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I think this is a bit like coming up with words to expand on the concept of poop. Poop is a necessary and useful word. It describes something you get on your shoe. Or something you may have to suddenly rush out to do. However if I became so intensely immersed in the world of poop that I needed to invent new words to describe the subtleties of it - you might not admire my efforts or where I choose to place my attention. We have words like oppression that seem to be understood and to work well. Are we truly doing anything useful by breaking down the idea of oppression into ever more granular descriptions of it? I say - poop works fine.


So you don't see the value in differentiating between (valuable) manure, (human) wastewater (which can be tested for public health), stool samples, the concept of bullshit, scatting, guano, pet feces, diarrhea, etc? You think those should be all the same word?

What a narrow worldview.


It was a silly example - though not intended as serious. I agree - the distinctions you describe are useful. So what about the utility of increasingly granular description of oppression? Can you point me to the utility of these?

The people creating new generative AI models are inventing new words. I think their topic of research and the new words they are creating have high utility.

The authors of this paper on the other hand appear to me to not be applying discipline and rigour to solving hard problems. They are however trying to associate the words they have created in a discipline with little objective utility - with the words of a discipline that has high utility.

This strikes me as annoying and absurd. Why try to make the crossover unless you are trying to catch some shine off of a discipline that is getting a lot of well-justified attention?

I'm still waiting for Ilya to publish his first paper on gender studies..




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