If I read “authentic relationship”, “a relationship which is built on honest premises and communication (i.e. neither party has lied or misled the other about their background, motivations, or relevant personality characteristics)” is my first guess as to what that would mean. My question is: are you incapable of performing this sort of “decryption work” (as in, the examples you generated are your best effort), or is your chief complaint that it’s effortful and error-prone (as in, you could have extrapolated something similar to what I did, but you believe that doing so is epistemically unjustified)?
I am advocating for this because, in practice, this seems to minimize the amount of time and communication necessary to make sure both parties are on the same page w.r.t. the definitions of terms used and the intent behind what is being communicated. The way you ask questions reveals almost nothing about the state of your mental map of the subject of discussion (what you think the boundaries are, how you think it corresponds to the surrounding context, etc). This increases the amount of communication required to answer your question much more than linearly—you know “where” you are confused much better than the author. The author can guess, but the author is dealing with the entire possibility space of things you can be confused about; the amount of work that can go into resolving that confusion is unbounded. However, if you put forth your interpretation, then ask for clarification/correction, the author has a much more constrained space to explore to attempt to diagnose where your map is insufficiently well-specified/pointing at the wrong thing/has some other conflict with the author’s map. ~Linear time for you to come up with the most straightforward possible interpretation (contingent on you actually being able to do so—still not clear to what degree this is a disagreement in the allowable degree of inference), + ~linear time for the author to identify mistakes, vs 0 time for you + unbounded time for the author.
The problem I’m having with trying to respond to the rest of your post (and the previous one in the thread) is that I don’t feel like I have a better sense of your position on the more critical underlying issues now than when I first replied.
I will try to be more specific still, though I will be leaning on concepts similar to those in ML, such as embeddings, vectors, dimensionality, etc. I can try to find another set of concepts if this doesn’t translate well enough. (I already tried to come up with an analogy with interfaces & generics in the software engineering sense, but couldn’t actually come up with a coherent model without bringing in intersection types, at which point I gave up. Maybe that gives you some idea of what I was going for anyways.) When you performed the substitutions for “authentic”, it looks like you traveled the smallest possible distance away from the “authentic” node, and not in the direction of any cluster of nodes that would be closer to (or have higher connective weight with, if you prefer) “relationship” (or “expression”, or “reaction”). Naturally, the node you landed on fit the surrounding context about as well as a square peg in a round hole.
Now, to be absolutely clear, when you say that “authentic” has no standard meaning, are you claiming that “authentic” is equidistant from every other node in your graph (of all possible concepts)? I feel like we’ve ruled that out, but I’m not 100% sure; if that is the case then the direction I’m going in with the rest of this is probably fruitless.
If not, if you do indeed have a graph with concepts that are much closer to “authentic” than other concepts, then some of the concepts in the “authentic”-adjacent cluster will likewise be much closer to the “relationship” node along many dimensions than most of the others. What are those dimensions? Relationships have many properties and embedded concepts: participants, duration, style, etc. The dimensions we could say are relevant for linking together “authentic” and “relationship” would be more granular, likely describing the terms on which the participants engaged in the relationship, and the style of communication they use. If you refuse to traverse the graph to any appreciable degree (and make public where you landed; ideally also the path you followed), it’s much harder for anybody else to help you. It’s not clear at which level of linguistic abstraction the disconnect is—you could be missing the “authentic” node altogether (solved by dictionary), you could be missing connections from “authentic” to “honest” to “honesty about self” (don’t think this is the problem; not clear how to solve this if it is), you could be asserting that those connections in your graph have equal weights to, say, the connections from “authentic” to “tangerine” to “random number generator”, so there’s literally no way for you to privilege the first set when trying to trace a path from “authentic” to “relationship”, because you have no idea which direction to go looking in (don’t think this is the problem either), or you could be asserting that the first set of connections do indeed have heavier weights, but not to a sufficient degree (if there is any such degree) that you would feel justified in traversing those nodes.
EDIT: I want to note that I started writing this comment well before Habryka posted his response. It strikes me that he hit on some very similar things (at one point I edited out a sentence that called your initial question “underspecified”; it’s not that it wasn’t an accurate description of my feelings on the subject, but I decided to taboo that word because I thought of a better way to explain what I thought the problem was).
If I read “authentic relationship”, “a relationship which is built on honest premises and communication (i.e. neither party has lied or misled the other about their background, motivations, or relevant personality characteristics)” is my first guess as to what that would mean. My question is: are you incapable of performing this sort of “decryption work” (as in, the examples you generated are your best effort), or is your chief complaint that it’s effortful and error-prone (as in, you could have extrapolated something similar to what I did, but you believe that doing so is epistemically unjustified)?
I don’t know how you generated that guess, so my answer can only be the former.
