In your example, I think Bob is doing something unrelated to rationalist Taboo.
In the actual factual game of Taboo, you replace a word with a description that is sufficient to tell your team what the original word is. In rationalist Taboo, you replace a word with a description that is sufficient to convey the ideas you were trying to convey with the original word.
So if Bob tries to taboo “surprise” as “the feeling of observing a low-probability event,” and Alice says “A license plate having the number any particular number is low probability—is it surprising?,” Bob should think “Oh, the description I replaced ‘surprise’ with did not convey the same thing as the word ‘surprise’. I need to try tabooing it differently.”
This works better when you’re trying to taboo the usage of a word in a specific context, because the full meaning of a word is very very complicated (though trying to make definitions can still be a fun and profitable game, I agree), but when you look at how you’ve used it in just one sentence, then you have some hope of pinning down what you mean by it to your satisfaction.
In your example, I think Bob is doing something unrelated to rationalist Taboo.
In the actual factual game of Taboo, you replace a word with a description that is sufficient to tell your team what the original word is. In rationalist Taboo, you replace a word with a description that is sufficient to convey the ideas you were trying to convey with the original word.
So if Bob tries to taboo “surprise” as “the feeling of observing a low-probability event,” and Alice says “A license plate having the number any particular number is low probability—is it surprising?,” Bob should think “Oh, the description I replaced ‘surprise’ with did not convey the same thing as the word ‘surprise’. I need to try tabooing it differently.”
This works better when you’re trying to taboo the usage of a word in a specific context, because the full meaning of a word is very very complicated (though trying to make definitions can still be a fun and profitable game, I agree), but when you look at how you’ve used it in just one sentence, then you have some hope of pinning down what you mean by it to your satisfaction.