User:Ryguasu

"Ryguasu" means "hen" (i.e. "chicken") in Guarani, a South American language I used to know a little bit of. Arguably a stupid name, it has the advantage that just about nobody on Earth except me has a desire to claim it as "theirs".

My real name is Chris. I am a 22-year-old citizen of the United States, where I was born and where I reside. I am currently a computer science and/or cognitive science concentrator at Brown University.

My interests, as far as wikipedia is concerned, mainly concern thought and language, and how a number of fields -- including linguistics, logic, mathematics -- are grounded in how humans think. In this vein, I think wikipedia articles on technical subjects should not just reduce fields to their first premises (if that's even possible), but also explain why those premises make any sense, and what they relate to.

I think very few of my contributions to wikipedia thus far have actually had anything to do with "my interests, as far as wikipedia is concerned." Articles I have been involved with include:

• Vacuous truth
• Linguistics
• Design, Teleology, Teleological argument
• George Lakoff, Moral Politics
• Ronald Coase, Transaction cost, Sunk cost, Cost, Homo economicus
• Ascribed characteristics
• Guarani language and Guarana

Feel free to leave comments at User talk:Ryguasu

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Table of contents 1 To do 2 Waiting for replies 3 Ramblings 4 Notes to self 5 Articles that need improvement 6 To reexamine 7 Ways Wikipedia is strange

To do

• Teleology: definition in terms of Purpose is problematic
• Conceptual metaphor: uh-oh -- the gobledygook squad was here!
• Double negative: add history, NPOVify
• add Copilia stuff
• "facet" is a synonym for "ommatidium". (neither have articles)
• "mental picture" is a vast oversimplification of "idea", in any reasonable understanding. fix it.
• make What the Tortoise Said to Achilles coherent, and make more relevant links to it
• put Ostrom-ish stuff at Tragedy of the commons and Prisoner's dilemma
• George Lakoff: add book summaries, relativism disclaimer; move the not Lakoff-specific stuff to other articles
• Cognitive science of mathematics vs Where mathematics comes from[?] vs ...
• Gender-neutral pronouns or Gender-specific pronoun or Non-sexist language or Douglas Hofstadter: add reference to Hofstadter's race-based pronoun piece
• problematize Corporate welfare
• add US stuff to Zebra crossing and Pedestrian crossing
• Monosodium glutamate: insert some kind of scientific sanity, perhaps RE perception, perhaps RE criticism of the "studies"
• Portable Document Format: clarify relationship to postscript

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Waiting for replies

• User talk:XJamRastafire about Languages on inverse LISP basis[?]
• User talk:Sara Parks Ricker on "whom"
• User talk:Ortolan88 about vague language stuff

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Ramblings

I might someday incorporate these into wikipedia articles:

• User:Ryguasu/Evolution
• User:Ryguasu/Rationality
• User:Ryguasu/Linguistics
• User:Ryguasu/Sociology, etc.
• User:Ryguasu/Logic, Math, etc.

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Notes to self

• The deconstruction of mental illness is necessarily a high-priority task for postmodernism; if it fails, then the biological roots of mind/soul become more firmly established than postmodernism would care to admit.

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Articles that need improvement

I don't really know how to fix these, but I can try to explain why I don't like them, if you're interested.

• Propositional knowledge
• everything under statistics!
• hypothesis: not NPOV RE falsibiability
• phenomenon and friends
• Conservation laws
• Interpreted language: it's not about the language, but the language environment
• Grammar
• Definition of music
• Grain of salt
• Class warfare
• Objectivity
• Basic process
• Concept
• Popular culture
• Organization
• Cultural imperialism
• Newspeak

See Ryguasu/basic processes.

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To reexamine

• Ultimate reality: whose term is this, anyway?
• Thrift store: haven't I been to several for-profit thrift stores?
• Singular they: maybe compare to other singular/plural entities, e.g. "salt".
• History of economic thought
• Self-esteem
• Autonomous building
• intuition
• Programming language
• Exploitation
• Theory
• Knowledge
• Theory of justification
• Anti-Americanism

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Ways Wikipedia is strange

Wow. There are pages for particular computer jokes:

• ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL
• C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN

Conflicting theories

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user:Ryguasu/conversion script AI