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.
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.