{"id":4892,"date":"2011-07-01T23:22:12","date_gmt":"2011-07-02T07:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4892"},"modified":"2011-07-02T04:47:48","modified_gmt":"2011-07-02T12:47:48","slug":"speeding-up-by-slowing-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4892","title":{"rendered":"Speeding-up by Slowing-Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Having retrieved a previous month's <abbr title=\"United States Postal Service\">USPS<\/abbr> mail, I was flipping through the July-August issue of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanscientist.org\/\"><cite>American Scientist<\/cite><\/a> (v99 #4), and found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanscientist.org\/include\/popup_fullImage.aspx?key=mAGyoWpHKxoQY2hsuP62n0Xmf3buy\/lRmr\/ObVimeze3w\/+wb\/rozFG177vA4PO+\">a picture captioned thus:<\/a> <blockquote><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanscientist.org\/include\/popup_fullImage.aspx?key=mAGyoWpHKxoQY2hsuP62n0Xmf3buy\/lRmr\/ObVimeze3w\/+wb\/rozFG177vA4PO+\">Middle-aged and elderly people exercising during <q>Respect for the Aged Day<\/q> in Tokyo in 2005.  Japan's population is <u>aging particularly quickly<\/u>.  The ratio of people younger than 20 compared to those older than 65 is shifting, from 9.3 in 1950 to a predicted 0.59 in 2025.  If scientists succeed at <u>slowing aging<\/u>, this trend may well <u>accelerate<\/u>.<\/a><\/blockquote> (Underscores mine.) So the caption is claiming that the population is aging <em>quickly<\/em> and may age even <em>more quickly<\/em> if aging is <em>slowed<\/em>.<\/p> <p>Now, what's really happening in that caption is that the verb <q>age<\/q> is being used in two related but very different senses.  In <q>aging particularly quickly<\/q>, the sense is one of <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">increase in average chronological age<\/span>; in <q>slowing aging<\/q>, the sense is one of <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">become decrepit<\/span>.  The underlying <em>thought<\/em> is entirely reasonable; the <em>expression<\/em> is inept, because it moves from one meaning to the other (and then implicitly back to the first) without signally that it is doing so <em>except<\/em> in the sense that the passage is otherwise absurd; best not to make the reader sort-out such things.<\/p> <p>I don't know who wrote that caption.  The author of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanscientist.org\/issues\/pub\/2011\/4\/aging-to-treat-or-not-to-treat\">the piece in which it is embedded<\/a> actually notes <blockquote>the word aging refers to different things<\/blockquote> exactly to explain how confusions of these meanings results <em>in practice<\/em> in logically invalid arguments.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having retrieved a previous month's USPS mail, I was flipping through the July-August issue of American Scientist (v99 #4), and found a picture captioned thus: Middle-aged and elderly people exercising during Respect for the Aged Day in Tokyo in 2005. Japan's population is aging particularly quickly. The ratio of people younger than 20 compared to [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,117,4],"tags":[1025,446],"class_list":["post-4892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-communication","category-public","tag-equivocation","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}