MrHen comments on Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism - Less Wrong

104 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 April 2009 02:44AM

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Comment author: MrHen 21 April 2009 08:39:36PM *  2 points [-]

Yes, I have stopped beating my wife, thank you for asking.

That wasn't a loaded question. That was asking for clarification.

(PS) I just noticed that "-1 points" is plural. Is that correct for negative numbers?

Comment author: Mulciber 21 April 2009 09:00:27PM 1 point [-]

Oddly enough, yes. "0 points" is also the standard. The singular only applies for 1.

Comment author: thomblake 22 April 2009 02:55:46PM *  0 points [-]

I just noticed that "-1 points" is plural. Is that correct for negative numbers?

Yes, that's one of the odd things about plurality, and why I argue that it's a silly thing to encode in so much of our language. Singular means exactly one, plural means any other number. Sometimes we use the singular and "of a" for fractions, like "one quarter of a pie", but "0.25 pies" is also correct.

ETA citation

Comment author: Annoyance 22 April 2009 08:25:07PM -2 points [-]

"That wasn't a loaded question. That was asking for clarification."

No, clarification is when you have an imprecise idea and ask someone to provide more content to make it clearer. What you did was ask about something that was neither said nor implied.

I have no interest in denying the infinite number of meanings I don't express in any given post, only in discussing the meanings I do express. Feel free to ask questions about those.