Discuss the Substance, Not the Symbol
Epistemic status: content summarized and synthesized (0-1 steps of reasoning) from the Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky, specifically A Human's Guide to Words. Guiding Puzzle: Is X a Y? Questions of the form "is X a Y" are all over the place, and a huge amount of cognitive power goes into trying to answer them. Some of them are fun or trivial, like "is water wet" or "is cereal a soup".…