Sometimes people use "modulo" to mean something like "depending on", e.g. "seems good, modulo the outcome of that experiment" [correct me ITT if you think they mean something else; I'm not 100% sure]. Does this make sense, assuming the term comes from modular arithmetic?

Like, in modular arithmetic you'd say "5 is 3, modulo 2". It's kind of like saying "5 is the same as 3, if you only consider their relationship to modulus 2". This seems pretty different to the usage I'm wondering about; almost its converse: to import the local English meaning of "modulo", you'd be saying "5 is the same as 3, as long as you've taken their relationship to the modulus 2 into account". This latter statement is false; 5 and 3 are super different even if you've taken this relationship into account.

But the sense of the original quote doesn't work with the mathematical meaning: "seems good, if you only consider the outcome of that experiment and nothing else".

Is there a math word that means the thing people want "modulo" to mean?

Well, not that much, right? If you had an 11-word diceware passphrase to start, each word is about 7 characters on average, so you have maybe 90 places to insert a token - only 6.5 extra bits come from choosing a place to insert your character. And of course you get the same added entropy from inserting a random 3 base32 chars at a random location.

Happy to grant that a cracker assuming no unicode won't be able to crack your password, but if that's your goal then it might be a bad idea to post about your strategy on the public internet ;)

maybe; probably the easiest way to do this is to choose a random 4-digit hexadecimal number, which gives you 16 bits when you enter it (e.g. via ctrl+u on linux). But personally I think I'd usually rather just enter those hex digits directly, for the same entropy minus a keystroke. Or, even better, maybe just type a random 3-character base32 string for one fewer bit.

Some thoughts after doing this exercise:

I did the exercise because I couldn't sleep; I didn't keep careful count of the time, and I didn't do it all in one sitting. I'd guess I spent about an hour on it total, but I think there's a case to be made that this was cheating. However, "fresh eyes" is actually a really killer trick when doing this kind of exercise, in my experience, and it's usually available in practice. So I don't feel too bad about it.

I really really dislike the experience of saying things I think are totally stupid, and I currently don't buy that I should start trying to say stupider things. My favorite things in the above list came from refusing to just say another totally stupid thing. Nearly everything in my list is stupid in some way, but the things that are so stupid they don't even feel interesting basically make me feel sad. I trust my first-round aesthetic pruner to actually be helping to train my babbler in constructive directions.

The following don't really feel worth having said, to me:

My favorites didn't come after spewing this stuff; instead they came when I refused to be okay with just saying more of that kind of junk:

The difference isn't really that these are less stupid; in fact they're kind of more stupid, practically speaking. But I actually viscerally like them, unlike the first group. Forcing myself to produce things I hate feels like a bad strategy on lots of levels.

A thing that was going through my head but I wasn't sure how to turn into a real idea (vulgar language from a movie):

Whoa. I also thought of this, though for me it was like thing 24 or something, and I was too embarrassed to actually include it in my post.

(I've added my $50 to RatsWrong's side of this bet)

For contingent evolutionary-psychological reasons, humans are innately biased to prefer "their own" ideas, and in that context, a "principle of charity" can be useful as a corrective heuristic

I claim that the reasons for this bias are, in an important sense, not contingent. i.e. an alien race would almost certainly have similar biases, and the forces in favor of this bias won't entirely disappear in a world with magically-different discourse norms (at least as long as speakers' identities are attached to their statements).

As soon as I've said "P", it is the case that my epistemic reputation is bound up with the group's belief in the truth of P. If people later come to believe P, it means that (a) whatever scoring rule we're using to incentivize good predictions in the first place will reward me, and (b) people will update more on things I say in the future.

If you wanted to find convincing evidence for P, I'm now a much better candidate to find that evidence than someone who has instead said "eh; maybe P?" And someone who has said "~P" is similarly well-incentivized to find evidence for ~P.

I would agree more with your rephrased title.

People do actually have a somewhat-shared set of criteria in mind when they talk about whether a thing is safe, though, in a way that they (or at least I) don't when talking about its qwrgzness. e.g., if it kills 99% of life on earth over a ten year period, I'm pretty sure almost everyone would agree that it's unsafe. No further specification work is required. It doesn't seem fundamentally confused to refer to a thing as "unsafe" if you think it might do that.

I do think that some people are clearly talking about meanings of the word "safe" that aren't so clear-cut (e.g. Sam Altman saying GPT-4 is the safest model yet™️), and in those cases I agree that these statements are much closer to "meaningless".