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JoshuaZ comments on Tidbit: “Semantic over-achievers” - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's a related problem; Humans have a tendency to once they have terms for something take for granted that something that at a glance seem to make rough syntactic sense actually has semantics behind it. A lot of theology and the bad ends of philosophy have this problem. Even math has run into this issue. Until limits were defined rigorously in the mid 19th century there was disagreement over what the limit of 1 -1 + 1 -1 +1 -1 +1... was. Is it is 1 because one can group it as 1 + (-1 +1) + (-1+1)... or maybe it is zero since one can write it as (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1)...? This did however lead to good math and other notions of limits including the entire area of what would later be called Tauberian theorems.
This sentence is so convoluted that at first I thought it was some kind of meta joke.
Well, the extra "that" before "that it actually" really doesn't help matters. I've tried to make it slightly better but it still seems to be a bit convoluted.
Thiss?
Or just use a bunch of commas?
The punctuation, it's beautiful!
I'm a little relieved to find that, when i first read the grandparent comment, i was able to parse it the same way as you have in your clarification.
Yes! So much better.
I have nothing against splitting infinitives, but "to once they have terms for something take for granted" is pretty extreme. It's likely to overflow the reader's stack. After fixing that, running an iteration of the "omit needless words" algorithm, and doing a bit of rephrasing, here's what I came up with:
There's a related problem: If they have terms for something, humans tend to think things that make syntactic sense actually have semantics behind them.
(Ninja edit: Some more needless words omitted, including a nominalization.)
(Edit 2: Here's a better nominalization link because it gives examples of when to use nominalizations, not just when not to use them.)
Isn't this the same issue we see with surface analogies and cached thoughts?
I'm not sure. Cached thoughts generally make semantic sense. So I'm not sure this is the same thing. The surface analogy issue does seem closer though.