Said Achmiz

Karma: 15,306

Said Achmiz 21 May 2010 5:44 UTC
4 points
on: Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices
The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are NOT the same color as the “yellow” tiles on the top face of the right cube. Each tile in both sets is made of pixels of several different colors. The “blue” tiles on the left are made of several shades of slightly bluish-gray; the “yellow” tiles on the right are similarly composed of several shades of slightly yellowish-gray.

Such illusions may indeed be real, but that image does not seem to be a good example.

Edit: Interesting. The higher-resolution version of the image (in mattnewport’s post) is indeed as described, i.e. the colors of the relevant tiles are identical. Is the deviation in the lower-res image a result of compression?
What links here?
- Zack_M_Davis's comment on Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads by Raemon (24 Apr 2023 21:40 UTC; -1 points)

Said Achmiz 15 Oct 2011 23:06 UTC
11 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Closet survey #1

It can’t be true that both universal higher education and immigration are social goods, since it is cheaper to just not educate some percentage your own people.

This comment perplexed me until I realized you were assuming that the average education level of immigrants is lower than that of “natives” (that is, the pre-existing population of the country). But that need not be the case. To borrow from personal experience — many immigrants from the former Soviet Union are quite a bit more educated than the national average in the U.S. Surely immigrants who bring an above-average education with them are good for the society (assuming that they intend to become productive members of society)? Doesn’t it follow that both of the things you mention can, in fact, be true, conditional on certain contingent properties of immigration?*

*And of higher education, presumably. I mean, we could say “higher education can’t be a social good if we do it wrong in ways X, Y, Z”, to which the obvious response is “we shouldn’t do it like that, then.”

Said Achmiz 25 Oct 2011 4:39 UTC
1 point
in reply to: phane’s comment on: Whining-Based Communities
The point, I think, is not that you can achieve arbitrarily large success no matter what your starting point. It’s that you achieve the most success that is possible given your starting point.

In other words: yes, life is unfair. You now have two options. You can either:

1. Do the best you can with what you are given. This doesn’t mean quietly acquiescing to whatever default fate is expected of you, or going the path of least resistance; it can mean doing grandiose, ambitious, seemingly-crazy things. Maybe you decide that your best option, given your starting point, is to try to change the world (or at least some relevant part of it). But at any rate, your strategy takes your starting point as given.

or...

2. Sit there and whine that the world isn’t fair, while behaving as if the world actually did work the way you think it should work. This strategy will, of course, fail. It seems obvious to me that whatever external factors have conspired to keep you down, at least part of the responsibility for such failure is your own.

ETA: I think one source of contention in your comment is that when we talk about “triumphing”, or “solving” an obstacle, what we mean is simply achieving the best result given the starting conditions, rather than achieving some given point on an absolute scale of success.

Said Achmiz 20 Jan 2012 3:37 UTC
17 points
on: POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum
I’m not sure if this is the right thread for this, but I don’t see how example #11 in the “Skill 1: Noticing Sunk Costs” PDF is an actual example of the sunk cost fallacy.

Ellery’s options are to eat the slightly-burnt soup, or not to eat and instead to spend $12 (and, presumably, some cooking time) to replace the damaged soup with good soup and eat that instead. She has to eat something (again, presumably); the option to simply abandon the sunk cost, by discarding the soup and then eating nothing, seems implausible. In other words, her decision whether to eat or not eat the soup directly affects her future financial situation, and her decision is based on that effect.

Am I misunderstanding something?

EDIT: Of course it’s possible that the negative utility Ellery would get from eating untasty soup outweighs the positive utility from eating at all plus the value of $12, but in any case the question concerns future utility, right?

(My apologies if this is a thread derail.)

Said Achmiz 5 Feb 2012 6:51 UTC
8 points
on: Rationality Quotes February 2012

… Let us think about the future! Not only praise it, not only worship or shrink in terror from it, not only dream of it or fear it — let us think about it, invent it, prepare for it!..

— Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Cargo Cult Language

Said Achmiz5 Feb 2012 21:32 UTC

−2 points

44 comments4 min readLW link

Said Achmiz 5 Feb 2012 22:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Do you react similarly to all instances in which people try to correct other people’s usage? Or only some, and if so, which sorts? In other words, corrections of which of the following do you consider pedantry/elitism, and which do you think are justified:
1. Spelling
2. Grammar
3. Style
4. Cliches, awkward constructions, etc. (e.g. Orwell’s complaints)
5. Incorrect usage of terminology
6. Other?
I don’t mean this as a rebuttal; I’m genuinely curious about your opinion on descriptive vs. prescriptive language rules.

