Origin comments on Feel the Meaning - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 February 2008 01:01AM

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Comment author: Amanojack 11 March 2010 05:20:55PM 6 points [-]

I'm loving these semantics/logic posts. Well done.

The easy solution is just to realize that words are labels and nothing more - end of story. It's just that that's quite a hard lesson to internalize.

Comment author: Origin 21 March 2012 09:00:09PM 0 points [-]

I am new to this wiki (first post even) so I might be missing something, but is it really that hard a lesson to process? If I called a monkey a garp it'd still be exactly the same creature, therefore words are labels and have no meaning of themselves. Quite a simple train of thought. And I can't think of a single emotional reason why anyone wouldn't want to adopt this belief, since most people don't care about words. Right?

Comment author: gunnervi 09 July 2012 12:07:48AM *  3 points [-]

but is it really that hard a lesson to process?

I am going to assume that by now you've read enough of the Sequences to recognize your possible hindsight bias, in your post.

In any case, merely saying that "words are labels" is akin to the guessing the teacher's password; people have said it for ages (e.g., "a rose by any other name" from Romeo and Juliet), yet most people (in my opinion) do not truly understand it.