Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Arguing "By Definition" - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 February 2008 11:37PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 February 2008 07:20:24PM 2 points [-]

Frank, I think I would say, not so much that definitions are useless, but that we should sharply distinguish between communication problems and single-player inference problems. When people start violently arguing over their communication signals while they (a) understand what each other are trying to say and (b) are trying to do an inference that they could theoretically do as single players, something has gone wrong.