You almost always have some information to concentrate your priors. Between mutually-helpful speakers, implicit with an answer to a question is that the answer gives all the information you have on the question that could benefit the questioner. E.g.
What will the closing price of Apple be at the end of the year?
“Almost certainly somewhere between $150 and $250.”
positive statements like “Stay away from the wires” are more effective than negative statements, like “Don’t touch the wires,” because your brain basically ignores the negative part of it. “*mumble mumble* touch the wires? Don’t mind if I do!”
That’s what I was going for with
When reading or hearing a negation used in language, you must first process the positive form it contains to understand the entire statement. For example, to understand “the sky is not green”, you must first understand “the sky is green”, then negate it. Usually, this happens quickly and subconsciously, but it can harmfully slow down or weaken understanding by making you first consider a false idea.
I predict that it mostly gets worked around, by using only a few extra words.
“The sky is something other than blue” and “I will be somewhere else tomorrow” are both semantically-equivalent to the forbidden forms. Even “I deny that the sky is blue” is a positive-form negation of the object-level statement.
I suspect all such workarounds depend on one of a relatively small set of negation-enabling words, such as “other”, “else”, and “deny”, as you demonstrate. Prohibiting more words should eventually block all workarounds, while making writing more annoying.
An excellent alternative. I was going for something usable without any tools.
beat up the lock by ordinary methods
contact someone outside to let you out
beat up the door by ordinary methods
beat up the wall by ordinary methods
teleport
contact someone outside to destroy part of the wall
reshape phone and/or clothes into paperclips and wait for the paperclip maximiser to take them in a way that will probably let you out
break off a sharp piece of metal from your phone and cut your way out
break off a thin piece of metal from your phone and pick the lock
wish/pray
order a delivery, which will require the door to be opened (during which you can walk out), which may be easier from the outside
look up solutions and implement them (or contact person or AI to come up with them)
ignite a fire (friction or something, perhaps aided by starting on clothes you take off), and burn away the wall
distract yourself with entertainment on your phone so you mentally escape
wear steel-toed shoes as part of your clothes and kick holes in the wall
mentally swap inside and outside of room (the wall separates the two, but it doesn’t care which direction) -- now you’re outside
wait for someone to check on you and let you out
scream for help (or play suitably loud sound on your phone) to accelerate 17
vaporise yourself (never mind how) and let your molecules diffuse to the outside world
order a very thin, flat sheet of powerful explosives, which can be delivered thru a gap in the door without outsiders having to unlock, and detonate it to break the wall
don’t go in the room in the first place
order a time machine and go back to prevent the door from being locked
collapse to a true vacuum (… which would also kill you)
look for mechanical weaknesses in the architecture of the room and exploit them
write out enough of your thoughts to your phone to effectively transfer your mind/personality, then send it to be simulated outside the room
hack the room’s lights to be way brighter and gradually apply light pressure to push away part of the floor (you have 10 years, right?)
use the other door which isn’t locked
order a saw and cut the wall easily
scream at the wall (or play suitably loud sound on your phone) to break it
open (or break, if necessary) the window and climb out
publish a prize/bounty offer online for letting you out and wait for someone to take it
wear a cape as part of your clothes and write (lay out thread pulled from other clothes?) in Spanish on it, making it an es-cape (… sorry)
corrode the lock (or otherwise cause escape-enabling damage) with urine
fall asleep and forget about your problem, another form of mental escape
run really fast to slam the door open despite the lock when you hit it
wait, one of the walls was missing this whole time?
the lock’s electronic, hack it
break the light fixture to get glass shards from the bulb, which would be very effective for cutting your way out
become the type of person who would take brutal revenge on those who lock you in rooms, thereby acausally preventing this situation
take off some clothes, thread it around the door, get it stuck with part sticking out on your side, and pull really hard (and hope that overrides the lock)
cry me a river (literally), which might break something by water pressure
suggest a study of this room’s lock to LockPickingLawyer
disable phone’s cooling mechanisms, heat the processor, melt a hole in the wall
wait, the door didn’t properly block the way out this whole time?
talk to the gatekeeper over the text channel, be really smart and manipulative, and convince them to let you out
set some clothes on fire, push it thru the gaps around the door, thereby making everyone else in the building panic and let you out as part of the emergency response
skew the reviews of the company that owns the room to alter the number of people who come near the room, making someone let you out sooner (this would intuitively benefit from more people, but maybe less, sith bystander effect)
you didn’t say what kind of phone; maybe this is a special phone with an extra feature specifically designed to let me out
wait, the lock was trivially insecure the whole time?
go to the moon, which is outside the room (we have hundreds of ways of doing that)
Good challenge. I thought I could do this quickly, but it took ~45 minutes.
I looked things up when clarifying/writing out answers, but not in coming up with them.
Some of my answers are indirect, with the assumed completion “and then it’ll be much easier to find an actual method”. Some (a bigger some) are stupid.
Any otherwise-unclarified mention of “it” refers to the object which we want to send to the moon. Any otherwise-unclarified implicit reference to a task/goal refers to this task of sending it to the moon.
1 to 10: rocket, space elevator, catapult, make Earth bigger, bring moon closer, kick it really hard, outsource task to [other person/agent], build an unreasonably tall skyscraper, drive it there (find a way to grip tires onto near-vacuum?), direction-selective gravity disable + walking
11 to 20: set off explosives under it, machine-teleport, be on the moon already and pull it on a rope, motivate it to get away itself (if it’s intelligent/independent), pray really hard, trebuchet, pump it up a pipe, move Earth towards moon, destroy Earth so rocketry etc is easier, swim
21 to 30: figure out something with graphene (it does enough other crazy things), wind-up spinny launch thing, booming force of loud noise, figure out where someone with name “Moon” lives and use conventional Earth travel, transfigure with tension, revolve it on a flywheel and release, send it into orbit so it is the moon, jump to an alternate universe where it’s already on the moon, shoot matter against it to push it away, break apart the moon so its fragments land on Earth and you can access them by conventional travel
31 to 40: vaporise the moon so anywhere is technically “on all zero the-moons”, make a knowingly-perversely-incentivised prediction market, break it to atoms which will all eventually diffuse to the moon (but probably not at the same time), quantum-teleport, let a nearby Earth-disaster blast it away to the moon, get people to collaboratively throw it, burn it (??? cf atomic diffusion maybe???), set a bounty, stretch it out by a factor of many thousands, plant something that grows indefinitely under it
41 to 50: stretch Earth, corrugate spacetime (yeah idk; ask my Babble), throw a rope to connect to the moon and climb, pile up a sufficiently-large mountain under it, climb a ladder, wait for red-giant Sun to make things “convenient”, get a machine that’ll turn it (and only it) into paperclips on the moon, establish a trend of sending Earthly things to the moon which will include it eventually, contrive your incentives/reward/emotion/utility function to want it harder, inflate a bubble under it
Just did it. Paradox.
Clever, but
to the point that I can’t predict it
not further. If you increase redundancy, still unpredictable, as here, you probably went too far.
The ability to quickly recall what I studied for its application.
I thought that was obvious. Why do you ask? What am I missing?