Many words in practice span multiple levels of abstraction in addition to confusion about definition within a particular level of abstraction. Eg a query confusing prescriptive and descriptive explanations.
Treating this as errata thread.
And still, it is not a given that valid English sentences.
This feels like an incomplete thought. It could be self-referential, but it seems unintentional.
I think it's unintentional. I don't see how to parse that as a valid English sentence. (Even though it starts out so promising: "And still, it is not 'a', given that ...")
And there are some other errors too:
Nitpick:
Computer Science has a notion of “type safety”. In a given language, there are different “types” of things. Any operation you can do also specifies what types it’s allowed to act on. “1 + 1” is allowed, but “1 + hello” isn’t.
The following code is a perfectly legitimate expression in most languages:
1 + hello
In this case, 1
is a numeric literal and hello
is a symbol which, if it happens to be the name of a variable in the current scope, could certainly be added to 1 (assuming the types are compatible).
Now, perhaps you meant to write this instead:
1 + "hello"
Here we are adding a numeric literal to a string literal, which indeed does not work, in many languages. (But not all! If you doubt this, open your browser’s JavaScript console right now, type 1 + "hello"
, and hit Enter.)
Forgot that code blocks existed. I typed "1 + hello" because when I went to put quotes around 'hello' I saw I was already using them to designate a chunk of code, and went "eh, maybe people will guess hello is a string". You know, because if I know it's a string, everyone must know it's a string, right?
Heh, indeed.
For future reference (for other people reading this, even if you know), you do inline code styling with backticks, like so:
This single ` word` will be styled like inline code.
becomes:
This single word
will be styled like inline code.
And for code blocks:
```
This whole sentence will be styled like a code block.
```
becomes:
This whole sentence will be styled like a code block.
(EDIT: Corrected formatting.)
I think it might hold in PHP. At least the random REPL that I found evaluates echo hello
to hello
in standard output (with a warning, though it did execute).
This post is part of my Hazardous Guide To Rationality. I don't expect this to be new or exciting to frequent LW people, and I would appreciate comments and feedback in light of intents for the sequence, as outlined in the above link.
∫x2(a2−x2)1/2dx
Student: Hmmm, let's see if I can remember how to integrate. So I know the x is a variable that I'm trying to integrate over. What's that "a" though? I remember it being called a constant. But what's that?
Tutor: A constant is just some number. It could be anything.
Student: Cool!
student disappears for a while and comes back with the following
∫x2(a2−x2)1/2dx=a
Student: I did it!
Tutor: The fuc... um, how about you walk me through how you got that?
Curious. Here's another tale of confusion:
Computer Science has a notion of "type safety". In a given language, there are different "types" of things. Any operation you can do also specifies what types it's allowed to act on. In python
1+1
is allowed, but1 + "hello"
isn't. If you try to execute the second chunk you get a "type error" because "+" is the type of thing that expects two integers, and "hello" is a string, not an integer. A language is type safe to the degree that it catches and warns you of type errors.Human language is not type safe. Saying that gravity drowned is completely valid English, and also isn't how reality works. The students math derivation was also completely valid manipulation of English sentences, but invalid calculus. Human language is not completely detached from reality; it wouldn't be useful if it wasn't. And still, it is not a given that valid English sentences form valid conclusions about the world.
Here's a look at how the student did their calculus problem:
Almost none of us would make the mistake TALE-SPIN did about gravity. And if you know calculus, you'd probably never make the mistake the student did. But if you don't know calculus, it's not readily apparent that the derivation is false.
Human language is incredibly overloaded. Even in a domain like math, which does in fact invent a shit ton of it's own words, most of the words on the Wikipedia page for "category theory" are common English words.
Any given words that you are likely to use to refer to a specific concept are words that also have all sorts of other meanings. If the person parsing a sentence that contains words they are familiar with, but concepts they aren't familiar with, is inclined to try and understand the sentence in terms of the concepts they are familiar with. This can produce obvious nonsense that one immediately rejects and concludes they don't know what the sentence means. But in the case of TALE-SPIN, there was no meta level sanity check, and it spits out "Gravity drowned". In the case of the student, their false reasoning still lead to the type of thing that is allowed to be an answer (if they had concluded the integral equaled "walrus", they might have been given pause). That plus their lack of calculus knowledge meant that they didn't get any red flags while doing their operation
It is entirely possible to see a thing in the world, use a certain word for it, and hop around a path of twisted false syllogisms, and produce a conclusion that's completely opposed to the reality of the original object.
Be careful, and remember TALE-SPIN