flâneur

Language, Action, Impact

sheracaolity.ghost.io · 420 words · saved by 1 readers

One common pattern I have noticed among many of my peers (especially those who have received a certain amount of mathematical training) is that they spend a lot of time creating definitions for things and debating what the better definitions of those things are. I used to be this kind of person in the past, but at some point, I realized that creating and debating these definitions does not create value for me most of the time. Instead, when we have a definition for everything, we will notice that there are many self-contradictions in our actions in everyday life, and we might get frustrated about the fact that we can never completely remove such self-contradictions. I believe this kind of self-contradiction originates from the tendency to achieve formal language-level self-consistency in thinking with natural language. In my experience, most debates on natural language definitions center around human concepts such as success, love, justice, meaning, god, etc. However, I believe that mo

One common pattern I have noticed among many of my peers (especially those who have received a certain amount of mathematical training) is that they spend a lot of time creating definitions for things and debating what the better definitions of those things are. I used to be this kind of person in the past, but at some point, I realized that creating and debating these definitions does not create value for me most of the time. Instead, when we have a definition for everything, we will notice that there are many self-contradictions in our actions in everyday life, and we might get frustrated ab

related reading