Water Is Wet? (feat. a rant about personality types)

Alternative title: The Noah Takes 1300 Words to Argue Nothing About Nothing to Nobody

Hey! My name’s The Noah and THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS is Noahbody Cares, the blog in which I discuss that about which Nobody cares... about... on my blog.

Thanks for reading Nobody.

In my friend group at university, there are only about 2 topics of conversation that come up every day: enneagram-like personality tests and whether or not water is wet.

In case you’re wondering I’m a level 8 5 wing 6, Chaotic Neutral, moderate, INTJ, Slytherin, Red, C/D, optimistic skeptic.

This graphic requires an
intimate understanding of
early internet culture as
well as pop-psychology
...
Once again Nobody,
thank you for reading!

*asterisk Not that any of those labels are meaningful indicators of how I will behave or how I ought to behave…

**double asterisk because personality, like most things, is fluid and changes over time. That said…

***triple asterisk personality types aren’t designed to tell you how you ought to live, but they are still useful because people find comfort in the fact that other successful people think like them. That said…

****quadruple asterisk you shouldn't find comfort in labels because no one else’s brain works like yours! No one knows and virtually no one cares what’s going on inside your mind! You can't fathom where the heck “thoughts” come from much less how you process information, store energy, and interact with the material world. You don't even know if the material world exists, so what makes you think you can figure out who anybody else "really is deep down" based on a vaguely defined set of characteristics which everyone holds sometimes and no one holds all the time that got vomited up by a 5-minute test written by a non-psychologist's intern designed to sound so general that anyone can read their own meaning into it by dividing logic, emotion, power, and awareness into boxes based on the assumptions that people answer honestly and don't make any unconscious adjustments to bias the results toward the outcome they expect.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t include my zodiac… you're too far gone.

That intro was intended to be one sentence long, sorry. This blog post is already trash and I haven’t even started the meme topic. Now that I’ve lost you Nobody it's time to 

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Some people think water isn’t wet! Weird right?

My friends who think water is NOT wet (just the stuff it’s touching is) typically make the same few arguments

They argue one of three things:

ONE: Water makes dry things wet, therefore it CAN’T be wet

TWO: Water can’t be dried, therefore it CAN’T be wet

THREE: The definition of wet doesn’t include a clause to specifically include water (depending on the dictionary)

People on the “water is wet” team mostly argue:

FOUR: Water contains or is covered in water, so it IS WET.

FIVE: It’s intuitive that water is wet

SIX: Some definitions include a clause specifically including water itself, and those dictionaries are… better… for some reason.

I'm going to be honest. I freaking LOVE this debate! There are few arguments SO polarizing that people don't tie to their identity as a person. I love that the arguments people make about wetness are all utter NONSENSE, but no one takes the time to draw these arguments to their natural conclusions.

You see with some big questions (like “does God exist?”) your answer affects countless “smaller” beliefs. And with some polarizing questions (like “should abortion be legal?”) the answer is connected to lots of other core beliefs, such that flippantly changing ones mind on the issue would require reevaluating dozens or hundreds of other questions and values.

But with the “is water wet?” question, for whatever reason people don’t connect it to ANY other beliefs, and argue about it practically in a different universe from their opinions on how words work, what definitions are, and what they value.

Only 90's kids will understand

To show you what I mean let’s turn these arguments into general rules, and apply those rules to our other beliefs.

Water makes dry things wet, therefore it CAN’T be wet

Soap isn’t soapy because it can make things soapy. Sandy isn’t sandy because it can make things sandy. Complex wording is not complex because sentences can have been made complex by wording which itself is complex in and of itself. God isn’t good because He makes things good. YOU GET IT

That’s not how ANY adjectives work! Why would the word “wet” follow this rule that no other word follows?

Water can’t be dried, therefore it CAN’T be wet

“To SAY that SOMETHING is wet, means the WATER on the SURFACE of that something can be… REMOVED!!” -Some guy on the internet 2017

[source]

Once again, that’s not how opposites work. Ice can’t be made hot, therefore it isn’t cold. Fire can’t be made cold, therefore it isn’t hot. Matthew 5:13b. I guess you could argue that self-describing adjectives are redundant, so saying that fire is hot or water is wet is unnecessary, but is it really incorrect?

So what does the other side argue?

Water contains or is covered in water, so it IS WET.

