(epistemic status: experimental new format! Optimized for memetic power. Fun and useful refactorings of classic ideas about language.)
(note: this post was originally made as a slide deck and lives as a pdf here. Color coding of ideas was inspired by abramdemski and turntroat. Since this is a bunch of images, the links don't work, and I've collected them all at the bottom of the post)




































































- "Love that energy Jaynes!"
- Necessary and Sufficient
- Family Resemblance
- Words as Hidden Inferences
- How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside
- A Human's Guide to Words
- View from nowhere
- "Al Capone has a point"
- Reality tunnels
- Blind Men and the elephant
- Formal Logic
- Implication
- Proof trees
- Rwandan Genocide
- Radio address given on April 30th, 1994
- Ghosts of Rwanda
- Machete Season
- "I didn’t succeed in tracking down the original docs, but this interview has a lot of context and quotes that lay out a pretty solid case."
- "From the Genocide Convention of 1948, there are several more articles specifying things like how international courts are supposed to work, and what “punishment” entails."
- General Romeo Dallaire, on the ground in Rwanda.
- "Just a year earlier the U.S had been badly burned with an attempted intervention in a Somalian civil war."
- Conflict Is Not Abuse
As a shortcut, if you have similar criticisms of A Human's Guide to Words, then we probably do disagree a lot. But if you don't think EY "thinks words aren't useful" then we just have a misunderstanding.