Re: Color Terms

On Sat, Nov 18, 2000 at 02:52:09PM -0500, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> I think the notion of a "primary" mode of thinking ought to be
> situational.  I've taken quite a number of silly internet personality
> tests, and they do ask questions that I would answer different ways
> depending on the situation.
Heh. Internet personality tests eh? I usually just fill it out many times,
each time "stuffing" it a different way to see what result I can get :-)
IMNSHO, any kind of "personality test" is inherently flawed -- because
it's measuring personality by a fixed standard (the test), but human
personality has way too many dimensions to be accounted for in this way.

>  As both a math major ("rational," at least
> until you try to visualize three-dimensional space-filling curves <G>)
You mean *four*-dimensional space-filling curves :-P (Or an infinite
dimensional gasket that has zero volume...)

> and a sf/fantasy writer ("intuitive")--well, I'm used to having to take
> both approaches in different contexts.  At least, if there's a nice,
> rational algorithm for writing good sf/f I'd love to know about it.  =^)
[snip]

Hmm. I find that I'm simultaneously "rational" and "intuitive". Or perhaps
you might say I'm intuitively rational, since the way I learn is to
internalize the subject (eg. math or logic or what-have-you), and then
follow my "gut feeling" about the subject when solving problems. The
actual working-out of the details (eg. in a math/logic proof, or in the
following of a "rational" procedure) is just a mechanical task that's
wrapped around this "gut feeling" to "make it presentable".

But then again, being a person who talks to himself using a plural first
person pronoun (sometimes a plural second person pronoun as well), I don't
claim to be representative of normal human beings ;-)


T

--
EMACS = full(y) crippled operating system