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Kaj_Sotala comments on Bridge Collapse: Reductionism as Engineering Problem - Less Wrong
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Comments (61)
I'm not sure that using this notation is a good idea, given that at least some of the readers unfamiliar with it are likely to initially parse it as "naturalized not-Cai". Even I did for a brief moment, because I was parsing the writing using my logic!brain rather than my fanfiction!brain.
Where does that notation come from, anyway? I know I've seen it on LJ, AO3, Tumblr, and ff.net, but as far as I can remember it just appeared out of thin air sometime in the mid-2000s. Do you have a sense of the etymology?
It's used in Microsoft Excel. If you have multiple worksheets, you preface a cell reference with "<sheetname>!" to specify which sheet you want that cell reference to be resolved on.
i.e.
"A3" means "the value of the cell in column A, row 3, on the current sheet", whereas
"Sheet1!A3" means "the value of the cell in column A, row 3, on Sheet 1".
Here are two theories that I find much more plausible than Excel.
Added: I said two theories, but the differences are small and not really relevant here. They agree on the essential point that it started as "Action! Mulder" (or something similar) with more normal spacing, with the exclamation point associated with the modifier and functioning pretty much as normal.
I always assumed it was a reference to bang paths. It seems more likely to me that Eliezer would reference something that appears in the Jargon File than syntax from Excel.
Well, Eliezer presumably is referencing something that appeared in fanfiction/Tumblr/etc. culture; where said culture got the notation has nothing to do with Eliezer.
Bang paths seem an unlikely candidate, as they don't actually make a good metaphor for what's being conveyed here.
Interesting. I did not know that it was used prior to him, and I apparently have poor reading comprehension. I definitely agree that the Excel metaphor makes more sense.
Huh. Not something I would have guessed.
Thanks, that's actually interesting.
A similar notation, and one which I believe Eliezer has used in the past (somewhere in the Sequences) is the scope resolution operator, used in C++ and PHP (and probably elsewhere):
std::cout
which means: the function "cout", in the namespace "std". (As opposed to just "cout", which would mean: "the function 'cout' in the current namespace".)
I can only conclude from this that the Tumblr-and-fanfiction crowd contains more finance types than programmers.
Yeah, I'd been aware of the scope resolution operator (I'm a programmer working in C++), though in context I think a cast, or maybe even template syntax, might be more appropriate: Rational!Harry in fanfic parlance seems to mean something closer to "Harry reconstrued as Rational" or "Harry built around the Rational type" than "Harry resolved to an existing instance in the Rational scope". Excel isn't something I've had much occasion to use, though.
It'd have to be a C-style cast or a reinterpret_cast, though -- we can't guarantee that the target type is a member of the canonical inheritance hierarchy. Though const_cast might have potential for some characters...
Heh. So: Harry <Rational>, or Rational (Harry), or (Rational) Harry (for C-style casting)? That would be amusing to see. It does seem slightly less readable, though.
Seemed eminently more readable than rationalist!Harry to me when I first encountered this notation, although now it's sunk in enough that my brain actually generated "that's more keystrokes!" as a reason not to switch style.
Just curious (and not necessarily addressed to you specifically), but what on Earth is wrong with the standard, conventional English notation for this, which is a hyphen? E.g. "Rational-Harry" etc.
I'm not a linguist, but hyphen-compounding doesn't look quite right to me in this context; you usually see that for disambiguation, in compound participles ("moth-eaten"; "hyphen-compounding"), or to cover a few odd cases like common names derived from phrases ("jack-in-the-pulpit"). I think standard English would be to simply treat the modifier as an adjective ("Rational Harry"; "Girl Blaise"; "Death Eater Ron"); nouns often get coerced into their adjective form here if possible, but it's common to see modifying nouns even if no adjective form exists.
As to why it doesn't get used this way in fan jargon... who knows, but fans do tend to share a (mildly irritating) fondness for unusual lexical and grammatical constructions ("I have lost my ability to can"). Probably just a shibboleth thing.
Explained here:
http://fanlore.org/wiki/!
Which rules or principles are you applying here?
Heh, logic!brain is definitely something I want to encourage. Fixed.
this is why i like ¬
script your keyboard! make it so that the chords ~1 and 1~ output a '¬'! or any other chord, really
if this actually sounds interesting and you use windows you can grab my script at https://github.com/alice0meta/userscripts/tree/master/ahk