Glad you agree that technical jargon can be used, and must be used, at the top of the bell curve. Be it always or sometimes.

Thanks, I gaslit myself into thinking I misunderstood what “technical science job” meant.

And I am talking about the fact that believing that nothing is complicated and that complexity is always made up can be a dangerous, anti-intellectual and anti-academic argument.

Of course, if you’re talking with people who don’t need to actually do the job and only understand enough of it, and you still speak like to a specialist, you’re not only in the middle, but also potentially (but not necessarily) kind of a dick.

But reading this and your example, and the fact we seem to be miscommunicating somewhat, I do wonder this: English is not my first language, what do you include in “technical science job”? Is it a specific job or group of jobs? I took it to mean any job with tech or science workers.

EDIT: further explanation of what went through in my head, which may clarify interpretation and intent. Having the management lingo example made me interpret that curve as a: all this jargon is just bullshit and you could do better without it. Definitely true imo with management lingo.

But what I was trying to say, maybe poorly, is that some technical jargon, in some areas, is meaningful. Explaining in layman’s term is dumbing down. Nothing wrong with that when it fits the purpose, but you still sacrifice something in the process.

“amongst the people who understand the jargon and notations, jargon and notations are layman’s term”

Sure, I guess that’s true if you limit your sample, this is not what I took the meme to mean but ok.

Anyone who took undergrad maths/science is not layman’s term.

I also disagree with this for the record but that’s besides the point.

My point being that for some stuff, you just can’t describe things as bags within bags, irrelevant of where you are on the scale, at least not without being quite intellectually dishonest and oversimplifying.

I am not saying I am on top of the scale, I am saying I’ve met and worked with people on top of the scale (and couldn’t keep up), and they don’t explain things with bags within bags.

EDIT: for clarity, there are things that are too complicated for everyone right now. One day we may understand them well enough that someone can explain it in layman’s term without loss of precision, but to get to that point, we must accept that we need to work with complex notations and lingo. Example: in the past, only Newton and Leibniz and a handful of others understood calculus. Now it’s taught in high school. Newton and Leibniz were not in the middle of the bell curve, nor did they overcomplicate their theory to make it sound fancy.

I am often torn a bit on this one, depending on the cases.

Don’t get me wrong, management lingo is undeniably bullshit, trying to hide how simple what you’re saying actually is, and giving yourself stature and legitimacy.

But I would argue that there are fields were the emergence of complex concepts (and lingo, and notations to define them) is a necessary evil. For sure even there, there are people who abuse it to big themselves up, but I also think a lot of the time, either the thing you’re speaking of is genuinely complicated, or it’s just not well understood enough. Sometimes I really wish I could say things in a simpler way, both in concepts and expression, but I can’t find a way to make it so. Not by malice, not to appear to know more, but genuinely because I don’t understand it enough yet either and that’s the best I’ve got.

Having experienced it first-hand, I am more forgiving to this (depending on the attitude of the person spouting the jargon) and don’t automatically assume all technical-sounding terms are automatically bullshit. They often are, but not always.

But management lingo is. 100%.

Microsoft still riding the high of replacing the Super key with the Windows key back in windows 95, and trying to replicate it.

There was an “Office” key instead of ctrl right only a few years ago, which was a total fumble. Here’s hoping the same fate awaits the copilot key, that’ll make for fun stories in tech museums in a few years.

“To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.”

Lucky for Beethoven, he was deaf.

Is that a new kink or have you been turning cornflakes into frosties for a while now? Any other party tricks we should be aware of?

My childhood illusions.

I haven’t read them but I’ll take your word for it. I should have made that explicit though you’re right.

If your only exposure to philosophy is from Conan the Barbarian then yeah. That, and glistening muscles and a biiiiig sword.

Failing basic human empathy, and a modicum of ethics, do people like this genuinely never open history books? That would certainly appeal to their selfish interests.

If he’s ever in charge, he better pray the tide never turns, lest he would like to lead by example.

Found’em

The cultural fit in particular I like to use. This is often thrown around as a catch-all term by companies when they don’t want to hire you for a bunch of bullshit reasons they don’t want to disclose to you. It’s only fair you weaponise too.

Had to use it recently to reject an offer and to avoid saying: “the person who would be my manager seemed like a gigantic dickhead and I barely made it the hour without slamming my monitor against the wall”. Although part of me wish I had said that.

That I need to get my shit off my balcony and figure out who’s the asshole taking pictures of my apartment without my consent.

I think that it is important to distinguish having the freedom to do anything from the attempt to do everything.

My point being that immortality forces that choice for you. You either start chasing meaning like a hamster in a wheel, or you accept everything losing meaning of things over time and sticking with them. Eternity does not mean “a really really long time”. Eternity means eternity.

Also, it was initially more of an answer to you saying that trying to be one thing was misguided, which I can agree with. As in, in a finite existence, you could be many things, but not because your chase of new meaning becomes random noise.

It reminds me a bit of Groundhog Day: what made Bill Murray happy in the end was finding meaning and contentment in his repeating life, rather than fighting against it.

