Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.

It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.

Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.

However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.

You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.

Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.

In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.

At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.

My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.

EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901851

> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.

There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.

> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.

It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?

I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.

I’ve never been an arts person and I’ve been a very, very logical person, so it’s very odd to me to realize that my answer to this is: poetry.

More and more these days I look for ways to both reason with and frame the world and current events. I’ve followed years and years of people putting forth logic and reason as explanations. But my moments of peace are when I find those perfect words written in some distant past, making me feel connected with others by a timeless dimension

I've come to realize that the the past ~80 years since the first nuke, the only world nearly all of us have ever known, was a major outlier. Nukes prevented direct conflict between major powers and digital tech alone was more than enough to drive economic progress, regardless of how dumb our decisions may have been on relations or economics. Those times, on both accounts, are effectively over. And so the chaos and uncertainty of this brave new world we're now living in isn't, in fact, new. Rather it's the world that humanity has lived in for the overwhelming majority of its existence. And we're now simply returning to the world that these great works were written in and for, and they've become more relevant than ever.

The world of beauty, art, peace, feeling states is worthy of discovery and like you say, it has a timeless quality.

I used to think I was outsmarting "the system" by only learning a few key facts about X and then twisting them around to get advantages and disadvantages, but little did I know that was the whole point of the course — to see the same thing from different perspectives and realize there are both advantages and disadvantages to X.

My experience (with myself and my kids) has been the opposite.

My creativity would be way less if I hadn't spent hours listening to others music. I think it applies to less fun/interesting things as well.

It's curious that most game shows require a vast knowledge of useless trivia rather than reasoning skills.

Daniel Dennett talked about this model of consciousness. Something similar could be replicated by AI's own self-play style reasoning. It could sharpen its own drafts. As new data points become available, the drafts could be extended, shelved, or reformulated. AI could make these notes on its own reasoning available for others for inspection and course-correction and avoiding local-minima. Common objections need not be raised by layman, AI can incorporate those by itselfs. The true feedback quality can only come from experts in their domain. Implications are what role do normal non-experts have when AI can do most of mid-to-expert level thinking on its own. Hopefully it could help students reach expert level faster.

A person generally cannot effectively, fluently, convincingly regurgitate an argument without understanding it, and the act of memorizing a variety of different positions primes the brain to handle all of them with greater depth and adroitness. Mill greatly underestimates the power and benefits of memorization.

I think most people would agree that memorization and a standarized 'one-size-fits-all' approach are inferior to teaching methods that are (onstensibly) creative, 'active,' and individualized.

I couldn't disagree more strongly. It's a false dichotomy. All learning -- all -- starts from and depends upon memorization. Is that its only the goal? Obviously not, but memorization gets a bad rap because it's viewed, incorrectly, as contrary to or in competition with more active, creative intellectual enterprises.

His argument was: you cannot memorize algebra, you have to understand. Students who are failing in college do so because they do not understand the fundamentals, and try to memorize enough to succeed - not realizing that the effort needs to go somewhere else.

Rule 1 of memorization is "do not [memorize] if you do not understand". [1] (Note: that source uses the word "learn" instead of "memorize", but to me the word learn means come to understand.)

There is a role for memorization and rote repetition, but it is not the foundation of understanding.

[1]: https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

They listen in class, then read the text and notes you posted, then watch a Youtube explaination, then ask Chat, then ask you questions ... anything to avoid trying to do a few practice questions where they might make a mistake.

It's like watching people try to learn to play basketball when they are afraid of shooting hoops in case they miss a shot. So they watch videos or read books to really understand how to shoot hoops. And then fail miserably when they are tested.

OK, you could argue that exercises build a type of understanding, and listening to explanations builds a different type of understanding, and the former is more useful, but people don't understand that.

Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.

Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.

They run variations, twists and traps, on recalled openings and duel and fool by creating and breaking expectations.

In line with a number of other activities rote core skills and reflexes are foundational but not all, they're essential to practice and to dealing with situations where they don't fit but can be bent to purpose.

This is a good example because a test of one's understanding is "do you know how to make the opponent pay for varying from the standard opening?"

For a beginner, the answer is no.

This is why Stratego, or various grand/large chess variants, or Chess960 needs to have replaced standard chess yesterday.

I personally perceive a decoupling all over the board. Not just in language. You hear terms like "wage stagnation" or "degree inflation". Just choose an area. They're all detachments from the true thing they represented.

'all you anti-medical compound people who keep crack illegal and it's use limited are stifling medical progress'

Wanting to approach LLMs with intention and thought is not inherently 'technophobic'.

Confusion between words and reality has been an important aspect of all human cultures since there were words. It's one of two traditional forms of magic found everywhere. (The other being sympathetic magic.) Think about what it means to say "knock on wood".

Unfortunately, it just needs a rebranding for the 21st century, since the aesthetic of angels and demons is so hopelessly antiquated and doesn't really have the same cachet it used to.

Silicon Valley and global communications infrastructure has been compromised by Israel. Quoting TFA:

> This analysis identified 4G infrastructure associated with operator networks based in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the Channel Islands. Notably, in prior public reporting these same countries have been linked to CSVs targeting mobile users.

> Israel has long been a focal point in the global surveillance industry, with multiple companies developing and exporting advanced spyware, cellular communications interception, and monitoring technologies.

Agree, but at one point you're also effectively betraying people who typically want to give you solidarity, especially when you're working on systems and tooling used for suppressing said solidarity. So yeah, fuck you Meta employees for completely lacking any sort of spine.

In the same way we shouldn't have any solidarity with scabs, we should have no solidarity with the people who happily built the pit-pushing tools.

Or the worker must have an official contract?

I agree with you about the solidarity though. Anyone speaking out against this shit-world we've created with the internet is welcome.

You must understand that the hyperscalers all optimize for compliant employees in the hiring process. You cannot have solidarity with bootlickers, they don't deserve our support because they fucked the rest of us to begin with to further their own gains. Yes, the rest of us need to claw our way out of the pit. But each of these engineers now whining about the world they created now applying to them? Kick them back in the pit.

Clutch those pearls!

I think turning a blind eye to our colleagues' work as if it's morally neutral is what keeps us in that pit.

Usually here in Canada it's available in capsule form which I find less effective.

> I feel like people using AI to both read and interpret language is the death of rigorous language.

Thank you for your perspective. It is very validating (and in this case, still extremely disappointing) when strangers come to the same conclusions as yourself.