A sidetrack: People seem to be conflating AspiringKnitter’s identity as a Christian and a woman. Female is an important part of not being Will Newsome, but suppose that AspiringKnitter were a male Christian and not Will Newsome. Would that make a difference to any part of this discussion?
More identity issues: My name is Nancy Lebovitz with a v, not a w.
Sorry ’bout the spelling of your name, I wonder if I didn’t make the same mistake before …
Well, the biggest thing AK being a male non-Will Christian would change, is that he would lose an easy way to prove to a third party that he’s not Will Newsome and thus win a thousand bucks (though the important part is not exactly being female, it’s having a recognizably female voice on the phone, which is still pretty highly correlated).
Rationalist lesson that I’ve derived from the frequency that people get my name wrong: It’s typical for people to get it wrong even if I say it more than once, spell it for them, and show it to them in writing. I’m flattered if any of my friends start getting it right in less than a year.
Correct spelling and pronunciation of my name is a simple, well-defined, objective matter, and I’m in there advocating for it, though I cut people slack if they’re emotionally stressed.
This situation suggests that a tremendous amount of what seems like accurate perception is actually sloppy filling in of blanks. Less Wrong has a lot about cognitive biases, but not so much about perceptual biases.
This situation suggests that a tremendous amount of what seems like accurate perception is actually sloppy filling in of blanks.
This is a feature, not a bug. Natural language has lots of redundancy, and if we read one letter at a time rather than in word-sized chunks we would read much more slowly.
I think you have causality reversed here. It’s the redundancy of our languages that’s the “feature”—or, more precisely, the workaround for the previously existing hardware limitation. If our perceptual systems did less “filling in of blanks,” it seems likely that our languages would be less redundant—at least in certain ways.
I think redundancy was originally there to counteract noise, of which there was likely a lot more in the ancestral environment, and as a result there’s more-than-enough of it in such environments as reading text written in a decent typeface one foot away from your face, and the brain can then afford to use it to read much faster. (It’s not that hard to read at 600 words per minute with nearly complete understanding in good conditions, but if someone was able to speak that fast in a not-particularly-quiet environment, I doubt I’d be able to understand much.)
A sidetrack: People seem to be conflating AspiringKnitter’s identity as a Christian and a woman. Female is an important part of not being Will Newsome, but suppose that AspiringKnitter were a male Christian and not Will Newsome. Would that make a difference to any part of this discussion?
More identity issues: My name is Nancy Lebovitz with a v, not a w.
Sorry ’bout the spelling of your name, I wonder if I didn’t make the same mistake before …
Well, the biggest thing AK being a male non-Will Christian would change, is that he would lose an easy way to prove to a third party that he’s not Will Newsome and thus win a thousand bucks (though the important part is not exactly being female, it’s having a recognizably female voice on the phone, which is still pretty highly correlated).
Rationalist lesson that I’ve derived from the frequency that people get my name wrong: It’s typical for people to get it wrong even if I say it more than once, spell it for them, and show it to them in writing. I’m flattered if any of my friends start getting it right in less than a year.
Correct spelling and pronunciation of my name is a simple, well-defined, objective matter, and I’m in there advocating for it, though I cut people slack if they’re emotionally stressed.
This situation suggests that a tremendous amount of what seems like accurate perception is actually sloppy filling in of blanks. Less Wrong has a lot about cognitive biases, but not so much about perceptual biases.
This is a feature, not a bug. Natural language has lots of redundancy, and if we read one letter at a time rather than in word-sized chunks we would read much more slowly.
I think you have causality reversed here. It’s the redundancy of our languages that’s the “feature”—or, more precisely, the workaround for the previously existing hardware limitation. If our perceptual systems did less “filling in of blanks,” it seems likely that our languages would be less redundant—at least in certain ways.
I think redundancy was originally there to counteract noise, of which there was likely a lot more in the ancestral environment, and as a result there’s more-than-enough of it in such environments as reading text written in a decent typeface one foot away from your face, and the brain can then afford to use it to read much faster. (It’s not that hard to read at 600 words per minute with nearly complete understanding in good conditions, but if someone was able to speak that fast in a not-particularly-quiet environment, I doubt I’d be able to understand much.)
Yeah, I agree with that.