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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
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.
Of note is that Lojban doesn't fall into that chair trap in particular. I can easily talk about "le stizu" the same way I use "the chair" in English.
More literally, "le stizu" means "the particular chair(s) which in context I'm obviously referring to". Lojban is all about using context to reduce unneccessary verbiage, same as a natural language. The big difference is that the ambiguity in Lojban is easier to locate, and easier to reduce when it becomes necessary.
(Also, if I really did need chair^1 and chair^2 for som... (read more)