jimrandomh comments on "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 May 2009 07:24AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 18 May 2009 03:41:28PM 0 points [-]

So you maintain that anything which follows a few syntactic and semantic laws cannot be gibberish? I disagree; text can have meaning and still be gibberish. Consider a sequence of words drawn uniformly at random from a dictionary, then slotted into a repeating template like (noun) (verb) (article) (adjective) (noun). The template ensures that no rules of syntax are violated. A few constraints on the vocabulary can ensure there are no egregious violations of semantic rules, like green ideas and furious sleeping. Restrict the vocabulary to a few hundred concrete words and you can even ensure that every sentence makes a testable prediction. But it's definitely gibberish.

Comment author: Jack 18 May 2009 04:56:52PM 2 points [-]

Well there are a lot of semantic rules and plenty that we've haven't formalized. So I'm not convinced anyone now alive could write such a program. But I'm not a programmer so maybe someone has proved me wrong. However,iIf they were successful I don't think I would consider the result gibberish- especially if each sentence made a testable prediction. In this case wouldn't some of the predictions be true? If so then it is clear that your definition is not broad enough.

Thats troubling since I had already concluded your definition was too broad because it seemed to include important but complex and falsified scientific claims,