In other words, rephrase the damn thing!

Because if you think about it for, say, 15 seconds, you'll probably come up with a better way to say it!

Trying it another way couldn't hurt, could it?

Another way to try it.... Could it hurt? Not!

[...Or could it???]

Why must you goad us with your grammatical gravitas? Why why why why why why why why?

But now there is nothing left to say!

Except this: EIGHT TIMES!!!!! YAY!!!!

(No! You owe us one more!)

Oh wait. You did it. Now I feel like I stepped in on a private conversation. Sorry.

Say it like you mean it, boy
Or shut your mouth until you can
Ten times, ten times fast

my motto is eight times ever say what you can


once

My motto is never once say what times you 8.

now we're being timed?
this place has changed

Please indulge me an anecdote, it's relevant. Being a fan of Douglas Hofstadter, when I was dating/living with a very smart woman who is an astronomer, I tried to get her to read him. She came back a few days later and said that she found him unreadable and patronising. Why did he have to repeat the same thing 10 times in a row?

Now, my way of thinking about stuff is much more like Hofstadter's than it was like that girlfriend of mine. I have a very strong mental image of how I try to understand stuff, and it is of me coming upon some large object and circling it round and round and in different light and different perspective. I only believe that I understand something when I've gotten what feels to me like a comprehensive enough variety of views of it while at the same time finding connections between descriptions—not that everying is transformable to everying else, but more that there are visible roads by which one walks from one view of a thing to another.

There well may be diminishing returns in my method. She and I differed a great deal intellectually, but I learned to really appreciate the kind of mind that is very, very bright, but in some sense complementary of my own. I think she understands all sorts of things better than I do. But of course I would say that, given my way of understanding the world and my motto that "everything has more and less levels of description that are appropriate for a given purpose". And I think that in a real way, her intent motivating her understanding differs quite a bit from mine. I think that hers is more useful to her purpose than mine. I don't think it's better or worse...it's just more or less useful for a given purpose.

One of the reasons that I'm so long-winded is because I think the way I do. I simply don't trust an isolated articulation of something. It seems to me that it needs to be said in several different ways—not only because each way is likely "true" in the relative sense I describe above, but also because communication with other people is quite imperfect and it simply works to throw something out presented five different ways.

Kmellis: exactly.

It's because the map is not the territory. The symbol is always an approximation and an abstract.

And language is a virus.

No one single description, phrase, idiom, abstract or concept perfectly captures the essence of the thing itself.

Mathematics, however, is different. The symbology and meaning is containerized within the abstraction itself - formal systems, number theory, and so forth. Mathematics doesn't need to map to the real world, as it is a declared world of its own.

But you still need language and non-formal systems to describe and define the formal systems themselves, so that it can be mapped back into the real world.

So, doing it n times in the fuzzy ambiguity of language provides increasing levels of accuracy. A sort of neuro-linguistic interferometry. The more samples, the higher the sample rate, and the finer the detail.

Here's a weird thing going on where I work at the moment that ties in with this repetition thing.

Two of my collegues are our networking experts. They're both basically nice guys but they have a problem: one of them has a bad case of "male answer syndrome" and can talk authoratively even when he hasn't a clue and the other is rather easily led. Let's call them MAS guy and EL guy.

The dynamic is interesting because MAS guy will repeat again and again things that are fundamentally wrong (such as confusing switches for routers - wtf?) and EL guy starts repeating this stuff back. I think MAS guy is looking for reassurance he's correct and when EL guy parrots back he thinks he's correct. EL guy thinks MAS is correct because he sounds authoritative and the repetition draws him in.

They're trapped in this cycle of self perpetuating, self enforcing nonsense. It's weird.

So far I've not felt inclined to correct them because, well, it's complicated but it's more to do with office politics than anything else.

dodgy: plus, it's free entertainment!

especially if you have robot dogs that will spray urine on common

command, not common

sheesh
it is an underdeveloped market, though

Ah, so Gertrude Stein's literary attempt at cubism wasn't enough eh?