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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
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.
I'm a big fan of Lojban in principle, even more so after studying it in depth for a paper I'm writing, but I just don't think it's possible to significantly affect thought through language.
That's why General Semantics is a load of crap to me - being anal retentive with language is just going to annoy the heck out of everyone involved, and nothing else. There's a good reason why natural language is so vague.