• 2 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 16th, 2023

help-circle



  • Great question! The answer is that, well, you don’t, but that’s not what I’m intending unstained to mean here.

    As it turns out, “unstained” is structurally ambiguous, because English has two different “un-” prefixes, each of which has different functions and different category selection requirements.

    The first attaches to verbs, and means “reverse the action of”, e.g. un-tie, un-do, un-stain, etc. The second attaches to adjectives, and means “not X”, e.g. un-happy, un-satisfied, etc.

    So, if we want to form the word “undoable”, we can either take the verb “do” and attach “-able” first, giving us an adjective “doable” to which we can then add “un-” to give us “undoable”, an adjective meaning “not able to be done” (“Flying by flapping your arms is undoable”)
    OR
    We can take “do” and add the other “un-” first, giving us a verb “undo” meaning “to reverse the action of something” to which we can then add the suffix “-able”, giving us “undoable”, a different adjective meaning “able to be undone” (“Simple knots are easily undoable”)

    So, while both of these look and sound like the same word, they actually have different structures that correspond to the differences in their meanings.

    In my OP, you read “unstained” as “unstain-ed”, with “un-” attaching to “stain” to give a verb “unstain” meaning “to reverse the staining of”, and then added the participle suffix, while my intended structure was to attach “stain” and “-ed” first, giving a participle (adjective) “stained”, to which we can then add the other prefix “un-”, giving “un-stained” “not stained”.














  • In December, Waymo safety data—based on 7.1 million miles of driverless operations—showed that human drivers are four to seven times more likely to cause injuries than Waymo cars.

    From your first article.

    Cruise, which is a subsidiary of General Motors, says that its safety record “over five million miles” is better in comparison to human drivers.

    From your second.

    Your third article doesn’t provide any numbers, but it’s not about fully autonomous vehicles anyway.

    In short, if you’re going to claim that their track record is actually worse than humans, you need to provide some actual evidence.

    Edit: Here’s a recent New Scientist article claiming that driverless cars “generally demonstrate better safety than human drivers in most scenarios” even though they perform worse in turns, for example.