Curated. Communication is hard. And while I think most people would assent to that already, this post add some some “actionable gears” to the picture. A framing this post doesn’t use but is implicitly there is something like communication conveys information (which can be measured in bits) between people. 1 bit of information cuts down on 2 possibilities, 2 bits cuts down from 4 possibilities to 1. What adding information does is reduce possibilities, exactly as the post describes. Bear in mind the number of possibilities what you’ve described still admits.
The concept of “meaning moat” makes me think of Hamming distance. The longer a string of bits is, the more bit flips away it is from adjacent strings of bits. In short, the post says try to convey enough bits of information to rule out all the possibilities you don’t mean.
I think this especially matters for preparadigmatic fields such as AI Alignment where many new concepts have been developed (and continue to be developed). If you are creating these concepts or trying to convey them to others (e.g. being a distiller), this is a good post to read. You might know what you mean, but others don’t.
Actually, maybe this is a good single-player tool too. When you are thinking about some idea/model/concept, try to enumerate a bunch of specific versions of it and figure out which ones you do and don’t mean. Haven’t tested it, but seems plausible.
Curated. Communication is hard. And while I think most people would assent to that already, this post add some some “actionable gears” to the picture. A framing this post doesn’t use but is implicitly there is something like communication conveys information (which can be measured in bits) between people. 1 bit of information cuts down on 2 possibilities, 2 bits cuts down from 4 possibilities to 1. What adding information does is reduce possibilities, exactly as the post describes. Bear in mind the number of possibilities what you’ve described still admits.
The concept of “meaning moat” makes me think of Hamming distance. The longer a string of bits is, the more bit flips away it is from adjacent strings of bits. In short, the post says try to convey enough bits of information to rule out all the possibilities you don’t mean.
I think this especially matters for preparadigmatic fields such as AI Alignment where many new concepts have been developed (and continue to be developed). If you are creating these concepts or trying to convey them to others (e.g. being a distiller), this is a good post to read. You might know what you mean, but others don’t.
Actually, maybe this is a good single-player tool too. When you are thinking about some idea/model/concept, try to enumerate a bunch of specific versions of it and figure out which ones you do and don’t mean. Haven’t tested it, but seems plausible.
Thank you for curating this, I had missed this one and it does provide a useful model of trying to point to particular concepts.