This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Extremely short version: it's a load of crap
Slightly longer version: He taught that you should never refer to things in general terms or else you'll confuse the map for the territory. For example, the chair I'm sitting in now is chair^1, the identical chair across the table is chair^2, there's chair^1 as I'm eperiencing it now, chair^1 as I experienced it last night, and so forth. Oh and you should try to avoid the use of the copula "to be" because it encourages sloppy thinking (i'm not sure how, just paraphrasing what I remember)
You didn't make it sound like a load of crap: it reminds me of the idea of using Lojban, or even better a formal logic system, for everyday speech. Impractical, but it would avoid a ton of misunderstanding, or spilled blood for that matter.