I noticed the subtle background forces that whisper (at least to blue tribe members in their youth) “phylogenetic classification is the one true way to organize life forms”, and rejected its claim.
I still can’t guess why that bothers you :/ When I try to imagine the motivations of this shadowy conspiracy of elites who quietly manipulated the anglosphere into always maintaining separate concepts for fish and cetaceans, I just see a desire to teach us about how special and cool cetaceans are.
I can’t speak for So8res, but I’m bothered by something like… privileging one particular frame for reasons of fashion or class rather than efficiency? The sort of thing where you leave hazards around as tests, so that people can see who stumbles on them and who gracefully avoids them. I’m not opposed to tests in general, I just wish they’d be more efficient.
Like, the old meaning of fish was “fully aquatic animal”, which seems like the right sort of definition for a four-letter word (remember, words are supposed to encode information cheaply), and saying “actually we’ve reserved that four-letter word for this tiny slice of its former domain” seems like a weird choice (comparable to the ‘true bug’ definition).
I still can’t guess why that bothers you :/ When I try to imagine the motivations of this shadowy conspiracy of elites who quietly manipulated the anglosphere into always maintaining separate concepts for fish and cetaceans, I just see a desire to teach us about how special and cool cetaceans are.
I can’t speak for So8res, but I’m bothered by something like… privileging one particular frame for reasons of fashion or class rather than efficiency? The sort of thing where you leave hazards around as tests, so that people can see who stumbles on them and who gracefully avoids them. I’m not opposed to tests in general, I just wish they’d be more efficient.
Like, the old meaning of fish was “fully aquatic animal”, which seems like the right sort of definition for a four-letter word (remember, words are supposed to encode information cheaply), and saying “actually we’ve reserved that four-letter word for this tiny slice of its former domain” seems like a weird choice (comparable to the ‘true bug’ definition).