That’s… Certainly one way to read the film. In groundhog day, what made Bill Murray’s character at peace with his curse was resignation, not meaning. Only then was he able to find the answers he needed to find to give meaning to his life before the curse, at which point he was rewarded for it in the form of lifting the curse and escaping the day.

If after laying it all bare and genuinely connecting with his love interest, the day had repeated itself, would that previous day still had meaning? Would this have been a happy ending?

And also, again, this was a finite slice of it. How long would the peace have lasted? And even if it was indeed meaning, again, for how long?

Groundhog day makes the argument for needing the world to stop around you, to provide you with the time to connect with it, make peace with the fact some things are out of your control, and do the introspection needed to give meaning to your life. Once that is realised, life moves on.

Groundhog day does not make the argument that having all of eternity is great because you get to learn to play the piano.

It’s funny that you quote Groundhog Day because, if you live eternally, I expect it will indeed eventually start to feel like that, that the days are the same, even though they objectively are not. And with eternity, no Andie McDowell at the end of the tunnel…

Finally, you didn’t say anything about the way choices have weight. I don’t expect to convince you, but your original premise being that you don’t get where I am coming from, I hope this at least addresses that.

Fair enough, but either way we arrive at the same conclusion that being immortal does not make choices less weighty.

If you define the weigh of each choice as being the subjective length of time of it’s effect solely, then I would agree. But that is only one way to look at it. The other one, from my initial comment, was that each choice is more “precious” (willfully using a different term here for clarity rather than anything deep) if you only can make finitely many. In that sense, the weight of a single choice is that you know it will rob you of the opportunity of the other ones that you could have made. If you are immortal, you can just also make them later.

Hmm, I think our disagreement here depends what exactly would happen to the human mind over arbitrarily large time scales, because I don’t think that constantly changing is the same thing as inevitably converging towards being nothing at all in particular as you do.

Ok, my “entropy machine” statement was very vague and only moderately clearer in my head. For the sake of the argument, could we assume there is no physical issue with our brains over long periods of time? Say it feels like a healthy 20-30 year old mind forever.

My entropy thing had more to do with what one would do or chose to do. I was thinking about it vaguely in terms of “if someone or something can do everything, it communicates no information about that thing”.

What would be the point of trying to do everything apart from filing the time that you have? Maybe things would have meaning for N years with N very large? Doesn’t matter how large, it’s still nothing. And then you need to keep at it even though it’s lost meaning to you, or try something else, again, with the knowledge this is an inescapable cycle.

This also would have the advantage that it would let us re-experience things as if it were for the first time, so that life never completely loses its novelty.

So that’s starting to be interesting. If we add the forgetting, then you have sort of this sliding window of memories, yeah you address part of my above points. I was going to say that it could lead to being just trapped in sort of a periodic pattern largely, and that that would be meaningless, but I realised that would have been dishonest. First of all because of the unproven assumption, but more importantly because we have been talking about subjective meaning so far rather than objective meaning. So even if true, that would not necessarily render the experience meaningless subjectively.

All I can say is that, if I were given the choice in how to be made eternal, that would have to be part of the deal to soften the blow. Also this is not what I took it to mean so not what I had in mind when commenting. There’s room for arguing about objectives meaning but I feel like even agreeing on whether that’s a thing is a whole other conversation.

(Honestly, you could argue that this is essentially what reincarnation would do anyway,

Damn, I’m going to really sound like a contrarian I am sorry. I disagree with this. There is a fundamental difference to me between reincarnation, which involves death (or indeed, the erasure of the knowledge of your past life) and a discrete jump to another one and a sliding window of perceived memory but with continuous consciousness. I wouldn’t call reincarnation “immortality” in the context of this argument because we have been talking about subjective experience, and subjectively, even assuming reincarnation, you only ever experience one incarnation with no knowledge of prior ones.

Hmm, I reread your comment to try and figure out what you are trying to get at with this but could not figure it out. Could you explain?

Yes but it was more of an additional remark. I was just arguing death made for a meaningful experience. But it’s not the only meaningful experience one can have, so it does not reinforce my initial point.

each choice would last forever, giving it more weight rather than less.

From my finite point of view, each of my choice lasts for my whole life, there is no subjective difference.

Perhaps, but plenty of people get so absorbed in their lives that they don’t do this anyway, even with only finite time available to them.

True, my initial comment should read “can be meaningful” rather than “is meaningful”.

Our identity already changes significantly over time; for example, I am a very different person in many ways than I was a decade ago. Thus, change is an inevitable feature of existence that we already need to embrace even for a finite lifetime.

Put another way, if one is seeking meaning through a lifelong stable identity, then one is looking in the wrong place because there is no such thing.

There is a whole spectrum between “misguidedly trying to be one and only one thing” and being an entropy machine.

This is circular reasoning. If it were possible to be immortal–which is the hypothetical being considered–ageing and dying would no longer be a necessary part of the human experience, so there would need to be a better reason to choose them than “ageing and dying are part of the human experience”.

You mean like the sentences after that?