You're not wrong. When I'm confronted by a certain attitude on certain topics, I begin a little irascible myself because I'm not confronting it for the first ti

You're not wrong. When I'm confronted by a certain attitude on certain topics, I begin a little irascible myself because I'm not confronting it for the first time --- but a very long and annoying series of interactions, of which this new on the margin, is of the same type. Perhaps I should more proactively split the interaction in my head, "is this a political expression?" or "is this, say, an academic expression?" (here, I'm def., politics: concerned with the who-and-why of belief, over its content). The problem for people like me is that they're often closely related, and we're in positions in which we're surrounded by a kind of politics we didn't consent to. In particular, the discursive environment of, say computer science, is pathological to the literal and honest use of language. I find the "politics of computer science" qua the people, attitudes, approaches, etc. of the discourse to be basically dishonest. This, i think, is a case very easily made today especially. I used to think it was merely corporate hype, but it actually runs all the way down to fantasist researchers whose preference for fantastical metaphor grossly exceeds their capacity for good faith communication. So Babbage in having peddled his ideas for money back then, and gualling quoted in his oblivious tone, is a totem for this issue. He was not so extreme as we see today, for sure; but did not hesitate to use the misapprehensions of his benefactors for money. I dislike how readily he is quoted on this. In any case, I am not always well composed in a climate I find basically dishonest, that's for sure. I'll censor myself more in the future on this. And perhaps I should just finally give up caring about this issue, and consign this disappointment as one more in the bin of nihilism: the "science" of computers is a schizophrenic hall of mirrors where people play bad-faith games with language and incredulous onlookers take up these games and proceed sincerely. What content there is to the innovation is buried, what might be said honestly about it, nearly impossible to discern -- and so on. Very well. I'd say I thought physicists and philosophers were above it, but string theorists did play similar games in the 90s -- and I was angry all the way through the popsci of that too.