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NNOTM comments on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Comments (616)
Maybe my definition of "supernatural" isn't the correct definition, but I often think of the word as describing certain things which we do not (currently) understand. And if we do eventually come to understand them, then we will need to augment our understanding of the natural laws...Assuming this "supernatural" stuff actually exists.
I suppose a programer could defy the laws he made for his virtual world when he intervenes from outside the system....But earthly programers obey the natural physical laws when they mess with the hardware, which also runs based on these same laws. I understand this is what you mean by "constrained by natural laws".
There are no "correct" or "incorrect" definitions, though, are there? Definitions are subjective, it's only important that participants of a discussion can agree on one.
Well... Definitions that map badly onto the underlying reality are inconvenient at best and actively misleading at worst.
Besides, definitions do not exist in a vacuum. They can be evaluated by their fitness to a purpose which means that if you specify a context you can speak of correct and incorrect definitions.
That's true, though I think "optimal" would be a better word for that than "correct".
Even agreement isn't necessary, but successful communication would be nice.
When A says X to B, it helps if A and B agree on what X refers to at that time, even if X refers to something different when B says X.
True. There's also the option "B implicitly understands what A means by X although it usually means something else to B" which is different from "A and B explicitly agree on what X refers to at that time".
Consider also the possibility that A says X to B correctly predicting that it means something else to B. This would also be sufficient for successful communication, no explicit agreement needed.
Perhaps you meant these to be contained in your statement, and NNOTM did too. In that case we both failed to understand eachother without explicit agreement :)
Yes, I agree that (case 1) A and B explicitly agreeing on what X means is different from (case 2) B implicitly understanding what X means to A, or (case 3) A implicitly understanding what X will mean to B.
And, yes, I meant "A and B agree on what X refers to [when A says X to B]" to include all three cases, as well as several others.
And yes, if you understood me to be referring only to case 1, then we failed to understand each other.
Could be a language issue. The Finnish word for agreement pretty much always refers to explicit agreement, whereas there is no simple word for implicit agreement in Finnish language that isn't directly translatable to "mutual understanding" or something like that.
In English, "agree" often means something like "coincide". (And Romance languages sometimes say "coincide" for "agree", as in opinions coinciding.)