Nerds read the rulebook and either play by the rules or arbitrage the difference between what the written rules are and what people do. Normies look around to figure out what the de facto rules are. Quokka/not-quokka difference: assuming legitimacy of law vs not.
Conversation
this is closely related to a thing i'm still chewing on about a common characteristic around both here and with the rats that is something like "taking words seriously" (the rats used to say "taking ideas seriously" which is similar but "words" is importantly different)
1
12
manifests in a bunch of different ways, like being horrified that other people don't seem to mean what they say or say what they mean, having experiences of naively trusting people who say words that sound sufficiently good
1
11
Yea, I’ve big-thought whether the Augustinian view of language (words pick out objects) and the Wittgenstein view (language games) are both correct, just not normatively, but descriptively: they pick out two stances towards languaging
1
8
Replying to
when i used to TA calculus and linear algebra i felt like i could tell that most of the students were treating writing down math as a language game and getting confused about the rules - very few seemed to have a real understanding of the *semantics* of the syntax
like understanding that mathematical symbols *refer to things* and it’s possible to think directly about these things without the symbols seems to itself be this big developmental transition that even most college students never quite make
2
1
8
someone told me once that they got through a whole undergrad degree in math without ever understanding that the point of the rules of mathematics was that they turned true statements into other true statements; they just treated them as this arbitrary contingent social thing
1
9
Show replies