Juergen Schmidhuber writes about humor as information compression and that plus decompression seems about right to me. Being on TV is decompression from a phrase-as-concept to the component words, a pun, a switch to a lower level analysis than that which adults favor (a situation children constantly have to deal with). Muffin and cupcake is a proposal for a new lossy compression of two concepts to a new concept with a “topping” variable, which would be useful if you wanted to invent, for instance, the dreadful sounding “muffin-roll sushi”, “next Wednesday” is a commentary on the inadequacy of current cultural norms for translating concepts and words into one another even for commonly used concepts. The last one is a successful compression from sense data to the fact that a common joke pattern is happening and inference that one is in a joke.
I wish that we had a “Less Wrong Community” blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an “instrumental rationality” blog for “self help” subject matter.
I wish that we had a “Less Wrong Community” blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an “instrumental rationality” blog for “self help” subject matter.
Juergen Schmidhuber writes about humor as information compression and that plus decompression seems about right to me. Being on TV is decompression from a phrase-as-concept to the component words, a pun, a switch to a lower level analysis than that which adults favor (a situation children constantly have to deal with). Muffin and cupcake is a proposal for a new lossy compression of two concepts to a new concept with a “topping” variable, which would be useful if you wanted to invent, for instance, the dreadful sounding “muffin-roll sushi”, “next Wednesday” is a commentary on the inadequacy of current cultural norms for translating concepts and words into one another even for commonly used concepts. The last one is a successful compression from sense data to the fact that a common joke pattern is happening and inference that one is in a joke.
I wish that we had a “Less Wrong Community” blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an “instrumental rationality” blog for “self help” subject matter.
Yes and yes.
I would very much like to see arbitrary sub-blog creation in the style of subreddits, but an off-topic subreddit would be a good start.