As for the rest of your comment, I find it baffling. Nothing resembling what you describe is how I think when interpreting people’s writing (nor, as far as am aware, does anyone else I know think like this). In any case, if this is the type and amount of thought necessary to interpret a term used in a post, then I must say, even more emphatically, that such interpretation attempts are ill-advised. There is just no way such efforts can be justified.
But there is an even simpler response to make. Namely: suppose that your guess (quoted above) had been right; suppose that Vaniver, when he said “authentic relationship”, had indeed meant “a relationship which is built on …” (etc.).
Would it not be easy for him simply to say that? Wouldn’t that have been the easiest thing in the world? Why would he have needed to know anything about the “shape of my confusion”, or my mental models, or any such thing?
(Now, as it turns out, the actual meaning of ‘authentic’, as used in the OP, was rather more complicated. But that is a separate matter entirely!)
I was not describing the process I use to interpret novel linguistic compositions such as “authentic relationship”—my brain does that under the hood, automatically, in a process that is fairly opaque to me; despite that, the results are sufficiently accurate that I don’t spend hours trying to resolve minutiae, even in highly complex technical domains.
I was attempting to use an analogy with word embeddings in multi-dimensional space to explain why the way you approach information-gathering has asymmetrical costs. I can’t come up with another analogy, because your response is totally non-informative with respect to how/why/where my first analogy failed to land. Did you notice that you didn’t even tell me whether you’re familiar with the concepts used? I have literally zero bytes of information with which to attempt to generate a more targeted analogy.
Would it not be easy for him simply to say that?
This doesn’t really seem material to the point I was trying to discuss, but (I imagine) it’s because there can be a trade-off between density and precision when trying to convey information. (And, also, how is he supposed to know which parts of his post are going to be incomprehensible to which people? Again, one could put in an unbounded amount of effort into specifying with ever more clarity and precision exactly what they mean by every word.)
Your response to Habryka also seems to not materially respond to his main points (the grossly asymmetrical effort involved, and the fact that the time spent is not free, it is traded off against other pursuits).
You list certain outcomes you consider beneficial, but “things are not easy to explain and have hidden complexities” is true for literally everything given a sufficient level of desired precision. It is a fully general argument in favor of asking arbitrarily vague questions.
EDIT: I did want to thank you for your straightforward answer here:
I don’t know how you generated that guess, so my answer can only be the former.
That, at least, would let me move the conversation forward with a tentative conclusion for that question, but unfortunately that answer seems to imply sufficiently different mental machinery that I’m a bit stuck regardless. I’ll come back to this if I come up with something exceptionally clever to try to solve that problem, I suppose.
If I read “authentic relationship”, “a relationship which is built on honest premises and communication (i.e. neither party has lied or misled the other about their background, motivations, or relevant personality characteristics)” is my first guess as to what that would mean. My question is: are you incapable of performing this sort of “decryption work” (as in, the examples you generated are your best effort), or is your chief complaint that it’s effortful and error-prone (as in, you could have extrapolated something similar to what I did, but you believe that doing so is epistemically unjustified)?
I am advocating for this because, in practice, this seems to minimize the amount of time and communication necessary to make sure both parties are on the same page w.r.t. the definitions of terms used and the intent behind what is being communicated. The way you ask questions reveals almost nothing about the state of your mental map of the subject of discussion (what you think the boundaries are, how you think it corresponds to the surrounding context, etc). This increases the amount of communication required to answer your question much more than linearly—you know “where” you are confused much better than the author. The author can guess, but the author is dealing with the entire possibility space of things you can be confused about; the amount of work that can go into resolving that confusion is unbounded. However, if you put forth your interpretation, then ask for clarification/correction, the author has a much more constrained space to explore to attempt to diagnose where your map is insufficiently well-specified/pointing at the wrong thing/has some other conflict with the author’s map. ~Linear time for you to come up with the most straightforward possible interpretation (contingent on you actually being able to do so—still not clear to what degree this is a disagreement in the allowable degree of inference), + ~linear time for the author to identify mistakes, vs 0 time for you + unbounded time for the author.
The problem I’m having with trying to respond to the rest of your post (and the previous one in the thread) is that I don’t feel like I have a better sense of your position on the more critical underlying issues now than when I first replied.
I will try to be more specific still, though I will be leaning on concepts similar to those in ML, such as embeddings, vectors, dimensionality, etc. I can try to find another set of concepts if this doesn’t translate well enough. (I already tried to come up with an analogy with interfaces & generics in the software engineering sense, but couldn’t actually come up with a coherent model without bringing in intersection types, at which point I gave up. Maybe that gives you some idea of what I was going for anyways.) When you performed the substitutions for “authentic”, it looks like you traveled the smallest possible distance away from the “authentic” node, and not in the direction of any cluster of nodes that would be closer to (or have higher connective weight with, if you prefer) “relationship” (or “expression”, or “reaction”). Naturally, the node you landed on fit the surrounding context about as well as a square peg in a round hole.
