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Taboo Your Words (2008)

128 pointsby simonbrownover 11 years ago

9 comments

JackFrover 11 years ago
Very similar to if-by-whiskey <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;If-by-whiskey</a><p><i>If when you say whiskey you mean the devil&#x27;s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.</i><p><i>But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman&#x27;s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life&#x27;s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.</i>
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B-Conover 11 years ago
One of my personal rules for communication is that high-level language is a killer. Whenever conflict or confusion arises, high-level words need to be abandoned in favor of precision if the communication is to go anywhere. This is very similar to the article&#x27;s examples of replacing a word with it&#x27;s definition.<p>I believe that high-level language is the root of many philosophical&#x2F;political disagreements because people simply use different definitions. When disagreeing parties avoid high-level labels (like &quot;justice&quot;, &quot;bad&quot;, &quot;fair&quot;, and a plethora of others) and instead say exactly what they mean they can much more quickly realize exactly what they disagree and agree on. Arguments over high-level concepts <i>rarely go anywhere useful</i> because there&#x27;s no substance to argue over.<p>&gt; The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term &quot;God&quot; taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making the word &quot;faith&quot; taboo, and asking them why they believe it.<p>This is very true, and I can&#x27;t believe some religions that people think are the same. They happen to use the same words, like &quot;God&quot;, &quot;heaven&quot;, etc, but the concepts are completely different and incredibly incompatible.<p>High-level language is very useful for quick communication. But it&#x27;s horribly misleading and is a complete road-block to communication when people have different definitions or ideas in mind. This seems really obvious, but it&#x27;s sad how much religious, philosophical, and political discussions only center around high-level language.
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scytheover 11 years ago
The very rigid picture of language described here and used in this and many other lesswrong essays might be compared to early Wittgenstein (<i>Tractatus</i>), to be contrasted with later Wittgenstein (<i>Philosophical Investigations</i>), alongside Derrida and a litany of less famous philosophers.<p>Of course, the reason Wittgenstein ultimately rejected this picture, as in rejected describing the meaning of words by formal definition, is that it doesn&#x27;t accurately describe the way language is used in practice, and leads us to misunderstand situations.<p>&quot;Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound?&quot;<p>Albert: &quot;no&quot; =&gt; &quot;Berkeleyan idealism makes sense&quot;<p>Barry: &quot;yes =&gt; &quot;I refute it thus!&quot; <i>kicks rock</i><p>Of course, the question of course, is do we really want to understand the situation, or beleaguer Albert and Barry until they stop bothering us? The <i>argumentum ad nauseum</i> on lesswrong, by now an encyclopedia-sized blog, hints toward the latter. And there are plenty of bare, wrong assertions:<p>&gt;Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by &quot;free will&quot;, on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length.<p>&quot;Most philosophers&quot; probably wouldn&#x27;t, unless you&#x27;re at a conference of the Vienna circle. Philosophy admits a great many ways of approaching these questions.<p>If a tree is in a forest and nobody can ever hear or see it, is it really a &quot;tree&quot;? Is it in a &quot;forest&quot;? And can it really &quot;fall&quot;? After all, all of the trees and forests and falling we refer to in natural language (this is an empirical claim) are ultimately derived from (this is actually a propter hoc fallacy, but that&#x27;s inevitable) our real experiences of trees and forests, in which falling makes a sound (this is not a definition, but a description). This is a sort of lame analysis, but at least I&#x27;m not trying to dodge the question.
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gabemartover 11 years ago
I find this interesting. I particularly enjoy the idea of proscribed words in Taboo leaking information that helps describe the taboo word. It reminds me of a pentester checking robots.txt to see what parts of a website the admin doesn&#x27;t want crawlers to see.<p>However, I disagree with the &quot;tree falls in the forest&quot; example. The thought experiment was formed in a time when the only way to measure acoustic vibrations was with the human ear. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s any great leap to extend the conceit of the experiment to cover all forms of measuring acoustic vibrations.<p>Albert may claim:<p><pre><code> A tree falling in a deserted forest matches [membership test: this event generates pressure waves in a material medium]. </code></pre> And Barry could quite reasonably reply:<p><pre><code> How can we be sure those pressure waves are generated if we don&#x27;t have any wave detectors in the forest? </code></pre> In other words, I don&#x27;t think this is a case where ambiguous language is the source of the apparent disagreement. No matter how far down the abstraction-chain you go, the detection of acoustic waves always requires an observer of some fashion, which brings us back to the sense of the original thought experiment.
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tunesmithover 11 years ago
In the Theory Of Constraints &quot;Thinking Tools&quot; (a method to try and apply logic to group&#x2F;systems dynamics&#x2F;conflicts&#x2F;constraints) they call this a &quot;clarity reservation&quot;. I got caught up in a big discussion board argument about &quot;gun control&quot; before realizing everyone was arguing passionately about wildly different mental models that &quot;gun control&quot; represented. I could have said, &quot;I have a clarity reservation on gun control&quot; and spun the discussion out into several more simultaneous conversations.<p>It also got me thinking that most terms like this could be mapped on a 2x2 grid of &quot;content&quot; versus &quot;signal&quot;. &quot;Content&quot; is the meaningfulness of the definition, and &quot;signal&quot; is the emotional impact of the word, or its ability to elicit certain emotional responses in the audience. &quot;Gun control&quot; could be seen as a high-signal low-content term, and that&#x27;s the quadrant that you probably most want to avoid (or taboo).<p>This happens a lot in software engineering, too, probably more in the low-signal low-content quadrant (since most overloaded terms in software engineering are rather boring in the grand scheme). We regularly have confusion at work about words like &quot;profile&quot; (performance? user info? data type?) and &quot;dev&quot; (our test server? our git branch? our team?). This can also be hard when introducing layers of abstraction in a codebase - I feel like more than once I&#x27;ve struggled with running out of synonyms when trying to name certain classes.
cpsempekover 11 years ago
I don&#x27;t understand the distinction the author is making between defining the problematic word and the process of &quot;tabooing&quot; the word.<p>I do see the distinction in terms of the actual game: certainly 9 innings, 3 outs is not a definition for baseball. But the tabooing process described by the author seems no different to me than coming up with a definition.
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simondedalusover 11 years ago
This article is RAGE-fuel for anyone with &gt; 101 experience with analytic philosophy of language. It&#x27;s the theory of reference equivalent of<p>&quot;Your epistemology is bad because an evil demon might be fooling you.&quot; &quot;Whoa.&quot;
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dinkumthinkumover 11 years ago
I don&#x27;t recommend this &quot;LW&quot; web site. This way only madness lies.
begriffsover 11 years ago
Less wrong, more autistic.
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