You pay too much attention to irrelevant things and make too much fuss about nothing.
That’s the problem I have with you.
In other words, you suffer from autism.
When someone says something like “circles are polygons with an infinite number of sides” they are not “redefining” circles but merely providing an alternative logical model of them.
Most importantly, they are NOT rejecting – or at least it is nowhere implied that they are rejecting – the standard model of circles (which involves the concept of equidistance.)
You’re too rigid.
Of course you are too rigid, you are autistic.
And this is not the first I come across such a way of conceptualizing circles.
Maybe it’s not taught in schools, I don’t know, but so what?
What exactly is your point?
Oh right, you have no point, you’re simply autistic.
You ruined this discussion – you reduced it to petty arguments – thanks to your pedantry.
There’s absolutely NOTHING that you are adding to the discussion (whether it is that concerning causality or the tangential discussion concerning circles.)
If you were at least telling us that UrWrong’s model of circles is less precise than the standard model, then at least there would be some substance to what you’re saying.
But as it is, your posts are without any substance.
Waste of fucking time.
“Fallacious invention”.
Holy fucking shit.
You think that people who described circles the first OWN these circles?
Is that the severity of your retardation?
See how stupid you are?
You don’t even UNDERSTAND what I said.
Moron, people understood what circles are long before there was anyone to describe them in terms of equidistance.
Not all life is verbal.
Language and what makes it work is hardly “nothing” when communicating over the Internet is all you have.
Your attempts to corrupt and destroy the only language you have is more than a little self defeating, naive, and stupid - a child starting a fire in his own bed.
Noone is destroying language, moron.
When you say something like “circles are polygons with an infinite number of sides” you are not corrupting language but merely using it to express your logical model of circles.
The problem is you are AUTISTIC which means you take words TOO LITERALLY.
And when you cannot understand them literally you scream LANGUAGE GAMES.
You are embarassing yourself, James.
I am serious.
And there I was thinking that at least you had looked up what “autism” means.
But then for people who invent their own definition of words, I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised by anything they state.
They don’t “take words too literally” in the sense that you are thinking (using the word loosely). They miscomprehended. Their lack of ability to attend to their surroundings causes them to not pickup on common social behaviors and implications. As a result, they find themselves desperately trying to communicate and making excuses for their misuse of words. One of their primary excuses is "But it is all relative. It could be true. Words can mean different things to different people. What is true for one isn’t true for everyone. Everyone has their own reality…"
And you really shouldn’t reference textbooks until you bother to actually read and comprehend one. Of course the problem is that you will never know whether you comprehended it or not. You will just desperately try to make sense out of the words, come up with some guess, and then insist that you have perfectly understood the true meaning (all of which will be BS).
The point is that you focus on insignificant details.
Your criticisms are pointless. They are utterly moronic. There is nothing anyone can possibly learn from them. They merely irritate.
You said absolutely nothing of value in this thread.
You merely spam.
First, you really should refrain from typing while looking in the mirror.
But more importantly, the issue of what “a circle” means was an argument going on long before I interjected. I quoted a dictionary. From that You and UrWrong chose to argue endlessly, ignoring the very definition of the word, later excusing yourselves by claiming that definitions are irrelevant.
Of course, if you were capable of thinking before declaring truth, you might have noticed that before focusing on your last ad hom, irrelevant, and “moronic”, derailing diatribe.
Your pedantry is omnipresent. It’s not merely this thread that suffers from it. It’s the entire forum that does so.
And almost noone shares your autistic sentiment, just to remind you.
We knew what circles are LONG BEFORE there was language.
You don’t need to be able to describe circles using words in order to know what circles are.
So when someone argues against the idea that “circles are polygons with an infinite number of sides” what they are doing is they are comparing this statement, not against reality, but against other words.
The statement matches PRETTY WELL against reality.
So only pedants – autistic people, people with no ability to think laterally or holistically – find it problematic.
Basically, people who are too conservative – rigid, inflexible, unadaptable, unwelcoming of change – find it problematic.
You know, the ones who think everyone who disagrees with them is a liberal nihilist.
And in addition, another point that your “autism” characteristic didn’t notice, is that you and UrWrong were telling Arc that she was “wrong”. Yet, by your own argument, and even if you were right, she was still NOT wrong.
You and UrWrong falsely accused. And that is what happens when people ignore the details (the Devil’s pride and joy).
You don’t get it, don’t you?
People understand what the word “circle” means and they do so independently from dictionary definitions.
