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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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And I guess I'm just not very interested in the object-level debate, fair enough. To me, all the difficulty of the question arises from meta considerations, because if I sufficiently communicated why I think the assignments of load-bearing criteria were fundamentally arbitrary, the question would not be answered so much as recede in importance. I think to some extent "cleaving reality at its joints", while a strong metaphor, erases the vital detail of a high-dimensional space with many correlations, so that the axis of the joint is greatly overdetermined - such a thing simply does not arise in three-dimensional space. But I don't know how else I can try to express it either. We're not talking about which way the joint is turning but which sinews carry the most strain, which muscles the most force. Also in this metaphor the muscles are subjective to begin with. I'd say your position is "the muscles in the third and fourteenth dimension are clearly the only ones that matter centrally" and my position is "it depends on how the joint is trained."