(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(note: this post was originally made as a slide deck and lives as a pdf here.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
So..your boss has been telling you to correct other people's work...and they're asking who the hell are you?
You need to tell your boss to give you some official legible authority.
I'll file a complaint to this imaginary workplace.
I'm short on actual conversations I can remember the details of, so if you have any that you think make a good example, feel free to share. Examples are some of the most important parts and I don't like it whenever I have to make them up.