I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state.
This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.
When you talk like that, I feel as though I am talking to the emacs psychotherapist. It too is a mere instrument that reports on its internal state.
If you have found it a useful communicative tool, then I am glad for you. No doubt communication can be hard, so we've gotta use whatever tools we find effective. But honestly when I try speaking like that, I can't help but feel like a robot or a program. It feels very unnatural and very awkward to me. Perhaps that distance is exactly what lends it efficacy for some people, but that very distance only lends it offputticacy for me.
Am I right and you wrong? No, I don't think so. I have no reason to doubt that you have found success with such an approach. But were I a barkeep and you a patron responding like that when asked "why the long face?", you'd be getting a double of tequila on the house. (Tequila has a funny way of bringing out one's inner party, in my experience—or getting one started where there's yet only a quiet inner evening get-together).
Communication like that can be very helpful when dealing with personal conflict -- marriage, friendships, etc., but I can't see how that would help in the public sphere.
If a political opponent, writer, or public speaker were to say or write something like that, it would be irritating and off-putting. I'd think "OK, but what's your point?"
To clarify, if a Senator stood up on the floor and began: “Mr President, when my honorable colleague argues in favor of [some policy], I feel shamed, belittled, and angry.”
... That would be inappropriate, unhelpful, and unproductive. It would be better to engage with the opponent’s argument with another argument than to resort to talking about personal feelings in that context.
If it were limited to "when you do blah, I feel blah" verbiage, it would feel like that. But it's more generally about taking accountability for one's own side, while listening to the other side, without needless escalation. I can't really see a flaw with that approach, other than it taking more work.
I wonder how many arguments would be defused if both sides could phrase the other side's point of view in a way they would agree was accurately stated.
Really? I do a similar thing when dealing with idiots (not idiots, fully formed human beings, with a legitimate point of view, probably not evil, probably quite normal in person) on the internet.
Computer languages are synthetic, like the human languages of Esperanto and Loglan.
The distinction is how they're formed and developed. Someone didn't sit down 1500 or so years ago and say, "I'm going to make English." It just grew. Specifically Old English grew from a combination of languages used by Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in particular). It also borrowed a fair amount of Latin, Old Norse, and perhaps some Celtic. Followed by the development of Middle English with the Norman conquest which brought in French and Latin influence. And then later developed into what we call English today via more borrowing or coinage of words and, later, standardizing spellings and some pronunciatoins.
It's perhaps a little fuzzy if your language has an academy that tries to preserve its essence and creates official dictionaries and bars certain types of word creation. But for most "natural" languages, what makes them natural is the organic growth and evolution that occurs over time. Compared to the artificial selection of elements that happens with synthetic languages.
Call me crazy, but the synthetic vs. natural distinction is still blurry to me. All language is the natural evolution of thought.
> But for most "natural" languages, what makes them natural is the organic growth and evolution that occurs over time.
On this, we agree. This is the exact phenomena that I observe of computer languages.
As a small example, take the "if" statement as used in JavaScript. It wasn't invented by that language, it was borrowed from other languages like Java. But the word "if" came from English. Of course, English speakers didn't invent the concept either. As you describe, English evolved from other languages.
Computer languages are more modern, so we know more of their history. We know who drafted the first iteration of JavaScript, and we've closely tracked its evolution since then. We don't know who came up with the concept of "if", but I doubt that it was given to us humans by some divine god of language.. I think one of our ancestors invented it.
IMO there's very little on the internet that's significantly more toxic than Hollywood movies and pop music. Porn, I guess.
If you do find it: congrats, you must be pretty inventive.
On the extremist content: those people are not well versed. If you reaaaally want to you can let it brainwash you, but at that point a book could do the job as well.
And: internet extremists don't have significant attention spans and can barely act in the world. If they learned how to read, well... they'd soon know better.
Kinda sounds like LSD, or entheogens in general. It's not yet common (AFAIK) but they can be used in conjunction with sources of information, like logging into an administrators account.
"Has anyone tried sending information into black holes using lasers yet?"
We would need one at a pretty uncomfortably close distance to perform this experiment in acceptable time and without needing insanely large amounts of energy.
Makes me wonder how close the next known black hole is. The center of the milky way?
Is there evidence for or against the interior of black holes being similar to distinct separate universes? Is that a popular idea at all, in physicists' circles?
How much (and _what_) would I need to read and understand to get a feeling of the nature of black holes?
I'm a total layman when it comes to physics and it would put some distant worries of me to rest.
I'd rather measure a lot of Hawking radiation while throwing bottles in flasks into a black hole. However, I'm currently preoccupied with figuring out why my mouth keeps talking when I'm not thinking of anything.
PBS Spacetime is a great series, and delves deep enough for interested layman as well as practitioners to be interested. I find the videos really good. Here is a link to one of many on black holes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaEBbFbvcY
