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gothgirl420666 comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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This seems incredibly obnoxious and I don't understand how it's helpful. It reminds me of a little kid playing the "Why?" game. Regardless of whether someone can provide a precise exact definition for "money", I think we all understand what it is on some level. You don't have to define every single word you use in a conversation, because the definitions are already assumed to be understood... that's the whole point of having words. I agree that there are situations where two people might fundamentally disagree on the definition of a word they are using and unless they define it they will never get anywhere (e.g. utilitarians and deontologists arguing over what is "good"), but I don't see how these situations are like that.
I'm not an economist or statistician but:
Money: an item with no inherent worth of its own, but is understood to have a specific value and can be traded for goods and services
Statistics: facts about the world that are expressed in quantitative form
I don't know how either of those advanced my understanding.
Also I have had the opposite problem with academia, I find it really annoying how every professor feels like they have to spend the first day of class on "what is design?" or "what is psychology?" or "what is logic?" or etc. etc.
Well, what is logic?
Would some hypothetical alien civilisation have a notion of propositional logic, complete with equivalents of syllogisms and modus tollens and all that stuff? Would any of it be different to ours? Would they even have a concept of "proposition" or is the whole endeavour a weird parochial human construct for navigating the world? It kind of feels that logic and mathematics exist independently of logicians and mathematicians, somehow. But how? Is this actually the case? What is logic "made of"? Is this question even meaningful, and what does that say about how the universe works?
This is interesting. It's certainly way more interesting than never asking what logic is. Most people never do, and yet they still use the word "logical" in an intuitive, folksy way, convinced that they know exactly what it means. The word that comes out of the everyday user's mouth is loosely pointing to the same set of ideas that philosophers talk about when they talk about logic, but the everyday user has never bothered to follow the pointer to see where it goes.
The point of asking questions like this is to find out what ideas we take for granted without being aware of the complexity behind them. As a material object, contemporary fiat money isn't unusual, but as an artefact of human culture it has some of the weirdest properties you might possibly hope to dream up. In order to appreciate this, you have to think about what money is. Plenty of people are happy to talk about quantitative easing, the gold standard or the Eurozone as if they know what's going on, and yet they haven't asked themselves this question. Maybe they should ask themselves this question, is all I'm saying; and if they're not in a position to ask that question to themselves, maybe someone else should ask them.
They probably didn't because your definitions are wrong.
Until relatively recently, money did have intrinsic value. A trivial example: gold coins.
And a statistic is a technical term in statistics which has nothing to do with what you said.