoning when you do know it (even if it’s lengthier than one would usually want to get into).
On further consideration, and by analogy to “is immortal” being functionally equivalent to “will live forever” (so if it’s interchangeable wording, does that mean that “is immortal” is actually equally a positive statement?), formulating “indigestible” as words to the effect of “will pass through your body largely intact and with about exactly as many calories as it started with” occurs to me.
It’s certainly a demanding style.
I find that editing my writing to use positive statements does make it better. I feel doubtful I could easily take it to the extent of making all positive statements. This might be an interesting use of LLM rewrites: negative->positive rephrasing feels like something within GPT-4′s capabilities, and it would let you quickly translate a large corpus to read & evaluate. (I dislike the current name Abs-E and by analogy to E-Prime, suggest ‘E+’ - short for ‘English-positive’.)
This would also combine well with ‘Up-Goer-Five’ style writing. In fact, I think Up-Goer-Five writing is already mostly E+ writing because of the need to say what something is rather than is not.
That one seems easy to do if you go more quantitative. What is ‘energy’? I mean, by e=mc^2, some grass embodies a lot of energy. You mean calories. “Grass provides 0 calories” is a positive assertion, which is more correct and still reasonably natural English. “Oh, I meant for humans”. Fine, your first two versions failed this (‘indigestible’ for whom, exactly?) but easily revised: “Grass provides 0 calories to humans.” 0 is not a negation, but a specific number, and so is valid, and correctly expresses the intent while not being overly universal and implying false things about herbivores.
That statement would seem to also be obviously wrong. Plenty of things are ‘easily digested’ in any reasonable meaning of that phrase, while providing ~0 calories. Water, for example. Or artificial sweeteners. Minerals like calcium. (Chiral molecules, if you want to go really exotic.)
This example might be considered a benefit of the style. People can mean rather different things by ‘immortal’ if they are simply defining it by negation as ‘not dying’. One common definition is ‘not aging’ (ie. the probability of annual mortality being the same each year indefinitely); the other common one is some sort of ‘indestructible and will exist to the end of the universe’. The former is fairly ordinary and mundane and describes, say, naked mole rats; the latter is purely imaginary and found only in fictional works like comic books or sacred scriptures. If the former, you might say something like ‘has constant mortality rate’, and if the latter, ‘existing forever’.
So banning ‘im-mortal’ (which etymologically, turns out to be what you’d assume: Latin in—mortalis, “not-mortal”) could be useful. (You do see IRL people sometimes object to longevity discussions on dumb grounds like “you can’t become immortal, what about accidents?!”...)
I think you’ve interpreted this backwards; the claim isn’t that “easily digested” implies “provides calories”, but rather that “provides calories” implies “easily digested”.
Well, debates about what modal operators are meant by ‘only’ aside, I am doubtful that claim is true either! First, as a parallel consider grass again: to digest grass, ruminants need an extremely long intestinal system which takes multiple passes (including throw it up to the mouth to chew it again, for hours on end, chewing their cud again and again) and requires tons of microbes to digest it over multiple days; again, under any ordinary understanding of the phrase ‘easily digested’, it is not easy for cows to digest grass. Yet they still get all the calories they need to live on from it. So, for cows, grass ‘provides calories’ and yet is not ‘easily digested’. This is also true for humans: eating plants and raw uncooked foods ‘provide calories’, but are not ‘easily digested’; in fact, they provide much less net calories than they should because so many calories go right back into the digestive process.* (And this is one of the major theories for the importance of fire & cooking in human evolution: ‘the expensive gut tissue’ hypothesis.) You could also point to things like ‘poisonous berries’: you eat them and enjoy calories as their simple carbohydrates easily digest… until you then lose a bunch of calories by being sick and sh−ting yourself all day long. Easily digested, without a doubt but did they provide calories? They did—but only for the first few hours. So, this brings out that when you talk about ‘easily digested things’ which ‘provides calories’, you are implicitly including the caloric costs of digestion & side-effects and it’s really net calories you are talking about. Which will also be context-specific (eg. presumably there are wild animals like birds who will be immune to the berry poison and are the intended consumers, and for them the berries deliver full caloric value).
* see also: the malnourishment of ‘raw foodists’, which manifests in symptoms like menstruation stopping.