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by lmm 1859 days ago
> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context

Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?" Both those sentences are natural English and in a certain sense they "mean the same"; nonetheless they convey a quite different feeling, and neither is a replacement for the other.

1 comments

>> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context

> Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?"

I was talking about in that example. I was not making a claim about every arbitrary sentence containing the phrase "being watched".

Understand that if you add enough contortions and make a sentence jarring enough, you won't get anything across without additional context. (To a human I mean. I guess I have to add that caveat because other you'll post another rebuttal about how a sufficiently strong AI would parse it just fine.)

There's nothing jarring about the sentence though. It's just normal English. The difference between "she's being watched" and "someone's watching her" conveys the same meaning that it would in any other sentence.