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James_Miller comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (466)
From Paleohacks.
Reminds me of advice to people who want to know if they can sue someone: You can always sue. You just can't always expect to win.
Similarly:
The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
I don't really see the point of either of these quotes.
Edit: Fixed. Thanks.
Its not air-droppable if there's no aircraft capable of lifting it!
Because Markdown renumbers numbered lists for you (making it easier for you to re-order them). Prevent it with a backslash before the period:
Are the maxims actually collected somewhere, or just referenced piecemeal in the comic?
Wikipedia has them.
It seems like the author is defying the common usage without a reason here. The common usage of edible is "safe to eat", or more precisely "able to be eaten without killing you", and I don't see what use redefining it to mean "able to be swallowed" is. It just seems like a trite, definitional argument that is primarily about status.
I take "All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once." to be a useful warning, hopefully made more memorable by being framed as a joke.
Apart from the hilarious joke, this quote makes the point that "will kill you" is not actually the same as impossible to eat, which more generally generally points out that impossible is often used in place of "really bad idea."
I read edible as a synonym for eatable. Poisonous mushrooms: edible. rocks, not edible. That's how that word is attatched in my head. I assume you read it as non-poisonous/fit to eat so it feels like a crass and overt redefinition. If the guy who wrote that reads that word the same way I assume you do it's a really cheap joke. If he doesn't the quote makes a lot of sense.
Sure. It's really an amusing play on words more than a rationality quote.
I agree with the sense of your comment but wish to nitpick - I think "nontoxic" means you can eat it without it killing you. Crayons fit this definition, but are not properly called "edible"; many flowers can be eaten without killing you but "edible flowers" are the ones you might actually want to eat on purpose. "Edible" is narrower.
Nonetheless, the sentiment "You can do X, but only once" seems broadly useful.
Can you explain how so? This does not seem obvious to me. It seems broadly true, but not broadly useful. (And I'm not really sure what you mean by useful anyway.)
My model of Eliezer says: "You can launch AGI, but only once."
I think I get it. If you have a big weapon of doom that will ruin everything, it's not useless; you can use it when you're absolutely desperate. So options that sound completely stupid are worth looking at when you need a last resort.
Having a scary desperate option, along with clear, publicly-known criteria which will trigger it, can prevent things from deteriorating to the point where you'll be tempted to use that desperate option. A honeybee will die if it stings you, but it will sting you if it feels too threatened, so people try to avoid antagonizing honeybees, and the bees don't end up dead because people didn't antagonize them.
Related: Thomas Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict".
Just because you can do something doesn't mean the price for doing it is acceptable.
Just because the price for doing something is your own death (or consignment to non-volatile ROM) doesn't mean the price is unacceptable.
You and Alicorn are confusing denotation and connotation here. "Edible" simply means "able to be eaten"; it is used instead of "eatable", because the latter is for some reason not considered a "standard" or "legitimate" word. As such, it possesses exactly the same semantics as "eatable" would; in fact, a sufficiently supercilious English teacher will correct you to "edible" if you say "eatable". (Similarly "legible" instead of "readable", although "readable" seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)
Yes, it's true that people only usually apply the word to a more restricted subset of things than those which won't kill the eater; but such a behavioral tendency should not be confused with the actual semantics of the word.
The sense of the quote is exactly the same as if it had been:
In this case, it would hardly be legitimate to complain that "can be eaten" means "safe to be eaten". The fact is that the phrase is ambiguous, and the quote is a play on that ambiguity. Likewise in its original form, with "edible".
You've just provided a reasonable first-approximation analysis of wit!
Something "illegible" cannot have its component characters distinguished or identified. Something that is merely "unreadable" might just have ridiculously convoluted syntax or something.
Of course 'edible' does literally mean 'can be eaten', and equally of course, it is normally interpreted as 'fit to be eaten'. That's why paleohacks writes it that way. It's a joke!
When did this turn into the jokes thread?
If you're not having fun, why bother?
I've seen a distinction being made between “legible” applying to typography etc. and “readable” applying to grammar etc., so that a über-complicated technical text typeset in LaTeX would be legible but not readable, and a story for children written in an awful handwriting would be readable but not legible.
