Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> It's probably a silly, self-damaging idea to use such a word anyway. It
> smacks of cultism. It's peculiar. Do we have claques of mathematicians
> wandering about declaring themselves `logarithmarians'? Do geologists name
> each other `granitists' (admittedly, some of them are schists)? Is Stephen
> Jay Gould a `punctuated equilibrian'?
The entire paragraph defeats its own point. People who work with math call
themselves mathematicians; people who work with geology call themselves
geologists; people who work with machines call themselves mechanics; people
who work in libraries call themselves librarians; people who work with wood
call themselves carpenters; and you yourself are a novelist.
The fact that you yourself needed a single word to call these groups by, just
to put your sentences together, does not exactly help your point...
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:36:59 MDT