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[Ankesh]

2 + 2 = 4.

Who says thats true? How do you know? Why is 2 + 2 not 5 or 6 or 7?

We come upon the symbolic meaning behind words and alphabets. 2 + 2 = 4 because everyone says so. Everyone agrees to it.

Its the same with gold or paper money. Gold has value because everyone agrees that it has value.

(Most people have become insanely rich not by trading their labour - but because they took advantage of the difference between value different people assign to the same thing - arbitrage / trade / chattling. But thats another discussion.)

Anyways, my point is: "if you can't make money without money, you can't make money with money" maybe factually incorrect. But its symbolically correct. Everyone who reads that knows that Dan Kennedy is talking about the person's own money. Not the community money. "If you can't make money without community money, you can't make money with community money" - doesn't make much sense. So people don't take it into account.

"I've seen hell. It's a place where no-one says what they mean, or means what they say. I live that hell everyday of my life."

That statement is factually incorrect too. How can you live a place?

To communicate, you have to forget such factual incorrectness and jump for the symbolic correctness. Yes there will be communication errors this way - but its the best we've got. Because if you try to be 100% factually correct, you'll be writing 20 pages of footnotes for every one sentence (and you'll need 20 pages of footnote for each sentence in the footnote too... and 20 pages of ----).

Just like this:
http://fair-use.org/mind/1895/04/wha...id-to-achilles

The best you can hope for is try being as clear as possible without sounding silly.