Orion Montoya @mdcclv@mastodon.xyz

Update: I live in Seattle now. I don't yet understand what this city is about. That is a novel kind of uncertainty: I tend to believe I grok cities rather quickly, and in Seattle I can't even narrow down a list of potential pigeonholes. What is this place?

Is there Historical Urban Fantasy? Like, contemporary-attitude witches, but in the Civil War or in underground resistances?

History of Lexicography

vs

Lexicography of Historical Interest

Some dictionaries you have because you want to know what a word means; some you want to know how *that* dictionary defined *that* entry.

This is exactly on the Theory side of the border between “History of Lexicography” and “Theory of Lexicography”
https://mastodon.xyz/media/M_OKJqa3SfHzUG2goIA

Wait, is my favorite philosophical shitposter a stoner-mathematician tooter??

Packing books high, reorganizing books by subject: spiraling ontological classifications. Some of these are ontologically wrong, but correct if classes break on “type of intellectual pleasure”

- Anthropology/Culture
- Philosophy (non-Linguistic)
— (“Winnie Ille Pu” is here)
- Classics
- History (including Classical)
- Linguistics
—— Linguistic history
—— Hist of ling
— Lexicography
—— Theory of Lexicography
—— Dictionary History
— Lexical Semantics
—— Theory
— Semantics etc.

(I mean: have I naive-inductioned myself into a Rationalist? What are the pitfalls of a noob logician thinking that the solution is more rigorous logical models?)

A bunch of the things that are fucked up in our societies are entrenched because they are founded in generative lies that led to a bunch of other wrongnesses.

Oh shit am I one of those people now?

It’s really cool to see people applying generative tests to ideas, both good and bad ones, to see if they lead to more knowledge or insightful propositions, or if they lead to false propositions.

It’s really scary to see people apply faulty chains of reasoning to generate new, bad ideas, which they generated through induction, but which have falsehoods that lead them to generate more and more shitty thinking.

I was introduced to the idea of “the generative test” through linguistics (syntax). When you’re trying to account for linguistic evidence, you build a model to describe how that evidence (utterance, sentence, etc.) may have been generated, and then you test if it can also generate stuff that is not grammatical.

Then my mom was telling me about a Very Bad Talk that she went to about raising children. She said that there were audience members asking really engaged questions about the speaker’s bullshit. I realized: “they’re trying to generate new knowledge based on the dude’s principles!”

In this piece a few weeks ago Martha Nussbaum calls something a “a generative lie”. It is such a perfect formulation I had to google it to see if it was a Known Term of Critique. It’s not! https://nyti.ms/2yW8L5d

The idea: that there are lies that, if you believe them, not only make you wrong about that proposition, but also lead you to generate new beliefs that are also wrong.

A barista asked me how I was doing, and I was ebullient.

Maybe not everything is going to be okay. But some things are going to be just fine.

The nice thing was a job interview that I prepared very hard for. The process was astonishingly validating no matter what the outcome is. I feel seen: that I was talking with people who cared to understand me. Then I walked around Seattle and the whole city opened to me like any of the wonderful things that open for you.

Today was a good, great, fantastic day. Probably one of the pivotal days of my life. I want to share the joy.