Bo102010 comments on Working Mantras - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 August 2009 10:08PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (57)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 August 2009 01:22:27AM 5 points [-]

I'm suspicious of the idea that an author could mean one thing, and yet accidentally form a statement which has a different interpretation that is still true, like taking the syllables of a true sentence in Japanese, reciting them out loud, and finding that they form a true sentence in English. My childhood experience with Judaic "reinterpretation" of inconvenient Biblical passages may have something to do with this.

But as said, this is far more plausibly going to happen with poetic, evocative, indirect statements like those in the Twelve Virtues, than with sentences from a random OBLW post.

Comment author: Bo102010 26 August 2009 02:23:28AM *  2 points [-]

Didn't Hofstadter do something like a "grammatically correct sentence in one language that is also phonetically correct in another language" in one of his books or articles? Not that it undermines your point, but I couldn't find it and vaguely remember seeing it before.