Eliezer mentions that the story is adapted from Raymond Smullyan, so I’d guess that a fairly logic-focused moral of the story is the intended one. My personal interpretation is that one must not only consider that an untrusted speaker’s words might be false, but that they might be neither true nor false. In other words, when you write:
The box inscriptions? The jester explicitly considers that they might be untrue
I think the moral is that this is insufficient. The words are just squiggles decorating the boxes in the end, and they can be true, false, paradoxical, ill-defined, etc.
Eliezer mentions that the story is adapted from Raymond Smullyan, so I’d guess that a fairly logic-focused moral of the story is the intended one. My personal interpretation is that one must not only consider that an untrusted speaker’s words might be false, but that they might be neither true nor false. In other words, when you write:
I think the moral is that this is insufficient. The words are just squiggles decorating the boxes in the end, and they can be true, false, paradoxical, ill-defined, etc.
(This comment has been edited.)