Phoenix Less Wrong Meetup- Saturday, 5-7-11, 5pm

Danny_Hintze

We're excited to have a second Phoenix meetup. As always, absolutely anyone is welcome. This time we'd like to change the location to the Barrett Honors College Dining Hall at ASU (It's extremely nice and has excellent food). I'll be there from 5 to 7 on Saturday and have a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach on the table.

The address is 698-798 Apache Blvd E, Tempe, AZ, and here it is on a map. The parking garage on Lemon is probably ideal, Barrett is south of that.

My phone number is 602-501-9420, feel free to call or text me.

The address is 698-798 Apache Blvd E, Tempe, AZ, and here it is on a map. The parking garage on Lemon is probably ideal, Barrett is south of that.

My phone number is 602-501-9420, feel free to call or text me.

Off the top of my head, you could call someone a snake, a lump, a yoctogram, vile, snippy, vomit-inducing, insipid, pathetic, unfashionable, or not groovy. See?

So someone who does not wear what's in fashion is intrinsically bad?

What I "see" you saying is that certain groups, such as those wearing last year's clothes, are okay to put down because those groups are intrinsically bad by virtue of being considered intrinsically bad to the point that the very word for them is a put-down, while others are not.

For example, if I understand you, calling someone vomit-inducingly ugly is okay because the very terms "vomit-inducingly" and "ugly" are intrinsically bad, "ugly" being an evaluative term which therefore does not offend anyone who does not deserve to be offended. The class of people whose facial features are unattractive is a real, if fuzzy, group, but since membership in the group is defined by aesthetic evaluation, it's perfectly okay to put them down. And if we were to coin a term which does not mean "obese" but rather means "obese to the point of vomit-inducingness", them this new term, being by definition evaluative, would be okay to use.

Do you still want to hold on to your criterion, or do you begin to share my view that it was not well thought out?

Hey, I'm not saying it'd be nice to use these terms. "Bad" is meant from the perspective of the person using the term. I guess you could even include "gay" in that category if the intent is to deride someone for being a homosexual? The problem there isn't transmuting the identity into a separate bad thing, but being a homophobe.

So there are two related things you can do with such insults that we have identified so far - one is indicating that you disapprove of a particular trait that may be shared by others, the other is using a partic... (read more)