Water... is water. It doesn’t “contain” water. It’s not “saturated in”, “covered in” or “dripping with” water. It just IS itself.

Or maybe not. Maybe every little water molecule is surrounded by other little water molecules, and that’s what makes it wet? Your opinion on which of these arguments FEELS right seems like the crux of the debate… Until you start applying it to objects other than water and realize that it’s just non-sense.

If we apply this rule to everything than a LOT of spatial verbs lose meaning quickly. Am I “surrounded by” The Noah? Does every taco “contain” a taco? Is my shirt “wearing” a shirt because all its little shirt molecules are surrounded by other little shirt molecules?

THAT’S *clap emoji* NOT *clap emoji* HOW *clap emoji* WORDS *clap emoji* WORK. 

[note: don’t forget to add in the emojis here. That'd be embarrassing]

It’s intuitive that water is wet

If everyone already agreed with you… then everyone would already agree with you. I actually hear this argument a lot in more important conversations. When people are at an impasse they just say “deep down you know I’m right.”

Fun fact… No we don’t. Just because the answer to a question FEELS obvious to you, that doesn’t mean that it FEELS that way to everyone else, because YOUR gut feelings are informed by who YOU are, YOUR beliefs, and YOUR experiences.

Acting like everyone has the same information, experiences, and gut feelings as you, is a SUPRISINGLY common idea. I’ve been guilty of it. You’ve been guilty of it. Or maybe you haven’t. I don’t know you. I literally just assumed I know what you think unironically, while criticizing people who assume they know what you’re thinking. Oops. I’m absolutely leaving this in the final draft!

Finally the topic I wanted to talk about the most is the argument both sides of the debate make:

The definition of wet says _____. Checkmate!

Peruse means to read carefully...
and to read uncarefully.

I have strong feelings about this one, but I’ve already been writing for too long and I’ve got things of consequence to do, so I’ll just link to an article on the “appeal to the definition” fallacy or Argumentum ad Dictionarium if you want to sound like an absolute tool because you know a few words in Latin.

[https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/27/Appeal-to-Definition]

Basically, my opinion is that dictionary writers are just normal people describing how words are used AFTER they are widely used. They don’t have any special knowledge about how words SHOULD be used and they are always about a half-decade behind at best because meanings constantly change when word users overuse or "misuse" words for long enough. You can’t just whip out a dictionary to prove how a word SHOULD be used or that something in the real world MUST BE a certain way.

Heck, Google’s definition of blog starts with “a regularly updated website or web page”, but we all know that THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS is a blog even though my one faithful reader Nobody can confirm that it is by no means updated regularly.

[citation: I call it a blog, and you know what I mean when I say blog. That's what words are. They're just meaningless sounds that we make up in order to communicate our dumb magic thoughts hoping and praying that the people we are talking to piece together those meaningless sounds using the made up words in their own dumb heads. It's a miracle that we can ever understand each other, which is part of why I believe God invented language, but that's another blog post for another day on this regularly updated website .] 

Maybe now people will stop telling me that a sandwich IS filling between two pieces of bread, that everyone who calls themselves a feminist MUST believe in equality of the sexes, or that socialism and capitalism are compatible because definitions can’t track shifts in the worldviews of leaders in a movement, reference Geo-political conflicts in recent last decades, or account for the fact that Submarine Sandwiches are LITERALLY ONE PIECE OF BREAD!

Happy Easter… which is today because Google says so,

-The Noah

Post credits side-note:

If you really like a definition that's fine. I freaking love using definitions to explain what I mean when I say things, but you should never use a definition excluding something to claim that that something is or isn't part of that category. I mean, when it comes to "is water wet?" it's fine make whatever silly argument wins over the nearby crowd. But when it comes to defining someone else's political identity, complex conversations about race or gender, or someone's personal feelings, I wouldn't treat the dictionary as an authority that lays down the law on how things "really are."

Post-Post-credits scenes were normalized by Marvel Studios in 2012:

If you still insist on using the dictionary definition as an authority I can just do it better. Yes, the dictionary says Feminism is "the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes." But Google defines sex as "either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions." independent of gender, which means that all feminism is not only trans exclusionary, but excludes everyone who can't give birth. If you counter that one or both definitions should be updated, that's my point. Definitions don't tell you how words are used.