sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: VincentYu 18 November 2012 01:59PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (213)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 21 November 2012 03:51:48PM 5 points [-]

I have now written a total of about six thousand words on five fairly concept-heavy subjects (linear algebra, parallax and cepheid variables, the gold standard, the normal distribution/Central Limit Theorem, and complex numbers), There are a couple of observations I would like to make.

Although it's fun, and stylistically appealing, to write as if you were talking to a five-year-old, there are plenty of sentences that would be thought of as "adult"-level sentences which require little to no modification. There are a lot of words in the top 1000 list. Also, there are specific words I find myself trying to use over and over again. "Shape", "triangle" and "measure" crop up a lot as far as subjects with geometric interpretations go. I would be interested in seeing a log of all the forbidden words that crop up across all users.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 November 2012 06:15:26PM 3 points [-]

I would be interested in seeing a log of all the forbidden words that crop up across all users.

Me too. Say, a count of the 10 most-wanted-but-forbidden. Then unsanction those, and see what the next 10 are, and so on. I want to know if the increase in available subtlety corresponds with ascending complexity in physical intuition, or if it's something else.