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I sometimes try to talk with my mother about truth, reality, correct beliefs and so on. Her problem is, she is relativist. To her, the idea that there's only one reality, and that contradictory beliefs are incompatible is not only false, but repugnant.

One of the major causes happens to be vocabulary. In French, the closest synonymous for belief, "croyance", carries a heavy religious connotation. We have other words, such as "knowledge", "opinion"… but they have other problems. We just don't have a short colloquial word to convey the idea of a probability distribution, and no more.

"No problem, I'll just define the word for her." But I'm not allowed to. I'm supposed to be accessible, which means no long sentences, and no jargon. My trying to be precise comes of as pedantic, pretentious, and needlessly complicated.

And so we're stuck. She doesn't understand what I mean, and I can't explain it to her. Even worse, she actually believes she does understand. Because my words have meanings to her. Just not the meanings I wanted to convey.

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Regarding solo pieces, quartets, and quintets, you should note that guitar has frets. Playing in tune is much easier compared to say, the cello. While becoming a good guitarist requires just as much effort than becoming a good cellist, merely playing something that sounds cool requires much, much less effort.




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