There’s a good number of ideas that I want to share here on LW in the linguistics / communication cluster. The question always comes to mind: “But what does communication have to do with rationality?”- to which I answer, rationality is the attempt to win, in part by believing true things which help one accomplish winning. If humans had infinite computational resources and infinite free time in which to do experiments, there would be nothing stopping us from arriving at the truth by ourselves. But in reality, we can’t arrive at all the logical consequences of everything we know by ourselves, nor can we learn every facet of nature’s dynamics alone. So humans which aspire to be rational must communicate- and the faster one can exchange information with other humans aspiring to the truth, the more rational one can be. Therefore, it is important for an aspiring rationalist to think deeply about how to best exchange information with their peers.
I’m not without precedent in applying linguistics and communication to the project of rationality- one of my favorite of Yudkowsky’s Sequences is “A Human’s Guide to Words”.
I hope to explain this at some point in time, but for now I’ll let it speak for itself
There’s a good number of ideas that I want to share here on LW in the linguistics / communication cluster. The question always comes to mind: “But what does communication have to do with rationality?”- to which I answer, rationality is the attempt to win, in part by believing true things which help one accomplish winning. If humans had infinite computational resources and infinite free time in which to do experiments, there would be nothing stopping us from arriving at the truth by ourselves. But in reality, we can’t arrive at all the logical consequences of everything we know by ourselves, nor can we learn every facet of nature’s dynamics alone. So humans which aspire to be rational must communicate- and the faster one can exchange information with other humans aspiring to the truth, the more rational one can be. Therefore, it is important for an aspiring rationalist to think deeply about how to best exchange information with their peers.
I’m not without precedent in applying linguistics and communication to the project of rationality- one of my favorite of Yudkowsky’s Sequences is “A Human’s Guide to Words”.