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Comment by happimess | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, would you elaborate on your reasons to avoid "to be" verbs?

There is no science I can point to but I feel using language that way makes it as if the skill has become part of your identity. Makes it hard to detach. So that I insult Ruby or Apple and now I am insulting you. Google is dying means a big part of your self is becoming obsolete. I am a "pythonista/rubyist/haskeller" encourages tribal thinking. Them vs Us. I find this also explains much about flamewars. I don't like.

To avoid that I prefer to say I know Z. I use X instead of I am a X user. I am most skilled in Y not a Y'er. I really like A. It is still hard to see A die but I don't need to defend every affront as if I was the one insulted. I allow only a few things to help define part of my identity. Doing this actively, also triggers to conscious how much I don't want to slip into tribalism or stagnation.

And by being ok with confusion it means I don't fear new things, by being confused it means I'm learning, by being curious I'll actively seek to put my self beyond my ability.

>I am a "pythonista/rubyist/haskeller" encourages tribal thinking. Them vs Us. I find this also explains much about flamewars.

PG talks about exactly this point in Keep Your Identity Small [1].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Psychologically, this is called ego identification.

It's also the reason you shouldn't talk about religion or politics at work or with the in-laws. For exactly the reason you mentioned: attacking Ruby will feel to the Rubyist like a personal attack.

There's a form of English called E-Prime [1] that does this, the idea (I believe) is to clarify what you mean and be clear about how your ideas of things came about. It stops lazy assertions and gives you perspective.

For example, you can't say: Lua is better than Python[2]

Instead you say: I prefer Lua to Python

Or perhaps you say: More projects that I rate highly use Lua over Python.

Or maybe: Lua scores more highly on common performance benchmarks than Python

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

[2] Just an example; I'm not actually saying Lua is better than Python

Has anyone ever defined E-prime in E-prime? The wikipedia page doesn't offer one but I'd imagine it would have to be a series of prolog-like assertions about E-prime. You obviously can't just say "E-prime is ..."

E-prime begins with English and then removes the being verbs.

E-prime removes all conjugations of "to be" from English. <-- Not sure if quoting "to be" as a noun counts. :)

Shuzan held out his short staff and said, "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"

How does calling it a name oppose its reality? It still has a reality even if you concurrently give it a name.

Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" explains this well in chapter 9 (Mumon and Gödel). I believe the argument goes that by calling it a specific thing you "oppose the reality" of all the other things it also is - no single name will ever suffice. Closed world assumption and all that.

I hate to stray so far from the main thread, but anyone who finds E-Prime interesting might enjoy reading about Evidentiality[1]. Some languages allow encoding the nature of evidence in verb forms, with the most cited example (Pomo) having forms to distinguish direct evidence (visual and nonvisual), circumstantial evidence, and hearsay. Somewhat esoteric but pretty cool. Make the observations and give the facts to the listener and let them reach a conclusion - contrast with American English where it is incredibly common to qualify the confidence we have in our own judgement ("It must.." "I suppose.." "I think.." "It probably", and of course all forms of "to be") rather than qualifying the confidence of your knowledge in an objective way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality

Greek and Latin can do this in "indirect speech" ("He said that ..."). Depending on the verb forms, the actual speaker can indicate either that he agrees himself, or that it is just an assertion of the other person. So maybe not so esoteric!

Maybe its an avoidance of identity with these things? Typically people regard things that they claim are part of their identity as more fixed than other things.

Alternatively, he could be following the advice of Korzybski, in Science and Sanity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

It's the first and part of the second. I've never heard of Korzybski but I arrived at a similar idea that makes physics easier to grasp. I prefer to say gravity is well modeled as curvature of a manifold instead of saying gravity is a bending of spacetime. I also prefer to say someone is acting foolish than to say they are foolish. Never realized they could be connected as part of the same general philosophy. Thanks.

It's very easy to slip but I've gotten better in time.

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