To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. The availability of a diagnostic label for [the] bias... makes it easier to anticipate, recognize and understand.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Yeah, a good compression algorithm--a dictionary that has short words for the important stuff--is vital to learning just about anything. I've noticed that in the martial arts; there's no way to learn a parry, entry, and takedown without a somatic vocabulary for the subparts of that; and the definitions of your "words" affects both the ease of learning and the effectiveness of its execution.
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: