= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
mare-of-night comments on The Relevance of Advanced Vocabulary to Rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (41)
I think a doctor would do just fine inventing her own word for heart attack, if she didn't have any colleagues to communicate with. A rationalist would only get extra value out of using "real" words for concepts rather than ones they made up if they could speak with other people who knew of the same concepts.
Now that I think about it, some of my friends have done something sort of like inventing words when we needed to refer to concepts that didn't have an existing label. One of my programmer friends tends to take a common word that's sorta close and write it like a PHP variable ($protect, etc.). I use "ouroboros" to mean a being that can't exist without hurting itself, and I'll tell people that I use the word that way if the concept comes up in discussion so that I can refer to it later without having to re-explain.
What sorts of things can't exist without hurting themselves?
Or is it pointing out the effect of entropy on all living things?
The concept came up in the first place when a friend and I were arguing over whether it would be ethically good to instantiate all possible minds, if you had a large enough simulation for them to live in that would allow them to self-modify and modify their circumstances however they wanted. (There are technical difficulties with that, of course - like how to keep all these minds from hurting each other without the ones that want to hurt people being unsatisfied - but this is assuming there's some way to resolve that.) My objection to doing this was that some parts of mindspace will have extremely unhappy lives, but will not change or kill themselves if given the opportunity. For example, they might believe it is immoral to self-modify.
In the real world, mental illnesses like severe depression seem similar, in that it's painful because of the way one's mind is. Depressed people do want to stop being depressed, but it's very difficult to do that.
As I said above, I think I kind of misphrased my question while trying to make it clear in my head - almost ironically, my inability to find the right words hampered my ability to communicate what I meant.
I agree completely about people making up words for new ideas - I suppose that's what I meant to bypass: we make up words as shorthand for longer concepts, because if we didn't, it would take a lot longer to say or explain what we meant. My question was meant to be along the lines of, if we didn't have those new words, would our rationality be hampered by the lack of specific words (even if we knew what we meant in our minds)? (You don't have to answer that, I was just trying to clarify!)