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TheOtherDave comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - LessWrong
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Whenever I see semantic dissection in major posts, I always worry that language is just too messy, just a towering stack of cards, and wonder why there isn't more discussion about why we use English when the language doesn't seem optimal for science and seeking Truth. Obviously it's rational for those who already speak English to continue using it for lack of an immediately available, preferable alternative, but I don't see much discussing this fact, arguing whether we should start over, etc. Admittedly, I haven't yet grokked the "ways words can be wrong" sequence.
My previous post on the topic.
Help me get over my linguistic-existential dread by refuting (or accepting) the statement "To develop optimal rationality skills, the first step should be to redesign our linguistic operating system."
Well, one place to start is to stop conflating "our linguistic operating system" with the languages we speak.
The former is a cognitive structure which all languages intelligible by humans have in common. Redesigning that might very well be a valuable step, but it's way outside our current capabilities, and is unlikely to be a first step (or even a tenth or a hundredth step).
But, OK, fine then, should we redesign the languages we speak?
I'm inclined to doubt it. What I expect happens once a large number of people speak the language is that the actual spoken language gets creolized and that it's just as easy to express fallacies in it as in any other human language.
That said, speaking a particular language might be valuable in a sort of ritual sense... as a way of reminding ourselves that we are "speaking as rationalists," and should therefore strive for more precision and clarity and truth-preservation than we do in our ordinary lives.
That said, there's a lot of site jargon that serves that purpose quite well already building on an English frame.
So on balance, I'm inclined to reject the statement.