Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

More innovative grammatical terminology, but why on earth is the dative an 'oblique' case rather than a grammatical case - it's used to mark indirect objects? I'm sure this terminology is coming from somewhere, but it's not cited.

"Coverbs are derived from all parts of speech; sometimes it is only a writing convention that distinquishes coverbs from abverbs (i.e. they are written as one word with the verb two)" - and other times that distinction is what?

"No, a good satire was much more deeply truthful and, of course, much more profitable than a tragedy." - Huxley defends his early work?

Kahneman would not be surprised - https://www.economist.com/briefing/20...

Lie Detector: used this on 2 PI monolingual groups, one of 15yo one of 18yo. The 15yo were primarily interested in finding out the relationship status of their peers, which became awkward. It was very difficult to elicit "giving reasons" with the 15yo, less so with the 18yo. Usual problems w. L1, definitely needs an I group.

"...and now that he was a Papist, as happy as a lark, working away at the precise spot where he could the maximum amount of harm to the greatest number of people." - I don't remember that Huxley specifically attacked Roman Catholicism in Grey Eminence, but he certainly has it in mind here, strange considering how Thomist Propter's philosophy seems in this novel.

"It appears that maintaining the social order and the rules of fairness in this fashion is its own reward. Altruistic punishment could well be the glue that holds societies togethet." - this concept of 'fairness' is pretty wide; I"ve read primogeniture helped the UK avoid the revolutions that swept Europe in the modern period, likewise the possibility of profiting from the public purse seems to keep Hungarian intact.

"For exchange" vs. "For use" - Warren Buffett, history's most successful stock market investor advocates looking at every investment as an 'owner' rather than as a 'trader'. His success seems to fly in the face of the argument of this section.

"Conventional indifference maps and Bernoulli's representation of outcomes as states of wealth share a mistaken assumption: that your utility for a state of affairs depends only that state and is not effected by your history" - applies to countries and cultures too, but what if your media and educational institutions misrepresent your history?

"Although you cannot tell by its shape whether a verb is a fleeting vowel stem, a pattern emerges with familiarity." - System 2 vs system 1 thinking?

-hettem vs. -hetném, the potential combined with the conditional, can I even imagine what this might mean? The distinctions in English are so blurry.

"Can't you beleive in Jefferson and have your current wired in from the city?" - you can with an internet of energy.

"4.4.5 Declined infinitives" - a grammatical oxymoron?

"When translating from Hungarian, it is best to identify the noun being modified by the participle-adjective [phrase] and continue to translate from left to right...Magyar főszereplővel forgatott FILM nyítja a Brooklyni Nemzetközi Filmresztivált/A FILM with a Hungarian leading actor is opening the Brooklyn International Film Festival." - practical advice - that's rare; unfortuately do is the word 'phrase'.

The fact that people have a lot of virtues...doesn't prove anything about the goodness of their actions" - a spiritual utilitarianism? If Huxley is serious about this, it changes my take on Grey Eminence, his next book.

"Actual good is outside time." - kill 'em all let God sort 'em out.

"Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realise" - hubris leading to nemisis, one of the great drivers of history.

"Gyere ide!" - no discussion of this being irregular, highlights the difference between a pedagogic grammar and a descriptive grammar: how much you already need to know about the language before this book is useful for you.

"Use specific information about the case to adjust the baseline prediction, if there are particular reasons to expect the optimistic bias to be more or less pronounced in this project than in others of the same" - Zero base budgeting does the opposite.

"Time expressions and coverbs combine to express the meanings of the complex tense forms found in English" - Coverbs, what happened to verbal prefiixes? Like the IPA we need an international inventory of grammar terms.

"Great care should be taken with differences in [consonant] length as this can change the meaning of a word, e.g., szeretem = I love him/her, vs. szerettem = I loved him/her." - as these long consonants usually occur at syllable boundaries, I pronounce them twice i.e., sze-re-tem vs sze-ret-tem. Is this ok? No advice on syllabification here.

The long term predictions of stock pickers and political scientists fail because their environments are not sufficiently regular to be predictable - do we have anyway of determining the regularity of a environment?

"Could the intestinal flora of a carp be transferred to the gut of a mammal? And if transferable, would it achieve the same chemical and biological results?" - Huxley is bang on the money here.

180 year old carp, was that a thing in 1939, or more fiction?

"Studies of chess masters have shown that at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice (about 6 years of playing 5 hours a day) are required to attain the highest levels of performance." - 10,000 hours to expertise is a frequently used figure, it's good to have it in numbers that are intuitively grasped...and puts my language learning efforts into perspective.

"At one end of the cavernous room, lit by a hidden searchlight, El Greco's 'Crucifixion of St. Peter' blazed out in the darkness like the beautiful revelation of something imcomprehensible and profoundly sinister" - Um, Caravagio painted a 'Crucifixion of St. Peter, not El Greco. Is this meant to be a fictional work of art?

"A bit of a murderee, I'm afraid, as well as a scholar and gentlemen" - I'm shocked, I thought Martin Amis coined that word.

"...intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of seperate traits."

"If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it? - he seems to enjoy disabusing people.

"What makes them believe they know more about the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion." - surely they believe something about what the price WILL be. They are trying to make money not keep their holdings at a fair value.