The standard definition of edible is fit to be eaten, not "able to be eaten".
Indeed. Given people like Monsieur Mangetout or disorders like pica, it's hard to see why we would even bother using the word 'edible' if it didn't mean fit to be eaten.
To claim that the actual semantics of a word can be defined by anything other than the behavioural tendencies of its users is, at best, highly controversial. Whatever you or I may think, "irregardless" just is a (near) synonym for "regardless" and, to judge from my own experience (and the majority of comments from native speakers on the thread) "edible" actually means "safe to eat" (although, as Alicorn says, it's a little bit more complicated than that).
Words mean exactly what people use them to mean - there is no higher authority (in English, at least, there isn't even a plausible candidate for a higher authority).
On the contrary, it's trivially true. If semantics depended exclusively on behavior patterns, then novel thoughts would not be expressible. The meaning of the word "yellow" does not logically depend solely on which yellow objects in the universe accidentally happen to have been labeled "yellow" by humans. It is entirely possible that, sitting on a planet somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, is a yellow glekdoftx. Under the negation-of-my-theory (I'll try not to strawman you by saying "under your theory"), that would be impossible, because, due to the fact that humans have never previously described a glekdoftx as "yellow", the extension of that term does not include any glekdoftxes. Examples like this should suffice to demonstrate that semantic information does not just contain information about verbal behavior; it also contains information about logical relationships.
Guess what: I agree! Here, indeed, is my proof of this fact:
See how easy that was? And yet, here I am, dealing with a combinatorial explosion of hostile comments (and even downvotes), all because I dared to make a mildly nontrivial, ever-so-slightly inferentially distant point!
Insert exclamation of frustration here.
Yes, that thought is in my cache too. It doesn't address my point, which is more subtle.
It's reasonable to play with the expected meanings - but playing with the expected meanings in this case seems inconsistent with applying the label "Rationality Quote."
The quote is isomorphic to "Don't eat poisonous things - and some things are poisonous." That quote won't get upvotes if posted as a Rationality Quote - why should its equivalent?
I don't see the equivalence.
But remember, I'm not defending the quote as a Rationality Quote. I'm only defending the quote against the charge of inappropriate word choice.
I'm advisedly ignoring the original context, but I'm curious about the idea that your behavioral tendencies in particular (and mine) with respect to the usage of "irregardless" don't affect the actual semantics of the word. At best, it seems that "irregardless" both is and is not a synonym for "regardless"... as well as both being and not being an antonym of it.
Unless only some usages count? Perhaps there's some kind of mechanism for extrapolating coherent semantics from the jumble of conflicting usages. Is it simple majoritarianism?
Upvoted for this.
I don't think I'm confusing the two, I'm saying the connotation is what's important when the connotation is what is almost always used. And I'm not claiming that the quote is wrong, just that it's not really a rationality quote.
Unfortunately, this sentence itself seems to betray some confusion: "connotation" is not a kind of alternative definition; hence it makes no sense to say that "the connotation is what is almost always used". Rather, both denotation and connotation are always present whenever a word is used. "Connotation" refers to implications a word has outside of its meaning. For example, the words "copulate" and "fuck" have the same meaning (denotation), but differing connotations.
The crucial difference is that, while changing the denotation of a word (or getting it wrong) can change the truth-value of a statement, merely changing the connotation never can. Instead, it merely changes the register, signaling-value, or "appropriateness" of the statement. A scientist, in the ordinary course of affairs, might report having observed two lizards copulating; but it would be rather shocking to read in a scientific paper about lizards fucking, and one virtually never does. However, if a scientist ever were to write such a thing, the complaint would not be that they had claimed something false; it would be merely that they had made an inappropriate choice of language.
A lot of verbal humor results from using "inappropriate" connotations. The "edible" quote is an example of this, in fact. The listener understands that the sentence is true but still "off" in some way. Using an inappropriate connotation is not a misuse of the word, otherwise the humor wouldn't work (or at least, it wouldn't work in the same way -- there are other forms of verbal humor which do involve incorrect usage).
Well, I agree about that -- but that doesn't really seem to have been the main thrust of your comment. Your claim seemed to be that the quotee had redefined the word "edible"; and this is what I am disputing.
This is a silly argument.