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> you can quickly spin it… It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other. E.g. quantum mechanics is a

by rhelz 3y ago

> you can quickly spin it… It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other. E.g. quantum mechanics is arguably the least ambiguous theory ever devised, because it gives results of the most specific agreement with experiment. But nevertheless has an ever-increasing number of interpretations, none of which can be ruled out—to all appearances hopelessly ambiguous to what it actually means. When it comes decisions you have to make, either individually or as a society, even the most verbose and specific moral codes suddenly seem to be ambiguous. Some examples: 1. Are we morally obliged to either support or oppose Obamacare? 2. Is a 50% tax rate moral or immoral? What is the exact tax rate which is “most moral”? 3. Is it Moral to support a president who boinked an intern? Or a president who payed hush money to hookers? 4. Should it be illegal to smoke? Or sell fruit-flavored vapes? 5. How old should somebody be before they are allowed to (fill in the blank here…vote, have sex, drive a car, drink, drop out of school?) We certainly look to our cultural polestars—-religion, tradition, precident—to help us out with these sorts of questions, but by no means does any of them give us any definitive answers.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other. "Virtual base classes are instantiated in the order specified by the depth-first, left-to-right traversal of the directed acyclic graph of all base classes." That is a very precise, unambiguous statement if you know what virtual base classes are. (The sentence went on to define what "left to right" meant in this context.) You don't even need to know what a directed acyclic graph is in a formal way to be able to clearly, unambiguously understand what that sentence is saying. Compare that to, I don't know, the worst sentence from your CEO's quarterly yay-us message to the company. Or the worst sentence from a politician's campaign speech, or from a political debate where they're trying to dodge the other side's point. Yes, statements can be less ambiguous than other statements. (Even in politics - compare George Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes" with the statements many politicians make.)
- rhelz 3y ago
  Well…Suppose I wrote an optimizer which could—-perhaps as some kind of return-value optimization, determine that we didn’t even need to construct such an object, but we instead could just pass along the values to the caller? If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it? We are so good at handling ambiguity that we don’t even notice its existence most of the time. But specs, especially specs which specify the semantics of an expression—are infinitely ambiguous as to how to that expression is actually calculated. Ideally, the spec, for c++ or another language is deliberately made ambiguous, just because it leaves room for creative interpretations—-also known as “optimizations”.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    > If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it? Generally: no. Most such specs have a phrase along the lines of “externally observable effect”. In other words, the compiler can do anything as long as the programmer or external systems can’t tell that anything is different. Processors do this all the time, reordering instruction execution but then arranging things so that it’s impossible to tell that this occurred.
    - rhelz 3y ago
      Yup. Its an interesting example of deliberate ambiguity, and how useful it can be. This is why I don't like using "ambiguous" as a term of abuse. Ambiguity isn't inherently bad. Languages are ambiguous for a reason.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        But this can be unambiguously defined! Externally observable effects can have specific meanings.
        rhelz 3y ago
        I didn't quite understand that point, can you rephrase? I mean, yeah, things like specs for computer languages do define a space for ambiguity, but that space is ambiguous just the same.
astrange 3y ago
> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other. The logical positivists (and analytic philosophers in general) were very concerned about this. The original ones like Carnap thought it was a problem because of fascists, who are, you know, pathological liars. So the problem wasn't ambiguity, moreso that they were propagandizing and he hoped to defeat this by showing that it wasn't true. As it turns out, this didn't work, so they had to give up on it. Analytic philosophers do it because they're mad at obscurantist French people like Derrida. Which is also a noble goal if a smaller problem.

by rhelz 3y ago

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other. "Virtual base classes are instantiated in the order specified by the depth-first, left-to-right traversal of the directed acyclic graph of all base classes." That is a very precise, unambiguous statement if you know what virtual base classes are. (The sentence went on to define what "left to right" meant in this context.) You don't even need to know what a directed acyclic graph is in a formal way to be able to clearly, unambiguously understand what that sentence is saying. Compare that to, I don't know, the worst sentence from your CEO's quarterly yay-us message to the company. Or the worst sentence from a politician's campaign speech, or from a political debate where they're trying to dodge the other side's point. Yes, statements can be less ambiguous than other statements. (Even in politics - compare George Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes" with the statements many politicians make.)

rhelz 3y ago
Well…Suppose I wrote an optimizer which could—-perhaps as some kind of return-value optimization, determine that we didn’t even need to construct such an object, but we instead could just pass along the values to the caller? If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it? We are so good at handling ambiguity that we don’t even notice its existence most of the time. But specs, especially specs which specify the semantics of an expression—are infinitely ambiguous as to how to that expression is actually calculated. Ideally, the spec, for c++ or another language is deliberately made ambiguous, just because it leaves room for creative interpretations—-also known as “optimizations”.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  > If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it? Generally: no. Most such specs have a phrase along the lines of “externally observable effect”. In other words, the compiler can do anything as long as the programmer or external systems can’t tell that anything is different. Processors do this all the time, reordering instruction execution but then arranging things so that it’s impossible to tell that this occurred.
  - rhelz 3y ago
    Yup. Its an interesting example of deliberate ambiguity, and how useful it can be. This is why I don't like using "ambiguous" as a term of abuse. Ambiguity isn't inherently bad. Languages are ambiguous for a reason.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      But this can be unambiguously defined! Externally observable effects can have specific meanings.
      - rhelz 3y ago
        I didn't quite understand that point, can you rephrase? I mean, yeah, things like specs for computer languages do define a space for ambiguity, but that space is ambiguous just the same.

astrange 3y ago

> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other. The logical positivists (and analytic philosophers in general) were very concerned about this. The original ones like Carnap thought it was a problem because of fascists, who are, you know, pathological liars. So the problem wasn't ambiguity, moreso that they were propagandizing and he hoped to defeat this by showing that it wasn't true. As it turns out, this didn't work, so they had to give up on it. Analytic philosophers do it because they're mad at obscurantist French people like Derrida. Which is also a noble goal if a smaller problem.