77
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
77 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1425 readers
237 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I figured he was talking about Searle's Chinese room thought experiment. Searle sucks though, so that's probably also racist (in addition to being stupid.)
In 2024 it is, at the very least, extremely uncomfortable to read Searle describe Chinese writing as "meaningless scribbles", "formal symbols"*, "squiggle squiggle", and "squoggle squoggle". Basically taking Chinese, ignoring the fact that it's a real language used by real people and is not alien nor inscrutable nor mathematical, and using it as a prop to purposefully obfuscate a thought experiment.
But that's like, just my opinion man.
* The paper never seems to get around to calling English letters symbols I wonder why.
the other thing about this that's often come to mind for me is that the "who" picked in such things tends to be telling of the speaker, and of their perception of "impenetrable"
relatedly, a somewhat common phrase around this side of the world is/was "it's greek to me". I don't know the history of why it came into public lexicon around here (whether it was imported or grew locally), but been curious.
which leads to my sidebar and sneer: it'd be nice if it were easier to research things like this, and good god the modern internet makes it hard to do that. holy fuck what a tsunami of dogshit. and then fucking LLMs and openai come around, going "HOLD MY BEER". le sigh.
Wikipedia has quite a comprehensive list of similar idioms from a lot of different languages. Chinese gets a lot of mentions, but so do Greek and Spanish. Plus Turkish and Hebrew. As far as I can tell the Chinese describe any incomprehensible language as "Martian". But "It's Greek to me" goes right back to the Romans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me
The wiki seems to say the aphorism originates with medieval scribes and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
The actual ancient Romans are unlikely to have had such qualms, since at the time Greek was much more widely understood than Latin, so much so that many important roman works like Caesar's Memoirs and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations were originally written in Greek, with the Latin versions being translations.
Pedantic note: Yes, Meditations (a phisosophical treatise) was written in Koine, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (veni, vedi, vici—self-aggrandizing combat-reports meant for the senate and propaganda) or other "published" works from Caesar were not.
Although bonus points, the ancient sources portray Caesar (a proper educated major family Patrician) as speaking his dying words—if reported saying anything at all—in Greek, not in Latin: "Καὶ σὺ τέκνον" (Even you, child) rendered in Shakespeare as "Et tu, Brute".