Rationality Quotes November 2013

MalcolmOcean

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

That's because words are in general a grossly inadequate way to express thoughts. I wonder if telepathy would help with that.

What do you mean with telepathy? You can't just transfer data from one neural net into another with having some sort of common data protocal that makes classifications. You still need some sort of language.

0NancyLebovitz13y

That would depend partly on the specific problems with the words, and partly on the rationality of the people. If everyone is making the same mistake, telepathy will just amplify the problem. There will be a chorus of agreement which is amplifying the mistake. If people are using the wrong word, but with different shadings, then perhaps people will look into how well the word fits the concept it is supposed to indicate. However, the odds favor people yelling at each other about who's right.

6TheOtherDave13y

I suspect shared access to the conceptual referents of words would help with that specific problem, yes. I suspect (with Feynman) that it would make only a small difference. In particular, I suspect that if we did that we'd run more often into the currently-masked problem that everybody thinks about things a little bit wrong. (People seem to differ in their interpretations of "telepathy," so I've started trying to develop the habit of Tabooing the word. The irony of this in the current context does not escape me.)

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