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Morendil comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong
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I am troubled by the vehemence by which people seem to reject the notion of using the language of the second-order simulacrum -- especially in communities that should be intimately aware of the concept that the map is not the territory.
Some forms of accuracy are simply wastes of space; how many digits of Pi does rational!Harry know, as compared to rational!Hermione?
What's that?
A second-order simulacrum is a symbol that doesn't actually represent anything. The concept of 'the number' is a representative symbol (as in, an abstraction) of all numbers -- but isn't actually itself a number; it is a second-order simulacrum.
The proverbial average household with its whitewashed picket fence and that poor .5 of a kid (It's a damned shame what happened to poor .5!Timmy. People should be more careful around asphalt crackign equipment and rutting mules.) is a second-order simulacrum used as a 'conceptual placeholder' to make discussing households far simpler.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Second-order_simulacra