2022 LC Thread—New Year, New Thread

well yeah they do it because it occasionally works

To be fair, men do all sorts of dumbass shit to hit on women that never works. Honking? Catcalls? 0% hit rate.

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Yep, tahtt’s’ what we have.

Catcalls and honking aren’t really attempts to hit on women, though, I think they’re just intimidating women with unwanted sexual attention. It’s bullying, not flirting.

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If this isn’t hyperbole I think you’re bonkers. I think 10% would be high. I think it’s more like 1%.

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Everything everyone writes is hyperbole always.

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This week’s Sean Carroll podcast has a dude on who wrote a book about language and how it’s good for lawyers but not science because it evolved for persuasion, so this checks out.

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I’m listening to this (well, fell asleep 10 minutes in last night) and I think the guy is incorrect in important respects. Language did not evolve for persuasion (though that’s important). It’s better for lawyers than scientists because it’s necessarily vague. Words usually have no determinate meaning, many have 100+ “definitions” if you slice the pie thinly enough. Most communication uses like 1000 broad terms. Science and math (esp. math) are different from normal because they tie words to specific well-defined things (“observable” things for science). Words in science are typically narrowed and specialized version of “normal” language or are coined terms.

This vagueness of language isn’t because of “persuasion”, it’s because when you need 100 or 1000 or 10000000 people to use language in a mutually comprehensible way, it needs to be vague, with meaning filled in by context, as the world is not made manifest to us in some scientific image of reality. The tyranny of pretending language is precise is how you end up with the the current supreme court. Wittgenstein makes a big stink about this, in his own unfortunately oblique way, in the Philosophical Investigations, as do later philosophers like Quine and Davidson.

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I’ll admit that like a lot of guys until MeToo I didn’t know just how common it is for women to get cat-called etc…

But I’m still finding it hard to believe that your average married dad is going to take receiving a birthday party invite email as either opportunity or temptation.

When I was a HS teacher in China it would always bother me that my boss/colleagues would freely give students my wechat ID (they all had an email address to contact me). There was also a mom who for about a month was messaging me a few times a week late at night about her kid who was doing fine in my class. Thought something might be up but different culture, different boundaries. I brought it up to a few other teachers in the program once and they’d never heard from her.

Yeah, but you’re a lawyer so how I can I trust you? Seriously though, I was listening to the podcast while walking and couldn’t listen closely. I kept hoping they’d move on to less speculative stuff. Maybe the second half is better.

I think the precision of scientific language is overstated at least in practice. Often a speaker thinks he’s being 100% clear when he’s not. It’s part of why I like Carroll that he’s humble enough to acknowledges this happens.

Agree. Science, especially medicine, often progresses when it’s understood that a relatively precise term is not actually capturing the phenomena. Many medical terms are actually “functional” (“arthritis”) and additional investigation reveals they cover multiple distinct mechanisms or etiologies. This is a big problem in psychology, where it’s not always clear there is a real thing (e.g., “emotions”, “memory”) that a theory purports to be about.

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Yeah, I mean ask any biochemist what’s the distinction between a peptide and a protein, like how many amino acids before you have a protein, no one knows but it’s not important.

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In my personal experience, nearly one hundred percent of kids birthday party invitations have been via Evite.

Maybe this is regional but I find this bizarre and my experience is the complete opposite. I have never even heard of Evite.

There are 25 kids in a school classroom. For all of our parties (movie/bowling/ice skating/rolller skating), we invite the whole class (so nobody feels left out) and then invite a few other kids from different classes or activities.

How I am supposed to gather email addresses for an entire class of kids? How would you ever know if they checked their email? How would you know if it went to spam? How does that make more sense than just printing invitations from Walgreens and handing them out?

Function and, to a lesser extent, fold seem like the determining factors here much more than length, no?

A denatured protein that doesn’t function is still a protein, no?

To those on team “I’m not giving her my phone number or email address”, what exactly are you afraid of here? This all sounds so foreign to me

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Yes, but it at least wold have had a fold and function at some point. A thousand-chain polyalanine isn’t a protein.

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i’m afraid of my raw animal magnetism

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Our school hands out a class list at the start of each school year that includes parents’ phone numbers and emails. Figured that was standard nowadays.

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Then it seems like neither function or length alone makes a protein a protein.

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