Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

This begs the question, what was the bank doing emailing bulk sensitive data in an insecure fashion?

It seems like the bank needs better security policies and thinks that it is acceptable to go after innocent people rather than admit that they don't take data security seriously. I understand getting caught in a situation like this. It happens and while it might be a sign of bad policies, it might also just be unlucky. What matters is how one handles these situations - and the bank isn't handling it well. You have a data breech. Do you notify account holders affected, help them change their account numbers, take responsibility, and put in place policies that will prevent it from happening again? Or do you yell at Google and go after some innocent Gmail user trying to hide yourself from responsibility?

Heck, they even wanted their lawsuit to be confidential: http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArti...

At least the judge decided that their embarrassment wasn't cause to keep the lawsuit private.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

People use "this begs the question" to mean "this begs [you to ask] the question", and while it's not historically correct accurate, it's modern usage.

People 100 years ago would have thought that Americans using "mad" to mean "angry" instead of "crazy" was equally reckless.

Sure, but we already had the phrase "raises the question", and now we've lost a useful phrase to describe a logical fallacy.

It's not a useful phrase, because nobody knows what it means, and the words "begging the question" themselves don't make sense as a description of the fallacy.

So we've lost (past tense) a part of the vocabulary -- no one knows what it means anymore, but that's okay because it clearly wasn't useful for communicating the idea in question, since nobody knows what it means.

That almost sounds like a circular argument.

It could be that part of the reason why no one knows what it means anymore is that, at least in my case, the definition of the word 'beg' does not give any intuition about the meaning of the logical fallacy.

I have read the Wikipedia article and I understand what the fallacy is, but for the life of me I cannot stretch my imagination enough to accommodate how "begging the question" fits into it.

When I hear "begging the question" I immediately think of the abstract idea of someone actually begging a question for something. When I read about the logical fallacy, it sounds like it comes from "request for the beginning or premise". In my mind, the phrase should then be "begging for the question" which is still a stretch, but at least I can conceptualize it.

Therefore, it always takes me quite a few cycles to remember what "begging the question" really means because of the complete lack of intuitiveness. I also found this to be true for the term "dynamic programming".

If anyone could explain a better intuition for this phrase, I would greatly appreciate it.

If anyone could explain a better intuition for this phrase, I would greatly appreciate it.

Consider the example from wikipedia:

Person 1: He is mad right now.

Person 2: How do you know?

Person 1: Well, because he is really angry.

If you think of it in terms of the meaning of beg as evade, then Person 1 is begging the inquiry of Person 2. She is evading it by restating the premise.

I never noticed that definition of 'beg' before! Thanks for that explanation. My world is a little more coherent now.

http://www.visuwords.com/ is a fun way to find stuff like that.

Words have to make sense separately from what they mean? Maybe you're saying that the phrase doesn't mean the same thing as the literal meaning of the words? What about all the other phrases that mean something apart from the literal meaning of the words; would you have us stop using them, as well? :)

I know what it means and the words describe the fallacy very well. One simple way to describe the fallacy is an attempt to answer a question by trying to squeeze information from the question rather than providing the new information the question asks for. Thus, one begs the question for information.

It's not a useful phrase, because nobody knows what it means

The fact that language evolves is no excuse to just randomly mangle and distort it. English isn't even my native language and I bloody know what it means.

This is not only historically inaccurate but it is currently inaccurate. The fact that a lot of not very smart people use it does not mean we should add it to the language.

I am usually not a stickler for these things, but this is very important because the actually correct phrase "begging the question" has a very specific meaning which is very difficult to convey in other words. Thus, if we allow a bunch of idiots to hijack this phrase in their hopeless quest to sound intelligent, we will lose a very useful phrase for which there is no present substitute.

"Assuming what you are supposed to prove"?

Actually the meaning is not that specific. To someone who hasn't had the "official" meaning explained to them, the new one is much more natural.

If you're relying on this phrase to convey that idea then you're communicating badly, because many readers will misunderstand.

I agree with you. It is the bank which has done a mistake. Mail user or google has nothing to do with it.

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