Said Achmiz 5 Feb 2012 22:33 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
My intention was not so much to claim that one meaning is unambiguously correct and one is wrong — after all, an initially “wrong” meaning can become “right” through usage. (For what it’s worth, http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/comprised.html contradicts your claim of a consensus while acknowledging the controversy.) The point, rather, is that many people use the word without being aware that there’s any kind of controversy, or that there are multiple meanings.

Similarly, if you find some code on the Internet, paste it into your program, and it works (in the sense that it doesn’t crash or break, and seems to do what you wanted), but you have absolutely no idea why it works or what it means, that’s still cargo cult programming.

I do see how what I wrote may convey the impression that I was expressing an authoritative position on the matter, though.

Said Achmiz 5 Feb 2012 22:40 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Incorrect’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Certainly they can answer the question. The indication of cargo cult language, as I conceive it, isn’t necessarily that the speaker can’t answer the question, but that it’s asked in the first place (cf. my third example); in other words, there’s a suspicion that the actual meaning of the word/phrase the speaker used does not match what they intended to say (because they don’t actually know what the word/phrase means).

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 0:46 UTC
2 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Fair enough. The following, then, is a rebuttal to your top-level comment.

If you use two words interchangeably, whose meanings are originally distinct, then you lose the ability to use your word choice in this case to indicate one of the meanings and not the other. Meanwhile, your audience is no longer able to divine, from your word choice, which thing you mean. This weakens your ability to communicate effectively.

I am then making the additional, empirical claim that a common cause of these sorts of mistakes is people using words or phrases without being aware of the specifics of their meaning. In the case of word substitution, the writer is not aware that the words mean different things; or is not aware that a word has multiple, possibly opposed, meanings; or has no idea what a saying or expression really means. This may not be the only cause of misuse[1] of any of the words or phrases I mentioned, but it’s one cause, and I think a common one.

The follow-up claim is that being unaware of distinctions between words (and the concepts to which they refer), or being unaware of the ideas referred to by the phrases you use, is bad for you. That is what I was alluding to with the last two links in my post.

All of this is not to say that in real life, if you made some statement in which you use “accurate” instead of “precise”, my first reaction would be “Now hang on there, my good man, don’t you mean ‘precise’? Take care not to make such embarrassing slips!” I would — silently, almost unconsciously — quickly weigh the likelihood of you intending one meaning vs. the other; situate your word choice in the context of your statement and the surrounding conversation; and in any case we may well not be discussing matters so grave that the distinction even matters. Finally, if I’m still confused and I think it matters, I can just ask for clarification — though I mentioned in my post that this doesn’t always go well, especially if you are in fact not aware that the two words have different meanings in the first place.

There is a difference, however, between that sort of communication and the kind where your intended meaning is completely transparent to me and where you are conveying exactly the ideas you mean to convey, with no ambiguity and no chance of misunderstanding. I am not sure what to make of the attitude that this is not, all else being equal, preferable to the other sort. (Note: I am not ascribing such an attitude to you.)

That being said, though, I would prefer not to recapitulate any of the standard descriptivist vs. prescriptivist arguments here, not least because I don’t think I have anything particularly new to add to that debate. I only hope to have clarified that my problem isn’t with incorrect[2] usage per se; it’s with the consequences of this particular cause of incorrect usage.

[1] By “misuse” here I only mean “divergence from accepted or standard usage”; this isn’t to imply that such divergence is automatically “wrong” in an absolute sense.
[2] Same here.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Cargo Cult Language by Said Achmiz (6 Feb 2012 1:50 UTC; 3 points)

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 0:49 UTC
4 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Agh! I meant “polynomial” instead of “geometric”. Yes, “geometric” is the same as “exponential”. Edited. (How embarrassing.)

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 0:59 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Steven_Bukal’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language

SaidAchmiz even admits that for some of these, the usage he doesn’t like is more common, which is a big hint.

Do you really think this is the case? How does this apply to “the exception that proves the rule”, for instance?

Consider this hypothetical exchange:

Bob: All bears are either black or white.
Fred: Eh? But I saw a brown bear just yesterday.
Bob: Well, that’s the exception that proves the rule.

Let’s suppose that this usage is in fact more common than the two that I cited as “correct”. It seems to be either false or meaningless. What is Bob saying here? How does Rationalist Taboo help us?

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 1:24 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
I think there may be less of a difference between the two domains than you think. Copying and pasting entire blocks of code is one way that cargo cult programming happens, but it’s not the only way. Consider the following example from C:

void main() is (or was, at least) a fairly common construction. It compiles, it executes. Many, many people learned it from their comp sci textbooks or teachers as such a basic part of How To Write C Programs™ that they don’t even think of it as something that they copied from somewhere. But they have no idea why it could be bad, because it’s something they do without understanding why. This is classic cargo cult programming.

But you’re quite right that it’s not trivial to just stop making errors of this sort. I do think it’s one of those things where just being aware of it helps. I don’t have any concrete advice beyond “think more closely about the things you say and write”, but that’s neither original nor specific to this case.