We all know intuitively what circles are.
We knew that LONG BEFORE there was any language.
There is no need for dictionaries.
So when somene clings onto dictionary definitions this indicates there is some kind of problem with them.
That their intuition is weak.
That they are . . . autistic.
You are the protector of autism.
Very proud of being autistic.
I am happy for you.
It must be very good to be autistic.
As Magnus pointed out, those who pay too little attention while growing up, assume too much about their misunderstandings concerning language as well as many other issues.
In common English, anything vaguely similar to a circle is often called a “circle” by those having no need to be particularly precise. When young people are not educated, they begin to think that the word “circle” means anything vaguely circular. Quite the opposite of Magnus’ programming, learning language from common guttural usage is NOT the best way unless one never intends to understand or accomplish any more than guttural status. “Ignorant and foolish people talk like this. Thus this is the way to talk.” Only ignorant and foolish people think like that.
The more to-the-point concern is that it is a false accusation to declare someone to be wrong when they say that circles have no sides. Even if you want to claim that anything circular is “a circle” (foolish for several reasons), that still doesn’t make Arc wrong. And mathematics does NOT claim that a circle has infinite sides.
So you admit that you say it’s not a circle. As expected.
You are in the minority. Because shapes are approximations. Nobody really cares about ‘perfect’ exactitude. A carpenter working on a house has to deal with bends in what people call “straight” planks of wood.
Nuance is lost on you James. You seem to have trouble understanding the gray areas, the bends in a piece of wood.
Sorry I’m late to the discussion (I know you were all waiting for me), but I’m very intrigued by this question of whether circles have sides or not. I think I’m partial to the infinite sides faction of the debate. A circle has infinite sides. Yet at the same time, I see how this is equivalent to the notion of a circle having no sides. It makes me wonder if this is a sign that infinity = zero (or everythingness = nothingness). Though paradoxical sounding, it makes sense when you think about this mathematically: as you approach infinity, the elements which you are counting (those that tend towards infinity in their quantity) tend towards zero (like the sides of a polygon–the more numerous, the smaller they must appear in order to apprehend the whole polygon, tending towards zero size and the polygon towards a circle).
So is saying that a circle has infinite sides the same as saying it has no sides? I think these are two “sides” of the same coin. To say that a circle has infinite sides is to focus on the sides themselves, recognizing not only their existence but their numerousness, so numerous that the whole (the infinite) must be said to stand beyond the scope of your focus. But to say that a circle has no sides is to focus on the whole (the circle itself) and to say that any sides that exist can only be said to exist beyond the scope of your focus (but this time in the opposite direction–too small to see, to small to be said to exist). So I think we can say two things, but neither simultaneously: we either have the whole (the infinite) without the elements that amount to the whole (zero sides), or we have the elements (the sides) but without the whole that an impossible amount of them make up (the infinite).
Notice how autistic James is? He’s focusing too much on differences and too little on similarities. That’s autism.
What’s happening here is that UrWrong is telling us that our intuition interprets this shape as being a form of circle. Most people will tell you, independently from any dictionary definitions, that this shape is a circle. That would be intuition at work. And let us not forget that inuition precedes dictionary definitions. James, on the other hand, is telling us that our dictionaries do not allow us to interpret such a shape as being a form of circle.
James is, of course, wrong. What he’s doing here is he’s HIDING the work of his own intuition. In other words, he’s removing himself – his own intuition – from the equation in an attempt to pretend to be purely “objective”, or more precisely, to be a blind follower of instructions. This is evident from the fact that our dictionary definitions of the word “circle” contain certain ambiguities. For example, Google definition that a circle is “a round plane figure whose boundary (the circumference) consists of points equidistant from a fixed point (the centre)” has a problem in that the number of points that the boundary of a circle consists of is not specified. This makes it difficult for us to take a ruler and test any given shape simply by following instructions i.e. without doing any thinking on our own. We simply do not know many measurements we have to take . . . because we do not know how many points there are on the boundary of a circle. Thus, we need to use our own judgment. We need to decide for ourselves how many points there are. And depending on how many points we choose, the above shape can be tested positive. The fact is that James does not see the above shape as a circle, not because of any dictionary definitions, but because of his method of judgment.
That’s what happens if you focus too much on differences and too little on similarities. You become preoccupied with nuances and unable to see “the big picture”. Which is exactly what autism is about.
The hatred of ambiguities, the idea that ambiguities necessarily confuse, is the hallmark of autism.
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