[Question] What words should be shorter in the rational dictionary?

[brook]

I read some linguistics books a while back, and more recently I’ve been reading (against my better judgement) Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus. So, I’ve been thinking about word length and concept importance a lot.

Question 1: Should we be picking one or two syllable words for phrases/​concepts central to thinking better? Is the hit to interpretability (which LessWrong is not really optimised for as is) worth it? What other significant costs am I missing?

Question 2: Which phrases/​concepts?

[TLW]

What other significant costs am I missing?

Language has redundancy at least partially for purposes of error-detection-and-correction.

Adding new short words increases the probability of undetected (or detected-but-ambiguous) errors.

[AprilSR]

We were discussing this in the Eliezerfic Discord server a few weeks ago, and aurellem made a Google doc which listed their brainstorm for what phrases/​concepts might be good to have short terms for. The doc also has a list references to Baseline (the constructed language used in dath ilan) in Mad Investor Chaos.

[brook]

I’m sure this happens in many areas (maths, for one), but medical language is a pretty well-optimised system I know well. You might like to use it for inspiration:

Medicine: “72yo F BIBA with ³⁄₇ hx SOB, CP. Chest clear, HS I+II+0. IMP: IECOPD”

English: 72 year old woman brought in by ambulance because she’s been short of breath and had chest pain for the past 3 days. No noises were audible over her lungs with a stethoscope, both of her heart sounds were clearly audible with no added sounds. I think it’s most likely this is being caused by an infection on top of a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

[TLW]

I can kind of reverse-engineer most of that; what’s the /​7 mean?

[Evenflair]

Three of seven, three days in the last week. (I think)