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Literally nothing in the definitions you're linking to mentions anything about owners. And the definitions given at points just re-enforce the ambiguity. Defini

by abeppu 3y ago

Literally nothing in the definitions you're linking to mentions anything about owners. And the definitions given at points just re-enforce the ambiguity. Definition 5 is "To apportion (more or less evenly)." I think one could reasonably read "more or less evenly" to mean "either more evenly or less evenly" or "relatively evenly". The definitions for "distribution" rather than "distribute" only weaken your narrow view further. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/distribution https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/distribution Definitions include "An apportionment by law (of funds, property)" and critically "The apportionment of income or wealth in a population" with the example usage "The wealth distribution became extremely skewed in the kleptocracy." I.e. becoming extremely skewed didn't mean it was no longer a "distribution" in virtue of being concentrated. And especially in a space where lots of people have a technical background, we're very likely to be thinking of the wealth distribution explicitly as a probability distribution (also listed as a separate definition), _especially_ we've already used the concept of quantiles on that distribution. Englishing flexibly, I think it's totally reasonable for "distribution" to refer to either the function assigning probability mass, _or_ to the act or process of making such a function true. People in this thread are mostly using this word in a reasonable way. You're the one seeking to redefine words by insisting that only an entropy-increasing change is a "distribution".

uoaei 3y ago
That's a lot of contortion to attempt a defiance of etymology. And anyway the conversation was about redistribution, that prefix of course demanding an additional contextual layer on which the word is applied. Trying to imply that in general redistribution should be ambiguous enough to be synonymous to concentration is firstly just muddying language to make conversation harder and second taking us further from the point of the conversation anyway. Since when is it in the interest of any discussion that "words mean things" becomes controversial?
- abeppu 3y ago
  Words mean things. This word doesn't mean what you want it to mean, either according to the other people in the thread you're interacting with, or the source you decided to cite. Etymology is not the sole determiner of meaning. We can call an area on the moon a "mare", and know this comes from the Latin for "sea", but "mare" in the context no longer means "sea".
  - uoaei 3y ago
    This word does indeed mean exactly what I want it to mean, you're cherry picking other aspects of the definition to somehow overwrite the original rather than to acknowledge that we both can be right in certain ways. I'm right about what this word literally means, you're right that carelessness wins the day when it comes to language drift.

by abeppu 3y ago

uoaei 3y ago

That's a lot of contortion to attempt a defiance of etymology. And anyway the conversation was about redistribution, that prefix of course demanding an additional contextual layer on which the word is applied. Trying to imply that in general redistribution should be ambiguous enough to be synonymous to concentration is firstly just muddying language to make conversation harder and second taking us further from the point of the conversation anyway. Since when is it in the interest of any discussion that "words mean things" becomes controversial?

abeppu 3y ago
Words mean things. This word doesn't mean what you want it to mean, either according to the other people in the thread you're interacting with, or the source you decided to cite. Etymology is not the sole determiner of meaning. We can call an area on the moon a "mare", and know this comes from the Latin for "sea", but "mare" in the context no longer means "sea".
- uoaei 3y ago
  This word does indeed mean exactly what I want it to mean, you're cherry picking other aspects of the definition to somehow overwrite the original rather than to acknowledge that we both can be right in certain ways. I'm right about what this word literally means, you're right that carelessness wins the day when it comes to language drift.