mikedilger on Nostr: Humans are mostly wordcels. And James Lindsey kinda went crazy. I know those ...
Humans are mostly wordcels. And James Lindsey kinda went crazy. I know those sentences don't sound related, but I will explain.
I was once challenged with the question "Why does a mirror preserve up and down, but flip left and right?" Any good shape rotator will know the answer: you are a wordcel if you think it is flipping anything other than front to back. Left and right are not the same kinds of things as up and down are. If you are facing north, the mirror is not flipping east and west. Your east arm matches your east arm, etc. My point is that humans are mostly wordcels. I didn't immediately comprehend the answer to this puzzle and it proved to me that I too am easily confused by language.
The amount of sincere confusion that can occur due to misuse of language is immense. Karl Marx and Engels started something that confused a lot of people. Later Foucault and Derrida and others really twisted it up even more, changing the meanings of words. It is not a simple thing you can recognize and rise above, because we think with language quite a lot. Again, we are mostly wordcels. After a signifcant amount of confusion, it is nearly impossible to right yourself.
James Lindsey (involved in the Sokal squared hoax) has spent an inordinate amount of time studying and understanding the nutty ideas that came out of Marxism. I believe that he understands them well. But I'm afraid that I don't understand James Lindsey anymore. He speaks in ways that are incomprehensible to me.
To be fair I haven't heard from James Lindsey in a few years, maybe he is less esoteric these days. But the thought came up because he is touring New Zealand and I was wondering if I should go to his talk. I decided against.
I was once challenged with the question "Why does a mirror preserve up and down, but flip left and right?" Any good shape rotator will know the answer: you are a wordcel if you think it is flipping anything other than front to back. Left and right are not the same kinds of things as up and down are. If you are facing north, the mirror is not flipping east and west. Your east arm matches your east arm, etc. My point is that humans are mostly wordcels. I didn't immediately comprehend the answer to this puzzle and it proved to me that I too am easily confused by language.
The amount of sincere confusion that can occur due to misuse of language is immense. Karl Marx and Engels started something that confused a lot of people. Later Foucault and Derrida and others really twisted it up even more, changing the meanings of words. It is not a simple thing you can recognize and rise above, because we think with language quite a lot. Again, we are mostly wordcels. After a signifcant amount of confusion, it is nearly impossible to right yourself.
James Lindsey (involved in the Sokal squared hoax) has spent an inordinate amount of time studying and understanding the nutty ideas that came out of Marxism. I believe that he understands them well. But I'm afraid that I don't understand James Lindsey anymore. He speaks in ways that are incomprehensible to me.
To be fair I haven't heard from James Lindsey in a few years, maybe he is less esoteric these days. But the thought came up because he is touring New Zealand and I was wondering if I should go to his talk. I decided against.