define_eprime

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" explains this well in chapter 9 (Mumon and Gödel). I believe the argument goes that by calling it a specific thing you "oppose the reality" of all the other things it also is - no single name will ever suffice. Closed world assumption and all that.

define_eprime

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Shuzan held out his short staff and said, "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"

define_eprime

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

At a former company (which has since gone out of business) I met some people who loved Evernote.

One was an administrator who cheerfully kept confidential details about the security of our corporate network in it without once reading the Evernote TOS or considering the consequences if those TOS changed.

Even after I explained that those TOS clearly violated several parts of his employment agreements, he continued to use it. He didn't think there was anything wrong since our CFO also kept a lot of sensitive information in it...

define_eprime

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Whilst you are unavoidably picking up points on your CV with every project you complete and every line of code you write, you may not, and indeed probably are not actually getting any better.

I think I understand the gist of what he's trying to say: you can only know you've improved if you know what you're trying to achieve and measure what you do. By that measure doing arbitrary things "to get better" won't lead to improvement.

I think he's wrong in two ways.

First, he ignores a situation I've experienced many times - getting "stuck" in a point of stable local maxima after finding a less than perfect solution to a problem. Playing around with new and unrelated stuff occasionally helped me identify something I initially overlooked in my initial problem and lead me to something better.

Second, and perhaps more important, I believe the simple unconscious act of learning and sharing new things can lead many to live longer, happier and arguably better lives.

define_eprime

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Has anyone ever defined E-prime in E-prime? The wikipedia page doesn't offer one but I'd imagine it would have to be a series of prolog-like assertions about E-prime. You obviously can't just say "E-prime is ..."

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