I tried to reason through the riddles, before reading the rest and I made the same mistake as the jester did. It is really obvious in hindsight; I thought about this concept earlier and I really thought I had understood it. Did not expect to make this mistake at all, damn.
I even invented some examples on my own, like in the programming language Python a statement like print(“Hello, World!”) is an instruction to print “Hello, World!” on the screen, but “print(\”Hello, World!\”)” is merely a string, that represents the first string, it’s completely inert. (in an interactive environment it would display “print(“Hello, World!”)” on the screen, but still not “Hello, World!”).
Edit: I think I understand what went wrong with my reasoning. Usually, distinguishing a statement from a representation of a statement is not difficult. To get a statement from a representation of a statement you must interpret the representation once. And this is rather easy, for example, when I’m reading these essays, I am well aware that the universe doesn’t just place these statements of truth into my mind, but instead, I’m reading what Eliezer wrote down and I must interpret it. It is always “Eliezer writes ‘X’”, and not just “X”.
But in this example, there were 2 different levels of representation. To get to the jester and the king I need to interpret the words once. But to get to the inscriptions, I must interpret the words twice. This is what went wrong. If I correctly understood the root of my mistake, then, if I was in jester’s shoes, I wouldn’t have made this mistake. Therefore, I think, my mistake is not the same as jester’s. Simultaneous interpretation of different levels of representation is something to be vigilant about.
C’est ne pas un pipe. This is not a picture of a pipe either, this is a picture of a picture of a pipe. Or is this a piece text, saying “this is a picture of a picture of a pipe”? Or is this a piece of text, saying “This is a piece of text, saying \”this is a picture… \”″… :-)
Fascinating subject indeed!
I wonder how one would need to modify this principle to take into account risk-benefit analysis. What if quickly identifying wiggins meant incurring great benefit or avoiding great harm, then you would still need a nice short word for them. This seems obvious, the question is only how much shorter would the word need to be.
Labels that are both short and phonetically consistent with a given language are in short supply, therefore we would predict that sometimes even unrelated things shared labels—if they occupied sufficiently different contexts s.t. there was no risk of confusing them. This what we see in case of professional jargon, for example. I also wonder whether one could actually quantify such prediction.
If labels that are both short and phonetically consistent with a given language are really in such short supply, why aren’t they all already occupied? Why were you able to come up with a word like ‘wiggin’, that seems to be consistent with English phonetics, that doesn’t already mean something? -- This introduces the concept of phonetic redundancy in languages. It would actually be impractical to occupy all shortest syllable combinations, because it would make it impossible or require too much effort to correct errors. People in radiocommunications recognized this phenomenon and devised a number of spelling alphabets, the most commonly known being the NATO phonetic alphabet.