Wow, this is the most response I’ve ever gotten to an Overcoming_Bias comment O.o
My point was just, as Benquo noted, that definition that way (extensive) competes with every other conceivable interpretation. The success of such definitions in conveying the meaning suggests sufficient common understanding between the people to rule out the infinity of (“obviously” ridiculous) solutions, and therefore that the describer hasn’t actually excluded all the wrong answers. But, that was close enough to Eliezer_Yudkowsky’s point in the rest of the post, so, go fig.
I just mentioned it because his post reminded me of a passage I recently read in Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, where he mentions an exchange between a child and his father, showing that parental corrections do not suffice to define (rule out all wrong-sounding syntax) all of the rules we naturally use when speaking languages.
child: I turned the raining off.
father: You mean, you turned the sprinkler off?
child: I turned the raining off of the sprinkler.
Wow, this is the most response I’ve ever gotten to an Overcoming_Bias comment O.o
My point was just, as Benquo noted, that definition that way (extensive) competes with every other conceivable interpretation. The success of such definitions in conveying the meaning suggests sufficient common understanding between the people to rule out the infinity of (“obviously” ridiculous) solutions, and therefore that the describer hasn’t actually excluded all the wrong answers. But, that was close enough to Eliezer_Yudkowsky’s point in the rest of the post, so, go fig.
I just mentioned it because his post reminded me of a passage I recently read in Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, where he mentions an exchange between a child and his father, showing that parental corrections do not suffice to define (rule out all wrong-sounding syntax) all of the rules we naturally use when speaking languages.
child: I turned the raining off. father: You mean, you turned the sprinkler off? child: I turned the raining off of the sprinkler.