Zubon comments on 2-Place and 1-Place Words - Less Wrong

46 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 June 2008 07:39AM

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Comment author: Zubon 27 June 2008 04:00:43PM 4 points [-]

Laura ABJ, I believe that is acknowledged with the reference to Fred and John using the same function.

As has been said, the point should be elementary, but it seems to be missed frequently in human relations that the same word is being used for different things in this exact context. It is obvious, upon momentary reflection, that Bloogah might have other interests; people then take to internet message boards for hours to argue that Fred is a fool for using function 20934 instead of 20935, by which rankings are slightly different. They then go on to argue that anyone using the word should really mean 20935.