What I find most striking about these comments is that, when I stumble across them outside of the context of this post, the resulting double-take risks whiplash.
“Wait, what??? Did someone really say that? Oh, I see. It’s that thread where everyone is making absurd-sounding assertions, again. (sigh)” Lather, rinse, repeat.
Not for the first time, I want to be speaking a language with more comprehensive evidentials.
I know that we can’t help the situation by simply making up some evidential categories, language isn’t that flexible, but we can at least discuss the options and reveal specific obstacles. Full-blown attempt at directing linguistic evolution isn’t feasible, but as far are long inferential chains are being built and learned and used and relied upon, why not try and make use of it?
I suspect that it might be possible to steer the discussion to creation of certain keywords dangling on the end of chains of inferential reasoning, that would later serve as evidential qualifiers. Some of the top-rated comments come from the irrationality game thread, and they’ve been edited to reference “irrationality game”, which serves as such a qualifier. “Counterfactual”, as in “counterfactual muggling” does not only derive its evidential meaning from general English usage, but also from it being heavily used in arguments of certain king here on LW.
What I find most striking about these comments is that, when I stumble across them outside of the context of this post, the resulting double-take risks whiplash.
“Wait, what??? Did someone really say that? Oh, I see. It’s that thread where everyone is making absurd-sounding assertions, again. (sigh)” Lather, rinse, repeat.
Not for the first time, I want to be speaking a language with more comprehensive evidentials.
I know that we can’t help the situation by simply making up some evidential categories, language isn’t that flexible, but we can at least discuss the options and reveal specific obstacles. Full-blown attempt at directing linguistic evolution isn’t feasible, but as far are long inferential chains are being built and learned and used and relied upon, why not try and make use of it?
I suspect that it might be possible to steer the discussion to creation of certain keywords dangling on the end of chains of inferential reasoning, that would later serve as evidential qualifiers. Some of the top-rated comments come from the irrationality game thread, and they’ve been edited to reference “irrationality game”, which serves as such a qualifier. “Counterfactual”, as in “counterfactual muggling” does not only derive its evidential meaning from general English usage, but also from it being heavily used in arguments of certain king here on LW.