Former tech entrepreneur (co-creator of the music software Sibelius). Among other things I now play the stock market, write software to predict it, and occasionally advise tech startups. I have degrees in philosophy.
bfinn
Karma: 754
Third Time means ‘1/3 of the time’ (referring to break time = 1⁄3 of work time) and also ‘the 3rd occasion’. It’s only half a pun because ‘the 3rd occasion’ doesn’t refer to anything here, but it’s a common phrase like first time, second time etc. (E.g. ‘the first time I ate caviar I didn’t like it, nor the second time, but the third time I enjoyed it’.)
As for puns in the other names suggestions, there are too many to explain, I’m afraid!
Re the Malmstrom incident, there have been various reports over the decades of UFOs appearing at nuclear missile sites and even apparently interfering with (eg disabling) the missiles. Eg the Rendlesham Forest incident in 1980 at a USAF nuclear base in the UK, in which deputy base commander Lt Col Charles Halt and many other personnel spent hours observing (and filming, photographing etc.) UFOs over two nights.
(I’d link to the Wikipedia article, but last time I checked a while back it was being gatekept by ultra-skeptics who reverted any changes. I have however seen Col Halt describe the incident at great length & detail. An audio recording he made as the events were unfolding is also in the public domain, though he says radar tapes, film and photos were all taken away on higher orders and never seen again.)
Great post.
‘Fabricated’ doesn’t seem quite the right adjective, as it implies deliberate deception, whereas your examples suggest it’s usually unintentional. Indeed I initially assumed your post was about some kind of rhetorical trick rather than a mistake. So, how about something more along the lines of ‘incoherent’? (Or see related terms below.)
In any case, I’m a bit wary of the introduction of new terms for apparently-new concepts, because they are often already quite well-known and built into English via established phrases, which to save brain space should be used as well or instead. (E.g. ‘desperado’ and ‘chasing losses’ for the otherwise perhaps surprising ‘discovery’ of risk-seeking behaviour in a loss situation.)
That said, I haven’t thought of any existing phrases which precisely capture fabricated options; but FWIW here are some related ones:
You can’t have your cake and eat it too (which you touched on)
Hand-waving
Utopian / Fantasy world / Dream world / La-la land
Wishful thinking / Pipe dream / Chasing rainbows / When pigs fly / Pie-in-the-sky / Castles in the air.
Utopia(n) is actually an #EXAMPLE—cf the meme about communism leading to Utopia via an unspecified intermediate step. Which IIRC Scott Alexander said seemed to be Marx’s position—Utopia just follows automatically, no further elaboration or detail required.
Also, a couple of nitpicks:
The Twin Earth example was originally (AFAIK) from Saul Kripke in his book Naming and Necessity
‘The actual price of the goods and services’ should read ‘The actual cost...’
An issue I find with debugging a complex program is that when you write tests (which put inputs into part of the program and then check whether the expected output is produced), your tests can themselves contain bugs, and often do (if they’re not trivially simple). That is, your experiments isolating a small set of variables can produce confusing results due to the experimental design, not just unpredictability in what they’re trying to test. Eg maybe your way of measuring the slope angle or sled weight is flawed. (Cf assumptions about the speed/straightness of light or a steady-state universe messing up your astronomical observations). As philosophers of science say, all observation is theory-laden.
I don’t know anyone enlightened, so I’m not making a claim either way. Just that if this is roughly what enlightened is meant to mean (I surmise via the drawing analogy), then this might be an expected consequence, hence test, of it.
If Looking is something like bypassing one’s own mental machinery that interprets & somewhat distorts reality, then maybe someone who’s enlightened has few cognitive biases, or at least is capable of noticing & maybe bypassing them when they arise?
Agreed. I found reading so many comments exhausting and, et, unenlightening, and after a while I just gave up
[EDITED] I recommend tea (black, green, oolong or white—i.e. white leaves, not with milk). As well as being rather lower in caffeine than coffee, tea includes L-theanine, which (a) increases the benefits of caffeine (viz. attention, accuracy, energy) and (b) counteracts jitters and headaches from caffeine.
Oolong tea usually has a bit more caffeine than the others, though green & white teas have a somewhat better ratio of L-theanine to caffeine. But caffeine and L-theanine contents are very variable anyway.
https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/research/#nutrient-nutrient-interactions_caffeine
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4787341/
Thanks for this—interesting & quite useful. It reminded me of some similar observations:
George Orwell recommended somewhere that, when writing, you should try to visualize what you want to say for a while (i.e. non-propositionally) before making any attempt to put it into words, so as to be concrete rather than abstract/dry and falling back on cliches etc. that may not express it adequately.
