Is it necessary and useful for scientists to say "mnemonic" to refer to "memory" and "affect" to talk about "emotion"?
In other words, given that everyone understand emotion and mood and no one really understands what "affect" is until you are really deep into things, why is the term affect useful and important at all? And should we reserve it for deep dives (as opposed to public facing websites and such)? And does anyone call themselves an "emotion researcher?" or a "mood researcher?"
@brembs@PessoaBrain@knutson_brain
Absolutely on that - if we don't have words, we need to create them; your examples are great illustrations. The heart of my question is really: if we already have colloquial words for things, is there value in giving them scientific terms that mean the same thing?
If we are concerned that a word might be used in a confusing way that has multiple definitions, is it better to give it a new word? Or just more clearly define what we mean? (Or give it a modifier like for causality, causal production?).
I worry when scientists use mysterious terms to refer to things everyone is familiar with (like affect for emotion/mood). It's alienating. And I wonder: what's the value there.
I know too little of the examples you mention, but in most cases, the colloqiual words do not have a precise enough usage (in particular if one also considers their translations), such that a different, specific word may be used to disambiguate.
I just finished an interleaved reading of two books, and wow! did they enhance one another.
The first was an approachable philosophical treatise about how science works given that scientists are human with all their faults. The answer: “evidence”. (Thanks to Jim DiCarlo for this rec + confirmation by @markdhumphries).
The second was a book describing the unfolding of ideas about evolution from Darwin’s tree (mutations + survival of the fittest) through more modern ideas about horizontal gene transfer between species - a perfect illustration of the ideas in the philosophical book but not included in it. (Thanks to @cyrilpedia for this rec).
Books can be complementary in all sorts of ways. Do you know of pairings that are enhanced when thought about together?
I’m just starting a book about the nature of time and ideas about time travel by @JamesGleick. Any thoughts on a good complement for it? (Maybe @JamesGleick) even has suggestions?
@NicoleCRust It's old, but have you read Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe"? I remember finding it contained just about the best explanations of special and general relativity I'd come across, and that includes a basic primer on what it says about the nature of time which could maybe serve as a point of comparison/reference (it also explains quantum mechanics and string theory; I think the quantum mechanics explanations were fine they just didn't ping me as remarkable compared to others and the string theory bits have probably aged terribly on the "is this the actual explanation" front but I think probably still hold up as an illustration of how crazy the maths/physics interface can get).