Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong

55 Post author: sketerpot 10 August 2010 02:24AM

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Comment author: novalis 11 August 2010 04:08:57PM 13 points [-]

Another classic example of the brain's hackishness, which does not seem to have been mentioned here before, is the sentence, "More people have been to Russia than I have." If you say this sentence to someone (try it!), they'll at first claim that it was a perfectly reasonable, grammatical sentence. But then you ask them what it means, they'll start to say something, then stop, look confused, and laugh.

(Yes, there is a parsing of "have" as "possess", but this is (a) precluded by inflection, and (b) not ever what someone initially comes up with).

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 August 2010 04:49:39PM 2 points [-]

Ooh, same embedded system crasher as "I couldn't fail to disagree with you less."

Comment author: roryokane 14 August 2010 01:38:32AM 2 points [-]

I don’t see how that is a system crasher sentence. I think I can successfully parse it as “I must succeed in agreeing with you more”. Yes, it takes a while to figure out the meaning because turning each negative into a positive is a separate step, but there is a meaning in the end, unlike the sentence about Russia.