Alternately, i you don't trust your audience to understand counting rules
The problem is not "understandign counting rules" the problem is that it takes mental bandwith to do counting. It doesn't take mental bandwith to know which of the objects in the last sentence was the destination.
On the other hand it's mentally easier to calculate the distance between month-3 and month-6 then between March and June. But that kind of thought didn't enter into Loglan. It just copied the way Western languages talk about months.
It's easy to take a dictionary and simply give every English concept a new name. It's quite hard to actually think at the fundamental level about the concept in question and how reality can be sliced. Jahai seems to slice odors better than English. But it might be not trival to teach Jahai derived odor categories.
mental difference...between March and June.
Maybe for ordinary people (like me), the mental difference between March and June is not just the number of days separating them, and does not equal MD between, say, July and October. Calling them by numbers would mean having to re-tie the connotation tails to new symbols, nothing more.
This was going to be a reply in a discussion between ChristianKl and MattG in another thread about conlangs, but their discussion seemed to have enough significance, independent of the original topic, to deserve a thread of its own. If I'm doing this correctly (this sentence is an after-the-fact update), then you should be able to link to the original comments that inspired this thread here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0h/linguistic_mechanisms_for_less_wrong_cognition/cxb2
Is a lack of ambiguity necessary for clear thinking? Are there times when it's better to be ambiguous? This came up in the context of the extent to which a conlang should discourage ambiguity, as a means of encouraging cognitive correctness by its users. It seems to me that something is being taken for granted here, that ambiguity is necessarily an impediment to clear thinking. And I certainly agree that it can be. But if detail or specificity are the opposites of ambiguity, then surely maximal detail or specificity is undesirable when the extra information isn't relevant, so that a conlang would benefit from not requiring users to minimize ambiguity.
Moving away from the concept of conlangs, this opens up some interesting (at least to me) questions. Exactly what does "ambiguity" mean? Is there, for each speech act, an optimal level of ambiguity, and how much can be gained by achieving it? Are there reasons why a certain, minimal degree of ambiguity might be desirable beyond avoiding irrelevant information?