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- Hacker News
- I enjoy this kind of thing. I definitely take objection to their entropy argument though. A cheeseburger with like 5 ingredients stacked into layers is not in the same entropy universe as a salad with hundreds of little leaves and chunks of food in a big pile. Criticizing the cube model on the basis that eating the food can change the category seems a little silly when even they would admit that a salad eaten down to just a singular crouton is no longer a salad.
- Salads are dishes without a fixed structure. You can randomly rearrange the ingredients without changing it into another dish. For example, a pizza is salad on top of dough, a burger is salad between buns, and a burrito is salad wrapped in a tortilla. But as a whole, pizzas, burgers, and burritos each have a strict, defined structure, so they aren't salads, they just contain a salad component. Additionally, anything made mostly of liquid by volume is a soup or beverage, not a salad.by avallach
- Watermelon salad?by dmichulke
- A wedge salad has a fixed structure. Layered salads have a definite structure. Both are definitely salads.by bryanlarsen
- This is essentially just Ontology applied to mundane topics like salads:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
It might seem trivial when debating silly topics, but when you get to the actual structure of reality, debating where one thing ends and another begins is really interesting.
by keiferski - It would be ontology if you consider salad (properly defined) to be part of the fundamental fabric of the universe.by stdbrouw
- Today I am especially grateful that I work with cool people.by tigermafia
- Nice read!
I was interested in similar thoughts around definitions and scopes long time ago https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/4182/List-vs-Categ...
Something may look obvious to you unless you get into definitions (stage 1), discussions about definitions (stage 2), trying to get alignment on definitions (stage 3), and so on.
by gps372 - I'm surprised to not find the word "salt" anywhere in the page. "Salad" essentially means "salted". Other words like "salsa"/sauce, and sausage share the same root: salt.
With this in mind it's more clear to me what a salad is. First you have to understand that we are talking about food preparations. A salad is not just raw ingredients on a plate. It is explicitly a preparation. Most preparations are cooked, but a salad is merely salted, or sauced, which itself contains salt.
I don't think actual salt is necessarily required, but you do need something to "bring together" the ingredients into a salad. A balsamic glaze is a good option if you are avoiding salt.
- The author might not be aware of it but there have been extensive discussions and work about such terms in the philosophy of language in the past two decades (and earlier). I've heard whole lectures about whether fruit salad really is a salad, and the sandwich examples, too.
In my opinion, geometric meaning theories capture the associated problems fairly well, for example Conceptual Spaces. In linguistics, prototype theory and related approaches have dealt with them since the 1970s. That is not to say that the problems are solved but in my opinion many problems come from an artificial focus on logical concept decompositions and the fact that language doesn't work that way.
My 2 cents as a former philosopher who worked in this area.
- I really love this, it’s what I want to see in HN. But I can’t resist joining the pointless debate:
- A primarily cooked dish, particularly if it is cooked all together or is served warm, is definitely not a salad.
- An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad.
- English speaking people add the term “salad” to a bunch of concoctions that are definitely not salads.
by oersted - - warm potato salads are better than cold ones.
- few things are better than a blue cheese wedge salad.
by bryanlarsen
I definitely agree, but grandfathering in this specific exception suggests a definition variant: a salad can be mixed and shuffled (possibly from an ordered initial state), and in this case it remains a salad; it isn't damaged, and on the contrary it usually improves (typically by increasing the entropy of solid component positions and distributing liquid condiments more uniformly).> An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad.by HelloNurse- As non-soup eater I am strongly against use of term soup here. Surely soup also should be relatively strongly defined. And not used as adjective for wet. Clearly soups must have some water content level. Otherwise too many things would be soup. And those clearly are not soups.
So I ask first to properly have Soup Theory before using it in relation of describing things like salads.
by Ekaros - I love the amount of effort that went into this, and find it very amusing. I've had similar forays into defining sandwiches, ravioli, soups, and so on, but never in such meticulous detail.
But taking it seriously, a word like "salad" is best understood, IMO, as a family resemblance [0]: a group of inconsistently overlapping properties. Or, you could understand it functionally/pragmatically (a salad is what I order when I want a salad), where the meaning is not derived from an internal property but from the social system that produced it.
For salad or sandwich, it's all rather unimportant, naturally. But I do think taking this step back and questioning what it even means for an utterance to have meaning can help dissolve some serious and otherwise contentious philosophical issues. ("Intelligence" seems to be a rather relevant example.)
Mathematical definition is enchanting to those of us with an inclination towards abstraction. But just because it's a noun doesn't mean it's a thing --- or at least, not a thing independently of the speaker and their community of speakers.
by movpasd - Yes, I actually think this sort of self-aware silliness (also hot dog sandwich, etc) could be looked at as kind of “koans” of rationality. Ultimately the goal might be to recognise that pure rationality is incompatible with the inherent nebulosity of applying “meanings” to the world, and to embrace that interplay!
Or more likely i’m overthinking it and they’re just a way to have a funny argument with friends.
by heisenzombie - > Mathematics is the study of precisely imagined things. It's about imagining something so precisely that your idea of it is fully defined. There's no space for opinion or interpretation. Two mathematicians thinking about the same mathematical object, defined in the same way, are not thinking about two versions of it. They're actually thinking about the same object.
- Rob Miles
Any time I read something like this post, I can't help but think that it's people mimicking the language of mathematics because they don't understand its purpose. To them, math seems like pedantry, constantly obsessing about minor details that are seemingly irrelevant. When in reality, that obsession with full and complete definitions in math serves a purpose.
This discussion of salads serves no purpose. In fact, it's arguably meant to be confusing.
by CSMastermind - If taken 100% seriously, the post is just bad mathematics and bad linguistics. But I don't think it's intended to be rigorous work of either discipline.
But I do share the frustration regarding pedantry in mathematics, and I hate it when people mistake dictionary entries for attempts at rigorous definition.
by cedilla - I’m fine with their first consideration:
> A salad must be a mixture of greens.
The only additional realization you need is that things like “fruit salad” and “chicken salad” are using the word “salad” figuratively. There’s no reason to expect our definition of “salad” to cover figurative usage. After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?
by tshaddox - >After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?
This is covered further down in the article where it's pointed out that one of the Merriam-Webster definitions is
>"A usually incongruous mixture : HODGEPODGE"
The author points out that Merriam-Webster actually has a looser definition of salad than they do, because the article is only considering edible things to count.
Also, I disagree - I don't think "fruit salad", or "chicken salad", or "egg salad" etc are "figurative" (not sure what you even mean by that), I would absolutely consider them legitimate salads.
Not saying I agree with the rest of the claims, but it is funny to think of a bowl of skittles as being a salad, and it's always a mindfuck to think about just how impossible it is to categorize every little thing into a neat little box.
by Hugsbox - Reminds me of when I ordered Salade Marché in Paris and it was a large slice of paté with a frisson of endive on the side :-)by AdamN
- > A salad must be a mixture of greens.
My mums German potato salad disagrees
by hi_hi - We've got it. Hacker news is salad!by qwertytyyuu