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Annoyance comments on Taboo "rationality," please. - Less Wrong
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Y'know how we get around that? Insist on definitions. They're still pretty sparse on the ground, here. And the one that's had the most publicity is a very poor match for the generally-accepted meaning of the term.
Normally, people manage to communicate using our informal, muddly, complicated, natural language abilities. Sometimes this breaks down when we're discussing value-laden or highly abstract concepts.
Breaking words down into definitions doesn't solve the problem - the components that you define with need to be communicated, too. This lowest-level communication needs to be informal, non-defined primitives.
Tabooing words reboots the informal process of achieving communication, without the fuss of arguing about whether a definition is correct, or queries about which definition you are using.
"Normally, people manage to communicate using our informal, muddly, complicated, natural language abilities."
I think that, in actuality, they don't. Or rather, they communicate very little: mostly by indicating positions that the listener is already familiar with.
Ever try explaining a truly new idea to someone? With most people, I find that if they don't already have a referent, they simply can't understand, because they're not used to extracting complex information from natural language.
We're in agreement. The position that I was arguing against is something like: "People can't communicate unless they first define their terms." That would be an infinite regress; the only possibility would be that people never manage to communicate.
Okay, I'll accept that.
I offer a restatement: people can't communicate at a complex and abstract level unless their words are first defined in terms of words with already-accepted and -understood meanings.
If I begin to talk about gilxorfibbin without explaining what that is, it's unlikely the context will make it possible for you to know what I'm discussing.
The problem is that definitions are not hierarchical, you never get to the lowest level, because there isn't one. You need to choose a way to the target concept that communicates it as unambiguously as possible. The words spoken by one person guide another on his own map, pointing to the deeper and deeper concepts that require nontrivial arrangements from the words to single out, or even build anew.
Some words are broken, and lead the listener in the swamps. We should avoid these words, and use other healthier landmarks instead. Sometimes it requires a lengthy detour to get around the swamps, but the road is not necessarily any bumpier or conversely more streamlined than what would be expected of the original one.