Richard Feynman - Names Don't Constitute Knowledge

What Hacker News said

Cites braveo · 2017-04 · on “YouTube Advertiser Meltdown: An Opportunity for Startups”

If there's one thing I definitely don't care about, it's the exact definition of censorship. What I do care about is the idea behind censorship. I will not engage you in any conversation in which you try to use the definition to argue against the point I made. So if you would like to have a discussion about the ideas behind censorship and why the worry is valid for these large websites such as FB and Youtube, I'm all for it. But if you're going to repeat that the definition of the word precludes anything but governments, then I'm not interested. [this video]

Cites jacobolus · 2017-12 · on “Overcoming Us vs. Them”

[this video] > Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path. “Major derailment”? You can’t be serious. Nobody at my school ever memorized state capitals, and as far as I can tell they’re all doing about as well as you would expect (a couple decades later) in their various careers, including careers as lawyers, activists, policy analysts, journalists, politicians, scholars of political science, ... Anyone who does the real work (reading hundreds of topical books, keeping up with current events for decades, getting involved in political activism, engaging with peers in years of university seminars about related topics, ..

Cites vinchuco · 2018-08 · on “A Visual, Intuitive Guide to Imaginary Numbers (2007)”

> Do you know any other examples [this video] Where "complex numbers" is Chinese, "imaginary numbers" is German, and "2D numbers" is English in this analogy.

Cites celticmusic · 2019-10 · on “Fair, the SoftBank-backed car startup, lays off 40% of staff, sacks CFO”

when people start quibbling over words I like to point them to this feynman video. [this video] The idea that risk isn't a part of the discussion about why a company is laying off 40% of its work force doesn't seem like it has much merit. The responses made sense, and they've been explained to you. You're just casting about trying to come up with some way to dismiss the other persons point while intellectualizing it for the HN audience. If we were on reddit your tone would be some passive aggressive wiffle waffle about experience or intelligence. The tone might change based upon the site, but the inaneness of the person behind them doesn't.

Cites P5fRxh5kUvp2th · 2022-12 · on “Persistent and pervasive impact of being bullied in childhood and adolescence”

[this video] I don't care what you call it, if person A starts mistreating person B and person B knows how to deal with these situations, person A will quickly stop mistreating person B. Your argument here appears to be that bullying if person A doesn't eventually fight back. I don't agree with that, but I'm not willing to argue over the names of things.

Cites P5fRxh5kUvp2th · 2022-12 · on “Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT”

Sorry, I'm not reading all of that. I stopped at the second paragraph. The answer to the question doesn't actually matter, not to you, and not to me. It's a ploy to try and confound the conversation. If you and the other poster really feel it needs to be defined, then define cancelled as "the thing that happened to Dorian Abbot". boom, you're done. It now has a definition, tautological, but valid nonetheless. The thing that should be getting discussed is whether or not what happened to him should have happened to him. And the answer is no, it shouldn't happen to anyone. And now I'm going to leave you with an observation by Richard Feynman. [this video]

Cites P5fRxh5kUvp2th · 2022-12 · on “Why on Earth are flowers beautiful? (2018)”

Sure, if you find the phrase "common sense" to be less offensive than "blind faith", but in this case they mean the same thing. [this video]