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jooyous comments on Sayeth the Girl - Less Wrong
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Oh, I think I agree in that case. Objectifying people is okay because people are really complicated and sometimes you only need to consider one property of a person in order to compute your goals if you're maximizing utility along some one axis. Sure!
Objectifying people is bad when it hurts them.
When people are concerned about it, it's probably because it hurts them.
Or because they expect to gain from indicating concern.
Few things:
'And' would be unambiguously incorrect. 'Or' is correct, obviously doesn't exclude the possibility that the gain could be of the kind your mentioned and also allows for the other possibilities.
Why do you read gain like it's a bad thing? I have no objection to gain. I'm not judging the expression of concern one way or another, merely commenting on which situations concern is expressed. It is worth making such a comment because the quoted prediction was misleadingly simple.
Okay, but if you're saying gain isn't a bad thing, then you're not really saying anything. Maybe it would help if you name these other things that can be gained by expressing concern?
But you're not, because you didn't name any situations.
I can't quite explain why it feels trivial to read gain as a good thing, but I have an example. Positive version:
It's kind of confusing, right? It's like "Err, yes. That's what I said." Compared to:
That's why I read it as the second one.
Not quite. The denotation of “A or B” is normally “A or B”, though it often has the connotation “but not both”. “A and/or B” has the same denotation but lacks that connotation. See the first sentence of the fifth paragraph of this.
The term connotation is usually used for what distinguishes the meanings of "dog" and "cur". The exclusivity of "or" seems to be a rather different thing and is commonly regarded as a conversational implicature (which explains why it disappears under negation, for instance). Whether that's really correct is somewhat debatable, especially because nobody really knows what the denotation of "or" actually is; but calling it connotation strikes me as misleading.
Yes, "conversational implicature" is the more precise term for that, but I used "connotation" instead because I thought it was close enough and it is more widely known among LW readers. (I thought that the main difference was that the latter is usually applied to words and the former to sentences; is there another important one?)
There's at least one that cannot be considered a consequence of implicatures attaching to sentences (or maybe phrases): You can cancel implicatures ("you can do this or that - in fact, you can do both"), but not connotations.
It's instructive to ask the reverse question: Is there any important commonality between implicatures and connotations other than that neither is part of the literal meaning? I think the answer is no.
I had been primed by this post when choosing the word connotation, but I didn't remember Footnote 0.