What is sad is that these people from the start think of good grammar as an effort to "look professional" (which they can then discard), and not as an effort to be clear, an effort which fits into the basic respect one gives other people.
People are always impressed by how formal and informal tone and relative status is encoded in East Asian languages and how English doesn't have this and is supposedly egalitarian. Here's an example to show how it does exist also in English! Social relations are going to be expressed somehow. It's just how human culture works. The lower status person typically uses longer, more elaborate phrasing, while the higher status person blurts shorter ones. I wouldn't be surprised if equivalents exist in animals too.
That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
> Being able to easily interact with banks, without waiting in a line that’s too long for the dum-dum you get at the end to be a real consolation, made people use banks more.
Actually, in my city, not the ATMs, but the apps which made it possible to do almost everything on the phone significantly reduced the number of banks in the last few years. I have to go very rarely to the bank, but, when I have to do, I see that another close one has closed and I have to go somewhere even farther.
> Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon.
Well, the one and only thing which is constantly improving robots is human ingenuity, and if that is replaced by (yes, symbols-in, symbols-out) artificial superintelligence, I expect that improving to improve quite fast.
> The quintic was almost proven to have no general solutions by radicals by Paolo Ruffini in 1799, whose key insight was to use permutation groups, not just a single permutation.
Thing is, I am usually the kind of person who defends the idea of a lone genius. But I also believe there is a continuous spectrum, no gaps, from the village idiot to Einstein and beyond.
Let me introduce, just for fun, not for the sake of any argument, another idea from math which I think it came really out of the blue, to the degree that it's still considered an open problem to write an exposition about it, since you cannot smoothly link it to anything else: forcing.
And basically, about consciousness, what they said is true if our brain state fundamentally depends on quantum effects (which I personally don't believe, as I don't think evolution is sophisticated enough to make a quantum computer)
The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Earth is not an isolated system, it is an open one (radiating into space), and local decreases in entropy are not only allowed but expected in open systems with energy flow.
Life is no different to inorganic processes such as crystal formation (including snowflakes) or hurricanes in this regard: Organisms decrease internal entropy by exporting more entropy (heat, waste) to their surroundings. The total entropy of Earth + Sun + space still increases.
The entropy of thermal radiation was worked out by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1884. In fairness to you, I suspect most people wildly underestimate the entropy of thermal radiation into space. I mean, why would anyone, room-temperature thermal radiation isn't visible to the human eye, and we lack a sense of scale for how low-energy a single photon is.
Nevertheless, the claim that it "hasn’t been explained" is, at this point, like saying "nobody knows how magnets work".
1. Why exactly life is attempting to build complex structures?
2. Why exactly life is evolving from primitive replicative molecules to more complex structures (which molecules on themselves are very complicated?)
3. Why and how did these extremely complicated replicative molecules form at all, from much more simple structures, to begin with?
These are natural outcomes of evolution, you see the same things pop up very easily with simulated evolution* of even non-organic structures.
* that is, make a design (by any method including literally randomly), replicate it imperfectly m times, sort by "best" according to some fitness function (which for us is something we like, for nature it's just survival to reproductive age), pick best n, mix and match, repeat
The relevant molecules are made of very simple pieces that like to stick to each other and the way they stick influences their neighbors. It's very feasible to stumble into a pattern that spreads, and from there all you need is time and luck for those patterns to mutate into better spreaders, often getting more complicated as they do so in competition with other patterns.
You said it yourself: he was primarily a professor, not an artist. His position being a "luxury" is another argument. Anyway, He taught languages to brilliant students and created a highly respected translation of Beowulf. LoTR, Silmarillion, Hobbit, and all of it, were his hobby, a secondary but burning passion.
I'm sure many on this forum have secondary passions, be it music, visual art, writing, or anything else. Yet most of us realized we need to make money, and that those pursuits can be done at a fairly high level in our leisure time.
WordPress as a CMS is fine, but 90% of websites (e.g. the bit that lands in your browser) don't need the complexity of runtime generation and pointlessly run an application with a huge attack surface that's relatively easy to compromise. If sites used WordPress as a backend tool with a static site generator to bake the content there'd be far fewer compromised websites.
WordPress's popularity is mostly adding a huge amount of complexity, runtime cost, and security risk for every visitor for the only benefit of a content manager being able to add a page more easily or to configure a form without needing a developer. That is optimizing the least important part of the system.
> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.
This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.
My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.
It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.
I want to give a huge shout out to the UK magazine PC Format for the most absolute banger 90s magazine CD that I ever encountered.
It didn't just have Demos of new games, if you poked around you'd find that it had "this cool program called Scream Tracker 3" and a whole bunch of these ".MOD files" that played music that sounded like a CD![0]
[0] - Well, it was the 90s, and typical bundled multimedia speakers were so bad you couldn't tell the difference...
At their best they had an exceptional amount of demoscene / game development content overall, as well as several full (usually "previous") versions of various creative software like 3D modeling or photo editing apps.
Later on with the Internet biting into the cover disk magazines, they started to steadily fall towards the lowest common denominator and shift to the gamer lad segment. But I wouldn't have had as much fun with computers if it wasn't for a subscription back in the day. Thanks for the reminder.
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