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> Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media It's mildly amusing that you're clearly erudite enough to know about that rare usage, b
by scubbo 6y ago
> Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media
It's mildly amusing that you're clearly erudite enough to know about that rare usage, but still managed to typo it :)
(I'm not gloating or belittling - typoes affect the best of us!)
- fuzxi 6y agoI don't see any typos in his post...?
- rz2k 6y agoIn the sentence, the outcome of a murder is being put into effect, rather than the outcome is being altered or affected.
- fuzxi 6y agoaffect: to influence (someone or something) effect: to cause to come into being I can't find anything definitively stating "affect" to be incorrect and "effect" to be correct in this instance. I say they're interchangeable in this context.
- rz2k 6y agoSorry, I edited my earlier outcome for clarity. Here is the context again: > Lately one of my luddite friends keeps mentioning how computers will soon kill us all. Perhaps to add to his torment, I like to retort that computers won't need to kill us, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves. > Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media. I wonder what other tools the deepfake future will provide? Stealing the voice of a dead loved one could be used to great affect to push a troubled soul over the edge. Anyway, are we talking about changing the death from being caused explicitly by computers to users being motivated by computers to kill themselves? I think the comment is instead talking about there being myriad ways computers could manipulate their users into killing themselves. It depends on the predicate of "that", but one construction seems more consistent. Shouldn't the second "affect" also be "effect"?
- fuzxi 6y agoIt's somewhat ambiguous, but after rereading I agree that effect is probably more appropriate.
- js2 6y ago> Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media. I wonder what other tools the deepfake future will provide? Stealing the voice of a dead loved one could be used to great affect to push a troubled soul over the edge. Effect is the right word, both times (once as verb and the second time as a noun). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375233
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> I say they're interchangeable in this context. How can they be interchangeable when they mean radically different things? Both sentences might be valid, and we might have no way to determine which one was meant, but the two are clearly not interchangeable.
- 01100011 6y agoApologies. I generally think of affect as a verb and effect as a noun but that's not always the case. It sounded correct to me as I was typing it upon my porcelain writing chair.
- scubbo 6y agoNo apologies necessary - like I said, typoes get the best of us, and their presence is no cause for shame.
- Aardwolf 6y agoMandatory xkcd; https://xkcd.com/326/ https://xkcd.com/326/