Just figured out a test for figuring out someone’s religion. Look fo the dead words (words used strictly with unexamined negative or positive valence) at the highest active level of abstraction.
Silly example: I’m talking vegetables and how I like or dislike various dishes based on various vegetables. But one vegetable only has mentions in the context of dishes I dislike. That’s a dead vegetable. My “vegetable religion” is hatred of that dead vegetable.
Why: The highest level of abstraction is where we tend to be least sure of ourselves and resort to reasoning from values rather than facts.
Most words will end up being used in both positive and negative ways if you collect enough samples. They are live words.
this crystalizes a category of abstract nouns that get abused in science - “social capital,” “trust,” “prosociality” seem specific but are hard to distinguish from vague “good/bad” in practice
Yeah, so you have “church is social capital, keeps communities together and fights drug gangs” then the next priest child abuse scandal breaks and they’re like “well obviously _that’s_ not social capital”
It’s post hoc No True Scotsman games with conveniently rescopable nouns
Yes it does, though my memory of it is hazy since I read it around 2005 or so. A bunch of statistical trends dubiously linked to “good stuff”
I remember being kinda bored but impressed by the schlepping. Kinda like Richard Florida on urbanism.