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Comment by nickserv | Hacker News Reader

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nickserv·

It's absolutely not a meaningless term, it's a classification in the Nova standard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

And regarding health risks, please ask your doctor about your consumption. You may be surprised.

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Yeah, it kinda made me laugh too. I'm glad you could pull something out. I'd never heard of that Nova classification system. I'll have to read some more on it. The whole doctor thing, the more processed the food is, the less work your body has to do, which means the more available the calories are, which generally means the worse it is for you.

And usually the fats have to be processed because fat is generally not shelf-stable.

Nova is itself something that has changed a bunch over time and combines a ton of different concepts.

It is meaningless to the general population. No term is meaningless to an individual or small groups of people, obviously. That goes without saying.

Ignorance of a concept does not make it meaningless.

Truer words have never been spoken. Now set forth unto the world and transcend your ignorance to learn is meant by "meaningless". The discussion taking place will make more sense to you when you return.

By that logic all sorts of technical and scientific terms would be "meaningless".

Seems like playing semantics, to not say disingenuous, using "meaningless" to mean "unknown", when the former clearly has a negative connotation.

Most technical and scientific terms absolutely are meaningless outside of related technical and scientific communities. All terms have at least one person who sees it as meaningful else it could not fundamentally exist as a term, but clearly the context is about trying use it in contexts where the audience is the general population. There is no shared understanding of what it means in that setting, thus it is meaningless (to that audience).

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