Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>This isn't an accident of language. An example of an actual accident of language would be giving tanks instead of giving thanks.

By "Accident of language" I don't mean "slip of the tongue" or "mistake when speaking".

I mean that kind words we use to describe someome who runs as "runner" is an accidental, not essential, property of English, and can be different in other languages. It doesn't represent some deeper truth, other than being a reflection of the historical development of the English vocabulary. I mean it's contigent in the sense it's used in philosophy as: "not logically necessary"

Not just in its sounds (which are obviously accidental, different languages can have different sounds for a word of the same meaning), but also in its semantics and use, e.g. how we don't call a car a "runner".

That we don't call it that doesn't express some fundamental truth, it's just how English ended up. Other languages can very well call both a car and a running man the same thing, and even if they don't for this particular case, they do have such differences between them for all kinds of terms.

>* I think you should make your point so as to disprove Nuemann, not pick on the straw man of running.*

I'm not here to disprove Neumann. I'm here to point that Lanier's argument based on the use of "runner" doesn't contribute anything.

> I'm not here to disprove Neumann.

You are arguing on the basis of possibility of imprecision in language that the choice to be more precise does not contribute anything. That structure - whether you want it to or not - as a direct consequence of logic applies to every thinker who ever argued for precision due to the possibility of ambiguity. It is an argument against formal systems, programming languages, measurement, and more. Some of the time it will turn out that your conclusion was true. Other times it will not. So the argument structure itself is invalid. Your conclusions do not follow from your premises.

Try your blade - your argument structure - against steel rather than straw. I saw you slice through straw with it. So I picked up the blade after you set it down and tried to slice it through steel. The blade failed to do so. The blade is cheap, prone to shattering, and unsuited for use in a serious contest between ideas.

For what it is worth - I do happen to agree with you that Lanier is making a mistake here. I think it is in the logical equivalence mismatch. He wants intelligence to be comparable to running, not to motion more generally, but since intelligence is actually more comparable to compression we can talk of different implementations of the process using terms like artificial or natural intelligence without being fallacious for much the same reason we can talk about different compression algorithms and still be talking about compression. So instead of trying to argue from his distinction between motion in general and motion in humans, I would think the place to point to for contradiction is the existence of cheetah runners versus human runners. Directly contradicting his insinuation is that we actually do say that cheetah are faster runners than humans.

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