At the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—the gist of which is that any meaningful statement can be expressed as logical propositions—he hints enigmatically that this isn’t quite the be-all and end-all, as some things that can’t be said can still be ‘shown’. I assume meaning, gestured towards non-propositionally. An example he gives elsewhere, maybe along these lines, is that you can know how a clarinet sounds, but not state it.
The typical reader needs to meet the idea repeatedly, from different angles, to start to realize it.
Cf in Philosophical Investigations, W. makes various points repeatedly in different ways via different examples, and justifies this by saying it’s like repeatedly traversing a landscape which you need to view from different angles before you can understand the whole.
(Contrast the Tractatus, where IIRC in the intro he says maybe the book can only be understood by people who’ve already had the same thoughts. Maybe, in line with the whole book, on the grounds that if you can’t understand propositions, he can’t help you further (via non-propositions).)
For elephant-and-rider, the equivalent more common metaphor is ‘head and heart’ (or, correspondingly, heart and head)
Thanks. Interesting that it gets the general idea of ‘from behind’ but the specifics garbled—eg bottom left the people should be sitting on the bench, not the other side of the table!
Thanks very much—yes, that one is pretty remarkable, as are several of them.
On the close-up I see loaves, some kind of gadget left of centre, and is that the baby Jesus (with beard?) they’re about to tuck into?! (I assume DALLE-2 is not always sure how to show people from this perspective.)
Some prompts:
The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci, but painted from behind.
The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci, but painted from above, looking straight downwards.
The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci, as an X-ray image.
Relativity by Escher, as a high-resolution photograph.
Boris Johnson dressed as a clown and riding a unicycle along a tightrope, spray-painted onto a wall, in the style of Banksy.
An obvious point just about worth mentioning, is that of course you don’t need to spend a whole day over Sabbath. A half- or third-day per week is a lot better than none. Albeit perhaps increasing the chance that you’ll start thinking about post-Sabbath plans during Sabbath (if it ends before night).
Relatedly, if Sabbath is to be a whole day perhaps it’s better lasting from waking up until bedtime (or notionally say midnight to midnight), so it is bookended by the natural boundaries of sleep. (Albeit that reduces the point of the candle-lighting ritual.)
You may or may not know there’s a blog called the Ancient Wisdom Project which tries out practices from various religions for a month at a time.
One issue I have with the regular meal with friends/family bit is that (aside from those in your household, who you would see anyway) this potentially sets up a regular commitment which could well become onerous. In that, if you establish a pattern of seeing the same people week after week, you may after a while start to get bored of it/them (even close friends can pall if seen too often), and want to see other people, or no-one, for the Sabbath meal. Which starts to make Sabbath tedious/stressful if not dealt with, and even if dealt with delicately can create an awkward situation.
(Cf during COVID lockdowns my family set up a weekly Zoom meeting, with its own ‘rituals’ such as a quiz. This got quite tedious after a few months, with nothing much new to say, connection problems, the calls tending to overrun for no good reason, etc. etc. It was eventually broken only by people starting to drop out with excuses, after a few weeks of which everyone got the hint and it finally ended, having long outstayed its welcome.)
They prevent accumulation of personal-and-home-related work debt. A chaotic house is not restful. Postponed chores weigh on you. The deadline forces handling them in advance.
Cf a friend of mine once observed that taking a vacation has the benefit of forcing you to clear your desk of things beforehand—completing, ditching or delegating tasks, clearing your email backlog, etc. Often in a more decisive and forceful manner than you otherwise would, e.g. declining to do things you’ve been asked to do, finishing mini-projects in quick-and-probably-good-enough ways rather than spending too long over them, etc.
Re the last point, yes indeed. Mark Forster (an excellent productivity author) recommends training yourself to comply with your own resolutions this by, each evening (for a while), deciding on something big or small that you will do (or not do) the following day without fail, no matter what. Then do so, and repeat.
Comparing peak to sustainable running speeds: the world marathon record’s average speed is 55% of the world 100m sprint record. And for the Olympic men’s qualifying times, the ratio is 54%. Both quite close to 60%
Indeed. In fact IIRC the fact nuclear missiles were based there was secret at the time and long afterwards