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Comment by taoistextremist | Hacker News Reader

Nah, that would be skew. Orthogonal crosses but goes in a different direction.

Orthogonal is frequently used to mean two (or more) things are independent of one another. I have never heard skew used in that way.

Yes, the poster above has assumed the meaning of 'orthogonal' from its etymology, but the use he criticises comes from statistics (https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12128/what-does-or...)

I believe in the, quite common, context just used it's meant as non-parallel. Or the two ideas don't track at all.

Yeah, but they were saying in math related contexts, in which orthogonal is almost equivalent to perpendicular.

I believe even in the context of mathematics orthogonal means independence. I.e., one can move along x and y axis without having y or x value being changed. However if you move along any line that's not parallel to x or y axis then both x and y value change simultaneously. That's how I interpret orthogonality in the context of math anyway.

>However if you move along any line that's not parallel to x or y axis then both x and y value change simultaneously.

A third orthogonal axis is neither parallel to x and y, nor do x and y vary as you move along it.

Replace parallel with linearly indepent, and you are spot on.

No need to replace anything; the implicit assumption is a 2D space.

Then you can only talk about two concepts. I would like to be able to say, intelligence, morality, and obesity are mutually orthogonal.

If your model is 2D, then you are requiring a relationship between at least two of them.

The example was in 2D. The reader is able to generalize from there, we hope, no? :)

As long as you don't rely on concepts that don't generalize to higher dimensions. To the extent that you use concepts that don't generalize in your example, you are using a poor example.

That's the idea, and these ideas do intersect. Rate your belief in them on a scale of 0..1. if your rating was (0,0) you are at the intersection.

Except you can have orthogonal vectors that don't intersect.

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