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Wei_Dai comments on The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life - Less Wrong Discussion

67 Post author: Academian 28 December 2012 04:14AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 28 December 2012 09:30:00PM *  1 point [-]

I'm definitely talking about the concept of purpose here, not the word.

I think bryjnar is saying there may be two different concepts of purpose, which share the same word, with the grammatically 3-nary "purpose" often referring to one concept and the grammatically 2-nary "purpose" often referring to the other. This seems plausible to me, because if the 2-nary "purpose" is just intended to be a projection of the 3-nary "purpose", why would people fail to do this correctly?

Comment author: hyporational 30 December 2012 05:14:16AM *  0 points [-]

Why have brilliant people failed at these before?

Maybe 2-naryish thinking about intentions in general is somehow useful. Maybe this has something to do with how we come up with new uses for things and spot other optimizer-thingies before they kill us. Maybe the brain makes new discoveries by confusing language with new meanings from time to time but unfortunately this can be a failure mode too.

Maybe it really is just a simple logical fallacy. The brain came up with the 2-nary grammatical shortcut, and didn't properly keep it separate from the original 3-nary concept.