LESSWRONG
LW

All of Origin's Comments + Replies

0wedrifid
I thought the mysterious answer to that particular question was 'dark energy'. I don't think dark matter is enough to (not particularly) explain it.
1[anonymous]
Dark matter and energy are theories that are a little more complicated than that, in that astronomers can observe gravitational clustering more powerful than the regular matter allows for; dark energy is beyond the areas of my understanding. So far it seems to me the best guess is Shut up and Calculate.
Feel the Meaning
Origin00

I am new to this wiki (first post even) so I might be missing something, but is it really that hard a lesson to process? If I called a monkey a garp it'd still be exactly the same creature, therefore words are labels and have no meaning of themselves. Quite a simple train of thought. And I can't think of a single emotional reason why anyone wouldn't want to adopt this belief, since most people don't care about words. Right?

Reply
4gunnervi
I am going to assume that by now you've read enough of the Sequences to recognize your possible hindsight bias, in your post. In any case, merely saying that "words are labels" is akin to the guessing the teacher's password; people have said it for ages (e.g., "a rose by any other name" from Romeo and Juliet), yet most people (in my opinion) do not truly understand it.