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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2735 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 7, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Much ink has been spilled here over the dreaded em-dash and other hallmarks of AI writing. But what other linguistic pet peeves do you have?

I ask because I just found myself fuming over the widespread confusion between "jealousy" and "envy." People tend to use them as synonyms (more often simply using jealousy for both terms), but the two words describe emotions that I think deserve to be distinguished. Jealousy is felt over things that rightfully belong to you, while envy is felt over things which do not. God is jealous; you are envious. Being jealous is still generally bad, but it's nowhere near as bad as envy. As a child who was bad at sharing but generally pretty good about being happy about the good fortune of others, it has always bothered me how few people seem to grasp the distinction.

An extremely niche one I've complained about before is members of the rationalist community using rationalist lingo in contexts in which it is obviously inappropriate, as part of some kind of weird cargo-cult approach to in-group membership. I once saw a guy saying that he had an "irrational prior" on believing X over Y.

If it's irrational, it's not a prior. Stop it.

Why? You can have beliefs and they can be irrational. If the situation calls for symmetry, but your prior is asymmetric because “something tells you it can’t be otherwise” then irrational could be a good descriptor.

In your link, you had other, more seemingly valid, complaints which people addressed well. This one feels like BEC.

If all you're doing is going by your gut, you shouldn't pretend otherwise. An "irrational prior" is indistinguishable from a "gut feeling", but it's draped in the language of dispassionate, disinterested analysis.

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