Taboo Your Words

"Nine innings and three outs" works much better to elicit "baseball".

But that's not the rationalist's version of the game. The rationalist's game involves seeing at a lower level of detail. Not thinking up synonyms and keywords that weren't on the card.

Yeah, but when playing actual Taboo "rational agents should WIN" (Yudkowsky, E.) and therefore favour "nine innings and three outs" over your definition (which would also cover some related-but-different games such as rounders, I think). I suspect something like "Babe Ruth" would in fact lead to a quicker win.

None of which is relevant to your actual point, which I think a very good one. I don't think the tool is all that nonstandard; e.g., it's closely related to the positivist/verificationist idea that a statement has meaning only if it can be paraphrased in terms of directly (ha!) observable stuff.

Good point, especially since the most common words become devalued or politicized ("surge", "evil", "terror" &c.) but...

The existence of this game surprised me, when I discovered it. Why wouldn't you just say "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions?"

So what was your score?

(Did you cut your enemy?)

Sounds interesting. We must now verify if it works for useful questions.

Could someone explain what FAI is without using the words "Friendly", or any synonyms?

Easy PK. An optimization process that brings the universe towards the target of shared strong attractors in human high-level reflective aspiration.

"Why wouldn't you just say "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions"?"

...because you might not be a total total nerd :-)

In one class in high school, we were supposed to make our classmates guess a word using hand gestures. I drew letters in the air.

This strategy can't be that nonstandard, as it is the strategy I've always used when a conversation gets stuck on some word. But now that I think about it, people usually aren't that interesting in following my lead in this direction, so it isn't very common either.

An optimization process that brings the universe towards the target of shared strong attractors in human high-level reflective aspiration.

Then declaring the intention to create such a thing takes for granted that there are shared strong attractors.

What was that about the hidden assumptions in words, again?

Three separate comments here:

1) Eliezer_Yudkowsky: Why wouldn't you just say "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions"?

To phrase brent's objection a little more precisely: Because people don't normally think of baseball in those terms, and you're constrained on time, so you have to say something that makes them think of baseball quickly. Tom_Crispin's idea is much more effective at that. Or were you just trying to criticize baseball fans for not seeing the game that way?

2) Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not match [membership test: this event generates auditory experiences]."

But that doesn't help either as a scientific test, since you reference qualia. Er, I mean, that doesn't help either as a scientific test, since you use reference something that [membership test: incommunicable except by experience, non-interpersonally-comparable].

3) I've used the taboo method recently. On a libertarian mailing list, I claimed the economic calculation argument favors intellectual property because its absence creates a kind of calculational chaos. Because the debate devolved very quickly into multiple definitional arguments, I said something like, "Okay, argue your position without using the terms '[economic] good, scarce, or property.' I'll start [...]" No takers =-(

The game is not over! Michael Vassar said: "[FAI is ..] An optimization process that brings the universe towards the target of shared strong attractors in human high-level reflective aspiration."

For the sake of not dragging out the argument too much lets assume I know what an optimization process and a human is.

Whats are "shared strong attractors"? You cant use the words "shared", "strong", "attractor" or any synonyms.

What's a "high-level reflective aspiration"? You can't use the words "high-level", "reflective ", "aspiration" or any synonyms.

Caledonian said: "Then declaring the intention to create such a thing takes for granted that there are shared strong attractors."

We can't really say if there are "shared strong attractors" one way or the other until we agree on what that means. Otherwise it's like arguing about wither falling trees make "sound" in the forest. We must let the taboo game play out before we start arguing about things.

I'd have to agree with PK's protest. This isn't Hasbro's version of the game; you're not trying to help someone figure out that you're talking about a "Friendly AI" without using five words written on a card.

Oh, and there's no time limit.

Eliezer seems to want us to strike out some category of words from our vocabulary, but the category is not well defined. Perhaps a meta-Taboo game is necessary to find out what the heck we are supposed to be doing without. I'm not too bothered, grunting and pointing are reasonably effective ways of communicating. Who needs words ?

FAI is: a search amongst potentials which will find the reality in which humans best prosper.

The hemlock example demonstrates tcpkac's point well. How do you decide to conclude that Albert and Barry expect different results from the same action? To me, it seems obvious that they should taboo the word hemlock, and notice that one correctly expects Socrates to die from a drink made from an herb in the carrot family, and the other correctly expects Socrates to be unharmed by tea made from a coniferous tree. But it's not clear why Eliezer ought to have the knowledge needed to choose to taboo the word hemlock.

