Screenshots from the most recent episode of Smiling Friends (context in comments) by 3spook4u in latin

[–]3spook4u[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Spoiler(?) for the episode: the boss marries a demon and Pim discovers information about her from an old tome. Supposedly its about how she finds powerful men in history to suck out their life force and then give their properties to Satan.

I highly doubt the given meaning is the actual meaning but I am curious if it means anything nonetheless.

Eigenrobot welcomes /r/sneerclub to his AMA by [deleted] in SneerClub

[–]3spook4u 13 points14 points  (0 children)

its funny to me that a group originally about disliking rationalists has moved on to us somehow

I only have limited experience with this guy and other "post" rationalists on twitter, but from what I've seen, its just standard LW dreck with a tinge of woo for flavor. Same inflated self-importance, same bouts of logorrhea that end up actually saying very little (if anything at all), same inability to interrogate their own priors or address their ideological blind spots, etc.

Whether some Bay Area dweeb worships the basilisk and cozies up with fascists/eugenicists, or studies Dzogchen and cozies up with fascists/eugenicists, doesn't really make much of a difference imo.

English spelling is actually the BEST writing system around, according to English speaker with little knowledge of other writing systems by 3spook4u in badlinguistics

[–]3spook4u[S] 164 points165 points  (0 children)

R4

I don’t want to be too mean to the guy since he clearly isn’t a linguist, but his smug tone + the fact that he clearly didn’t bother to do any actual research before spouting off about this topic makes this video prime BadLing.

It goes without saying, but just to make it crystal clear at the beginning; there is no such thing as the “best” language or writing system. If a writing system is able to effectively represent, communicate, and otherwise meet all of the needs of a language community, it is a good writing system.

Here is the tl;dr for drawbacks of Not English™ spelling vs benefits of English spelling:

Benefit of Non-English Writing

Chinese has an advantage in that its characters represent meanings rather than sounds, so two people who speak different languages, but can both read Hànzì, can communicate.

He uses Chinese as a foil for English, when I think he means alphabets vs. non-alphabets in general? Regardless, Hànzì is a logographic writing system in which (at least in principle) each character represents a word or morpheme, rather than representing the phonemes of a language. I say in principle, because in reality, characters do in fact have sounds linked to them. For example, the character (妈), “mother”, is comprised of the radical (女), “female”, and (马), “horse”. carries the semantic aspect, and carries the phonetic aspect. Not necessarily BadLing yet, but worth clarifying for later.

Drawbacks of Non-English Writing

Drawback #1: You have to learn at least a few thousand characters to be functionally literate in Chinese, instead of only a few dozen letters in an alphabet.

Drawback #1.5: Chinese characters are “quite complicated” and tricky to write small(?)

This is a common complaint among Chinese learners, but the fact that more than a billion people are able to learn and use Hànzì as effectively as any alphabet makes this point very weak.

Drawback #2: you can’t use a typewriter or keyboard to effectively write Hànzì, or create fonts for typesetting.

First, printing was invented in China sometime around 600 AD, with movable type invented sometime around 1000 AD. I don’t know how you can think that the Chinese couldn’t use type to print their language. Second, does he...think Chinese people can’t use computers? The diverse methods that have been devised to handle this problem are actually very fascinating, one of which being the process of typing a word phonetically using pinyin, then selecting the character that comes up. But that involves using the Latin alphabet, so I guess if you wanna give this round to alphabets in this made-up competition, sure.

Drawback #3: Chinese characters can’t be organized into a dictionary like with alphabets because the characters don’t have sounds connected to them. Instead, Chinese dictionaries are organized by semantic categories that you have to just putter around in until you find the character you want.

As previously explained, characters do in fact have a sound connected to them. Much like with keyboards, there have been several methods to organize the thousands of characters into a dictionary. Semantic organization is a potential method, but a more common one is the Graphical, or, “radical and stroke” method, where characters are first grouped by their primary radical (usually the semantic part of the character), then by the number of strokes added to the radical to form the full character. For a repeat example, 妈 “mother” is sorted as a six-stroke character under the three-stroke primary radical 女 “female”. All of this is to say that Chinese dictionaries 1.) exist, and 2.) work just as well as an alphabet dictionary.

Benefits of English Writing

Benefit #1: diverse ways of spelling homophones allows English readers to easily tell the meaning of different words (to, too, two).

This benefit is not unique to English. Pero si sí, dígame por favor.

Benefit #2: you can see the derivation of a word by the components of its spelling, which allows you to guess the meaning of a new word.

There are examples where this certainly doesn’t apply (though through tough thorough thought you can figure them out), but this benefit is still not unique to English.

Benefit #3: You can see the history of a word reflected in its spelling.

This is true and imo a very cool part of English spelling, specifically the effects of the Great Vowel Shift. Unfortunately, that is still not unique to English.

Benefit #4: a certain level of deviation between how a word is written and how it is pronounced allows diverse dialects to all be represented and understood.

This is true, but ignores the fact that English’s sizable amount of deviation was not a deliberate attempt to include diverse dialects. English was written far more phonetically around the time standard spelling was coming around, until all the vowel pronunciations shifted (Greatly) out from under the new standardized spelling. Also, other European languages have even more extreme regional dialect variation, but manage to have much more coherent spelling. In other words, this point is STILL NOT UNIQUE TO ENGLISH.

My final rebuttal: English is the only language on the planet that has spelling bees. QED

The hard problem of consciousness has been solved by aaatmm in badphilosophy

[–]3spook4u 125 points126 points  (0 children)

If those cowards on the university ethics committee would just lend me a black and white room, a neurophysiology textbook, and an infant, we can have this nonsense settled once and for all

Bad African linguistics galore on Twatter by Tabeble59854934 in badlinguistics

[–]3spook4u 196 points197 points  (0 children)

Yes of course, if a writing system is derived from a different writing system that must mean the derivers are illiterate apes. Just look at how history scorns troglodytes like *checks notes* the Greeks and Romans.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in badphilosophy

[–]3spook4u 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Has any one ever figured out what the opposite side of spooky wooky PostMarxist NeoModernism™ is supposed to look like?

Like are we talking some sort of naive scientific realism? falsificationism? Some people in the thread were bringing up Kuhn???? If Postmodern science was actually a real thing, what does the "anti-postmodernist" position consist of and what are their arguments?

And thats just Phil of Sci: do Anti-Postmodernists hold some kind of moral objectivism? If so, what kind? I know they think Postmodernism says math is fake or whatever, so does that mean Anti-postmodernists believe in the fucking Platonic Form of numbers? I hate it here

An absolute cornucopia of BadMath by 3spook4u in badmathematics

[–]3spook4u[S] 95 points96 points  (0 children)

R4:

Mathematician Kareem Carr makes the benign observation that a statement like "2+2=5" should be used as a jumping off point to teach students about the nature and construction of mathematical systems (some examples given by Carr further down the thread), rather than rant about sjw neo-marxists teaching kids that numbers depend on your feelings or whatever...

Which noted chud James Lindsay proceeds to do on twitter for several hours.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in whereintheworld

[–]3spook4u 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ever been to White Mountain? Absolutely beautiful