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I'm betting the sentence started as "We cannot predict..." and someone decided that phrasing sounds a bit too much like YC specifically is bad at predictions (i
by fastball 4y ago
I'm betting the sentence started as "We cannot predict..." and someone decided that phrasing sounds a bit too much like YC specifically is bad at predictions (instead of the intended collective 'we'), so they switched it to "No one", forgetting to swap out 'cannot' for 'can' in the process.
Interestingly, I've been learning Indonesian and they actually have a solution for this ambiguity: two words for 'we'. There is 'kita', which is a 'we' that includes the listener (or reader in this case) and 'kami' which excludes them. So in this case YC could've used 'kita' to mean "we (including you the reader) cannot predict...".
- rahtoken 4y agoYou bring up a good example with regards to ‘clusivity’ in Indonesian; quite a few Indian languages have such constructs too[0]. [0]: https://youtu.be/YqbT-YuIwCg https://youtu.be/YqbT-YuIwCg