Now, to be absolutely clear, when you say that “authentic” has no standard meaning, are you claiming that “authentic” is equidistant from every other node in your graph (of all possible concepts)? I feel like we’ve ruled that out, but I’m not 100% sure; if that is the case then the direction I’m going in with the rest of this is probably fruitless.
If not, if you do indeed have a graph with concepts that are much closer to “authentic” than other concepts, then some of the concepts in the “authentic”-adjacent cluster will likewise be much closer to the “relationship” node along many dimensions than most of the others. What are those dimensions? Relationships have many properties and embedded concepts: participants, duration, style, etc. The dimensions we could say are relevant for linking together “authentic” and “relationship” would be more granular, likely describing the terms on which the participants engaged in the relationship, and the style of communication they use. If you refuse to traverse the graph to any appreciable degree (and make public where you landed; ideally also the path you followed), it’s much harder for anybody else to help you. It’s not clear at which level of linguistic abstraction the disconnect is—you could be missing the “authentic” node altogether (solved by dictionary), you could be missing connections from “authentic” to “honest” to “honesty about self” (don’t think this is the problem; not clear how to solve this if it is), you could be asserting that those connections in your graph have equal weights to, say, the connections from “authentic” to “tangerine” to “random number generator”, so there’s literally no way for you to privilege the first set when trying to trace a path from “authentic” to “relationship”, because you have no idea which direction to go looking in (don’t think this is the problem either), or you could be asserting that the first set of connections do indeed have heavier weights, but not to a sufficient degree (if there is any such degree) that you would feel justified in traversing those nodes.
EDIT: I want to note that I started writing this comment well before Habryka posted his response. It strikes me that he hit on some very similar things (at one point I edited out a sentence that called your initial question “underspecified”; it’s not that it wasn’t an accurate description of my feelings on the subject, but I decided to taboo that word because I thought of a better way to explain what I thought the problem was).
I don’t know how you generated that guess, so my answer can only be the former.
As for the rest of your comment, I find it baffling. Nothing resembling what you describe is how I think when interpreting people’s writing (nor, as far as am aware, does anyone else I know think like this). In any case, if this is the type and amount of thought necessary to interpret a term used in a post, then I must say, even more emphatically, that such interpretation attempts are ill-advised. There is just no way such efforts can be justified.
But there is an even simpler response to make. Namely: suppose that your guess (quoted above) had been right; suppose that Vaniver, when he said “authentic relationship”, had indeed meant “a relationship which is built on …” (etc.).
Would it not be easy for him simply to say that? Wouldn’t that have been the easiest thing in the world? Why would he have needed to know anything about the “shape of my confusion”, or my mental models, or any such thing?
(Now, as it turns out, the actual meaning of ‘authentic’, as used in the OP, was rather more complicated. But that is a separate matter entirely!)
I was not describing the process I use to interpret novel linguistic compositions such as “authentic relationship”—my brain does that under the hood, automatically, in a process that is fairly opaque to me; despite that, the results are sufficiently accurate that I don’t spend hours trying to resolve minutiae, even in highly complex technical domains.
I was attempting to use an analogy with word embeddings in multi-dimensional space to explain why the way you approach information-gathering has asymmetrical costs. I can’t come up with another analogy, because your response is totally non-informative with respect to how/why/where my first analogy failed to land. Did you notice that you didn’t even tell me whether you’re familiar with the concepts used? I have literally zero bytes of information with which to attempt to generate a more targeted analogy.
This doesn’t really seem material to the point I was trying to discuss, but (I imagine) it’s because there can be a trade-off between density and precision when trying to convey information. (And, also, how is he supposed to know which parts of his post are going to be incomprehensible to which people? Again, one could put in an unbounded amount of effort into specifying with ever more clarity and precision exactly what they mean by every word.)
Your response to Habryka also seems to not materially respond to his main points (the grossly asymmetrical effort involved, and the fact that the time spent is not free, it is traded off against other pursuits).
You list certain outcomes you consider beneficial, but “things are not easy to explain and have hidden complexities” is true for literally everything given a sufficient level of desired precision. It is a fully general argument in favor of asking arbitrarily vague questions.
EDIT: I did want to thank you for your straightforward answer here:
That, at least, would let me move the conversation forward with a tentative conclusion for that question, but unfortunately that answer seems to imply sufficiently different mental machinery that I’m a bit stuck regardless. I’ll come back to this if I come up with something exceptionally clever to try to solve that problem, I suppose.