You’ve probably noticed that your post has negative points. That’s because you’re clearly looking for reasons why an IAL would be great, rather than searching for the truth whatever it may be. There’s a sequences post that explains this distinction called “The Bottom Line”. Julia Galef also wrote a whole book about it called “The Scout Mindset” that I’m halfway through, and is really good.
That said, having an excellent IAL would obviously be a tremendous boon to the world. Mostly for the reasons you gave, scaled down by a factor of 100. And Scott Alexander and I think also Yudkowsky have written about the benefits of speaking a language that made it easier to express crisply defined thoughts and harder to express misleading ones—which is an entirely separate benefit from “everyone speaks it”.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I would give my past self is “start small”. I find it really easy to dream of “awesome enormous thing”, and then spend a year building 1% of “awesome enormous thing” perfectly, before realizing I should have done it differently. When building something big, you need lots of early feedback about whether your plans are right. You don’t get this feedback from having 1% of a thing built perfectly. You get much more feedback from having 100% of a thing built really haphazardly.
Putting that all together, my advice to you—if you would accept advice from a stranger on the internet—is:
Stop thinking about all the ways in which an IAL would be great. It would be great enough that if it was your life’s product, you would have made an enormous impact on the world. Honestly beyond that it doesn’t matter much and you seem to be getting a little giddy.
Start small. Go learn Toki Pona if you haven’t; you can learn the full language and start speaking to strangers on Discord in a few weeks. Make a little conlang; see if you think there’s something in that seed. See if you enjoy it; if you don’t you’re unlikely to accomplish a more ambitious language project anyways. Build up from there.
Thank you JP. There’s a high chance that I don’t have the Scout mindset yet, so finding the truth is hard. But to my defense, until now no comment whatsoever has been able to point out a cons of IAL, nor express the concern about the cost. So probably it’s true that the IAL scenario is (very) desirable. The negative score of the post doesn’t speak much: it can be a high karma member overwhelming lesser members, or it may simply reflect their opinion about my mindset, not the idea of IAL.
What you wrote about a crisp language that helps prevent misleading ideas is what I’d forgotten to include in the main post—it’s actually 1 of the goals of the excellent future IAL! If other veterans have explicitly mentioned it, then that means the problem with current languages is significant, and improving it is very possible.
You don’t get this feedback from having 1% of a thing built perfectly. You get much more feedback from having 100% of a thing built really haphazardly.
That’s an insightful advice. My plan, I think, more or less align with that view. I may attempt with something similar to Toki Pona—that is, a simple project not with IAL in mind. I’m a bit afraid that if I did a miniature version of the IAL, I would be anchored to it, seeing it in all glory and thus not be able to cooperate properly with fellow linguists & scientists & experts in other fields when it comes to the real deal. Something like the first-born child almost always has the most love. Meanwhile, my vision of the great IAL is that it must be a big collaboration right from the very start. But I’m not too worried, because I do have ideas of smaller projects that will test my enjoyment for elements needed for IAL.
You’ve probably noticed that your post has negative points. That’s because you’re clearly looking for reasons why an IAL would be great, rather than searching for the truth whatever it may be. There’s a sequences post that explains this distinction called “The Bottom Line”. Julia Galef also wrote a whole book about it called “The Scout Mindset” that I’m halfway through, and is really good.
That said, having an excellent IAL would obviously be a tremendous boon to the world. Mostly for the reasons you gave, scaled down by a factor of 100. And Scott Alexander and I think also Yudkowsky have written about the benefits of speaking a language that made it easier to express crisply defined thoughts and harder to express misleading ones—which is an entirely separate benefit from “everyone speaks it”.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I would give my past self is “start small”. I find it really easy to dream of “awesome enormous thing”, and then spend a year building 1% of “awesome enormous thing” perfectly, before realizing I should have done it differently. When building something big, you need lots of early feedback about whether your plans are right. You don’t get this feedback from having 1% of a thing built perfectly. You get much more feedback from having 100% of a thing built really haphazardly.
Putting that all together, my advice to you—if you would accept advice from a stranger on the internet—is:
Stop thinking about all the ways in which an IAL would be great. It would be great enough that if it was your life’s product, you would have made an enormous impact on the world. Honestly beyond that it doesn’t matter much and you seem to be getting a little giddy.
Start small. Go learn Toki Pona if you haven’t; you can learn the full language and start speaking to strangers on Discord in a few weeks. Make a little conlang; see if you think there’s something in that seed. See if you enjoy it; if you don’t you’re unlikely to accomplish a more ambitious language project anyways. Build up from there.
Thank you JP. There’s a high chance that I don’t have the Scout mindset yet, so finding the truth is hard. But to my defense, until now no comment whatsoever has been able to point out a cons of IAL, nor express the concern about the cost. So probably it’s true that the IAL scenario is (very) desirable. The negative score of the post doesn’t speak much: it can be a high karma member overwhelming lesser members, or it may simply reflect their opinion about my mindset, not the idea of IAL.
What you wrote about a crisp language that helps prevent misleading ideas is what I’d forgotten to include in the main post—it’s actually 1 of the goals of the excellent future IAL! If other veterans have explicitly mentioned it, then that means the problem with current languages is significant, and improving it is very possible.
That’s an insightful advice. My plan, I think, more or less align with that view. I may attempt with something similar to Toki Pona—that is, a simple project not with IAL in mind. I’m a bit afraid that if I did a miniature version of the IAL, I would be anchored to it, seeing it in all glory and thus not be able to cooperate properly with fellow linguists & scientists & experts in other fields when it comes to the real deal. Something like the first-born child almost always has the most love. Meanwhile, my vision of the great IAL is that it must be a big collaboration right from the very start. But I’m not too worried, because I do have ideas of smaller projects that will test my enjoyment for elements needed for IAL.