
St. Hildegard's Litteræ Ignotæ (2016) - danielam
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/Hildegard.html
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jhbadger
I think this is misunderstanding the purpose of the Litterae Ignotae -- it
wasn't just a substitution cipher for encrypting text for security reasons,
but a writing system for an artificial language called the Lingua Ignota. It's
not entirely clear what the purpose of this language was, but it may have had
some mystical significance to herself and her followers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Ignota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Ignota)

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userulluipeste
An unrelated note (for the sake of intellectual curiosity): the author used
the term "patroness" for a female in the role of patron, but that actually has
its own word - "matron".

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eschutte2
Can you provide a source for that? I'm having trouble finding any support for
the use of "matron" in the way you describe.

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DanielLihaciu
This was pre-Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church back when there were holy people,
and interesting things like this. Glad to see this on HN

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dang
Unfortunately a comment like this is likely to start an unholy argument about
holy people.

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Yetanfou
Should intellectually curious people be afraid of arguments about, well,
anything? It is in the confrontation between dissimilar thoughts that
understanding can arise after all, those who just preach to the choir end up
neither enlightening nor enlightened. If the argument turned into a pie-
throwing contest it would make sense to curtail it. Before that time, not so
much.

~~~
dang
I meant to reply to this at the time but forgot to come back—sorry.

The kind of conversation you're talking about is desirable and has taken place
throughout history, but not on large internet forums. It requires small
groups. This is true even when the conversation takes place in public—think
Socrates at the agora, or the Federalist Papers, or debates in journals. There
may be hundreds or (in electronic media) millions of listeners gathered round,
but the number of speakers remains small.

On a large, public, optionally-anonymous internet forum like HN, where anybody
can—and will—pipe up with their opinion just because they have one, there is
basically zero chance of a conversation on a difficult, divisive topic going
deep into new places. Instead it will either dissipate into repetition of
conventional opinion or—more likely—turn into a fight along tribal lines. I
have a feeling one could model this using statistical mechanics.

Once you understand this, it should be clear that it's not a question of being
afraid of arguments or questions about anything. It's about how to operate
this place in a way that encourages its strengths while minimizing the worst
of its downsides—how to 'let your profits run and cut your losses'. The longer
I do this job the more I appreciate McLuhan's "medium is the message" insight.
The content that appears here is so deeply conditioned by the size and
structure of the forum that I'm tempted to say that other factors are
negligible. That would be an exaggeration, but not by as much as one would
assume.