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 1:50 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Incorrect’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Heh.

In seriousness, I don’t take typos / slips of the tongue / accidental word substitutions / etc. to be examples of what I’m talking about. As I said in my reply to drethelin, cargo cult language is one cause of word/phrase misuse, not the only use. The cases where someone corrects you, or asks for clarification, and you go “ah yeah, whoops, of course I meant X and not Y”, are not cargo cult language, I’d say. I don’t take such cases to make a difference to the point, which applies when people are intentionally saying something which has a meaning that they aren’t aware of.

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 2:15 UTC
4 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language

It is much more powerful for people to understand accuracy and precision as distinct concepts than for them to use the “correct” words for them. If they do not, the problem is not that they misuse words, but that they lack the concepts to hang the words on. Attributing the difficulty to “erroneous usage”, rather than lack of concepts, is bootless.

You seem to be implying that using distinct words and having distinct concepts are things that are entirely decoupled from one another, which I find puzzling. Two of the points I was trying to make in my post is that lack of distinction of concepts is a consequence of not distinguishing words, and also that misusing words is a symptom of concept conflation; and that these things are in fact what make word misuse a bad thing.

If you are speaking to someone who does not understand a distinction between “accurate” and “precise”, then using those words distinctly yourself — and finding fault with that person for not understanding — is cargo-cult behavior: making a big production out of a symbolic distinction, in the hope of arousing a response which isn’t coming.

If the concept you want to express is “precise”, and the person you’re addressing doesn’t know the difference between that and “accurate”, you nonetheless do have to pick one or the other of these words. It’s not like you can just use both at once, simultaneously; it seems pointlessly perverse to deliberately use the wrong word; and the only remaining alternative I see is to haphazardly use or or the other as the whim strikes you. I don’t see the advantage in that, and I rather suspect that isn’t what you’d suggest doing either.

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 3:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Yes, C99 specifies that main() should be of type int, and most modern compilers will flag void main() as an error. This wasn’t always the case, and some compilers may still let you get away with it.

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 12:22 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Well said. This is basically my own thought as well.

Said Achmiz 6 Feb 2012 22:29 UTC
1 point
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Again, my aim is not to say that using a word to mean one thing is “right” and using it to mean something else is “wrong” in some Platonic sense. It is, rather, to say that if you’re not aware of what, exactly, the accepted usage is (and what less-widely-known usages are available, if any), and simply use words or phrases because you’ve heard them used in some vaguely similar context, then you will not be communicating what you think you’re communicating, and that, furthermore, you may be unaware of the existence of certain conceptual categories.

Also, I see your two years’ worth of Language Log posts and raise you the Less Wrong sequence “A Human’s Guide to Words”. “Words mean whatever people mean by them” is of no use for both effective communication and for using language as a tool to aid in cognition.

Many of the commenters here have taken my post to mean that I wish to legislate correct usage, or something to this effect. This is a failure on my part, in that I have not successfully conveyed my point, which I consider fairly straightforward, and will now attempt to briefly clarify:

Precision and accuracy are two different concepts. If we want to discuss them effectively, and also (this is sometimes overlooked) if we want to think about them effectively, then it helps quite a bit to have two different words for them. There is no intrinsic, fundamental reason why we absolutely must use “precise” to mean ‘precise’ and “accurate” to mean ‘accurate’, instead of vice versa. But given that we already have two words, is there any good reason not to say “precise” when you mean ‘precise’ and “accurate” when you mean ‘accurate’, rather than something else?

The Language Log article you linked in your other comment has this quote, which I more or less endorse:

And there are plenty of people of all political persuasions who have a passing concern about usage but don’t find the diatribes of the right-wing critics particularly compelling (or the ones of the linguists, either, in my experience) — people who are genuinely attached to the distinction between disinterested and uninterested, but who are uncomfortable about using words like “permissiveness” and “the erosion of standards,” and who are affronted by the condescending derision of minority dialects. As Lionel Trilling once put it, “I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.” But it’s difficult to make a case for language criticism nowadays without irony — you wind up saying things like, “Well, I personally don’t use disinterested to mean “uninterested,” and I’m sorry that this one is going by the boards, since at a certain point I can’t use disinterested with any assurance that most of my audience will get what I mean, but I for sure don’t think it signals the end of civilization as we know it. What’s for lunch?”

Said Achmiz 7 Feb 2012 13:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Cargo Cult Language
Excellent article, thank you for posting the link.

Said Achmiz 29 Oct 2012 18:57 UTC
18 points
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
Perhaps I missed some previous required-reading, but… what exactly do you mean by “agenty”, “agentiness”, etc.?

(Also, what does “PC” refer to in this context?)

Edit: This?