Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

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> a third explanation for the term

There is only one, only complex, that can be rephrased at will - and which was the intention of the coiner of the expression.

> I was unaware that he coined that term in French (when it may already have been coined differently in English before) [...] Is that where you got it from?

I know it from Books, the good old traditional way. And not necessarily books in French: it is in the works of Paul Johnson, for example. It was not "independently coined by many" - all authors I have state that Sauvy has coined the term.

> By the way, Sauvy "repudiated" his definition in 1989

Surely at some point he may have felt to retract, given that an expression coined to make a point and a good intellectual proposal - "what will be the future and the world role of those that we can now recognize as the non-aligned" - from analytical effort had become a synthetic vulgar twisted label. But the descent into vulgarity was not Sauvy's intention, and certainly there is no intent of attributing "superiority/inferiority" to the parts (as you will have seen from having read the piece on the Observateur).

So again: when somebody mentions Schrödinger's cat or Hegel's cows, you cannot assume that the context be violence or discrimination against animals "as mass interpretation became at some point". You cannot attribute to the speaker unproven intentions especially if dubious, especially if frequentistic. In general; as written, here it is explicitly forbidden.

For the rest, incidentally, I do agree with a tirade against the dire state of civilization in the decadent "western world", especially about the denunciation of «eunuch-like consumerist subservience» (50 years ago a conscious warning and today the token of the dead), but it was uncalled for from the post of flohofwoe.

> [French language]

I hope you are not falling into other assumptions.

« You cannot attribute to the speaker unproven intentions … explicitly forbidden »

As I said, I didn't intend to diss either Sauvy or you, first time I heard about this guy, and also asked some French contacts about whether he's still known in France, and the answer is « Pas la moindre idée de qui c'est ».

Also, in the article you linked, which I duely read in its entirety, he does talk about hunger and misery looming over the Third World, and he laments the misallocation of funds for more war and NATO (« pacte atlantique »). The bit about the origin of the expression and Sieyès is just the final note.

So I frankly don't think I insinuated (unterstellen) anything that was not in his text, and I was and am surprised for being reprimanded. If we are to assume good faith, then it must apply universally, not selectively.

We are having a communication failure here.

You wrote, see the emphasis, «[/]superior[/] first world» in apparent reply to member flohofwoe's «former Soviet scientists and engineers trying their luck with 3rd world despots». You wrote that «"third world", according to [some] Western definition, ... were those countries that were poor (and also perceived as primitive and culturally backwards, so the term eventually came to be seen as stigmatizing, at least with left-leaning people)».

When people mention 'third world', they are assumed to mean Sauvy's frame - there is no subsequent one overriding it, it is still the reference. "Third world" means what that short piece you read proposed. Billions of people trying to bend language, concepts and culture have the weight of a hefty nuisance, not that largely opposite one of Authority.

In Sauvy's frame, 'third world' has no connotation of «[infer]iority», «primitiv[ity]» «backward cultur[e]» or «stigmatiz[ation]». And «hunger and misery» are just facts relevant to the phenomenon, of course they are there, they are part of the point (they are grounds for the parallel with the "third state" near the French Revolution) - they are not appreciative nor depreciative, they are analytical.

If people said "third world" as a disparaging label, it is their own fault, and you cannot assume it in instances - you can suppose it frequentistically, but you cannot point to John and take for granted that his speech yesterday meant what the laymen at the bar would have meant.

« When people mention 'third world', they are assumed to mean Sauvy's frame »

Well, that's what you're assuming. I had never heard of Sauvy and was totally unaware of his definition that had lost all meaning by the time I grew up (and I guess the same holds true for most other participants). But okay, learnt something in the process.

What I took issue with in floh's comment in the beginning was not some improper definition of a term but the arrogance implicit in his tone (learnt or rather osmotically received arrogance, instilled by propaganda), an irritation possibly accumulated from a series of prior comments he'd made and which I'd read as part of my feed (because I appreciate his tech comments).

Now I respectfully suggest that we leave it at that.

> that's what you're [...] his definition that had lost

No, again the point is not clear.

When people mention a concept, they are assumed to know it. If the concept is "third world", that corresponds to the page of Sauvy you read. People may not know that concept properly, and create a superstition, and oftentimes will: that does not mean that the concept is replaced by the product of its ignorance. The proper concept in intellectual use remains untouched by its misuse; its misuse cannot have pretensions of preeminence. The terms do not «lose meaning»: they are simply misused by the ignorant and shallow - which intrinsically forcibly have no authority over it; what happens is that a twisted meaning will be spread, and that is just a natural phenomenon of the life of concepts. The people in the street are not the authorities. The meaning of 'spleen' is determined by a subset of doctors and a subset of poets, not by the a mass of near-laymen.

When people hear of "Schroedinger's cat", some, maybe many, will probably think "Mr. Schroe was very lonely; one day he found a cat and got to be a happy fella...": that does not replace the proper concept introduced by Schroedinger. People will do any disservice to it, and that you can suspect - but still there is no legitimacy in assuming that when /specific/ people talk about Schroedinger's cat, they mean "lonely people finding comfort" instead of the difficulty in determining etc.

« the point is not clear » – Yes it is. And it was, and had been before. I understand exactly what you're saying. I simply don't agree to such mechanistic, rigid “rules” for conversation.

See, the statements are clear, the message is not.

You speak about "rigid"?

When specific people, instances, say "gay", do you assume it is sexual? When they say "frown" do you assume it is not? I wrote "superstition", was it the concept of the "man in the street"? When men not in the street say "AI", do you understand "delirious neural networks"?

Those interpretations would be rigid. On the opposite terms are richer. And that richness is necessarily there in some of them specific people because we do not speak demotic. Not everyone is a layman.

Celebrating a "man sagt" is utterly absurd, and Heidegger wrote about it. I suggest you (re)read the pages in Sein und Zeit about Gerede, Neugier und Zweideutigkeit (§35, §36, §37).

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