Y'know, the 'Taboo game' seems like an effective way to improve the clarity of meaning for individual words - if you have enough clear and precise words to describe those particular words in the first place.

If there isn't a threshold number of agreed-upon meanings, the language doesn't have enough power for Taboo to work. You can't improve one word without already having a suite of sufficiently-good words to work with.

The game can keep a language system above that minimum threshold, but can't be used to bootstrap the system above that threshold. If you're just starting out, you need to use different methods.

Julian Morrison said: "FAI is: a search amongst potentials which will find the reality in which humans best prosper." What is "prospering best"? You can't use "prospering", "best" or any synonyms.

Let's use the Taboo method to figure out FAI.

I'll just chime in at this point to note that PK's application of the technique is exactly correct.

^^^^Thank you. However merely putting the technique into the "toolbox" and never looking back is not enough. We must go further. This technique should be used at which point we will either reach new insights or falsely the method. Would you care to illustrate what FAI means to you Eliezer?(others are also invited to do so)

Maybe the comment section of a blog isn't even the best medium for playing taboo. I don't know. I'm brainstorming of productive ways/mediums to play taboo(assuming the method itself leads to something productive).

Suppose you learn of a powerful way to steer the future into any target you choose as long as that target is specified in the language of mathematics or with the precision needed to write a computer program. What target to choose? One careful and thoughtful choice would go as follows. I do not have a high degree of confidence that I know how to choose wisely, but (at least until I become aware of the existence of nonhuman intelligent beings) I do know that if there exists wisdom enough to choose wisely, that wisdom resides among the humans. So, I will choose to steer the future into a possible world in which a vast amount of rational attention is focused on the humans, on human knowledge and on the potential that the humans have for affecting the far future. This vast inquiry will ask not only what future the humans would create if the humans have the luxury of avoiding unfortunate circumstances that no serious sane human observer would want the humans to endure, but also what future would be created by whatever intelligent agents ("choosers") the humans would create for the purpose of creating the future if the humans had the luxury . . . and also what future would be created by whatever choosers would be created by whatever choosers the humans would create . . . This "looping back" can be repeated many times.

I managed to avoid "desire", "want" and "volition". Unfortunately I only have time to write one of these today. I would do well to write a dozen.

Hollerith: I do not have a high degree of confidence that I know how to choose wisely, but (at least until I become aware of the existence of nonhuman intelligent beings) I do know that if there exists wisdom enough to choose wisely, that wisdom resides among the humans. So, I will choose to steer the future into a possible world in which a vast amount of rational attention is focused on the humans...

and lo the protean opaque single thing was taken out of one box and put into another

PK: Thank you. However merely putting the technique into the "toolbox" and never looking back is not enough. We must go further. This technique should be used at which point we will either reach new insights or falsely the method. Would you care to illustrate what FAI means to you Eliezer?(others are also invited to do so)

Don't underestimate me so severely. You think I don't know how to define "Friendly" without using synonyms? Who do you think taught you the technique? Who do you think invented Friendly AI?

But I came to understand, after a period of failure in trying to explain, that I could not tell people where I had climbed to, without giving them the ladder. People just went off into Happy Death Spirals around their favorite things, or proffered instrumental goals instead of terminal goals, or made wishes to genies, or said "Why don't you just build an AI to do the right thing instead of this whole selfish human-centered business?", or...

I've covered some of the ladder I used to climb to Friendly AI. But not all of it. So I'm not going to try to explain FAI as yet; more territory left to go.

But you (PK) are currently applying the Taboo technique correctly, which is the preliminary path I followed at the analogous point in my own reasoning; and I'm interested in seeing you follow it as far as you can. Maybe you can invent the rest of the ladder on your own. You're doing well so far. Maybe you'll even reach a different but valid destination.

@Richard Hollerith: Skipping all the introductory stuff to the part which tries to define FAI(I think), I see two parts. Richard Hollerith said:

"This vast inquiry[of the AI] will ask not only what future the humans would create if the humans have the luxury of [a)] avoiding unfortunate circumstances that no serious sane human observer would want the humans to endure, but also [b)] what future would be created by whatever intelligent agents ("choosers") the humans would create for the purpose of creating the future if the humans had the luxury"

a) What's a "serious sane human observer"? Taboo the words and synonyms. What are "unfortunate circumstances" that s/he would like to avoid? Taboo...

b)What is "the future humans would chose for the purpose of creating the future"? In what way exactly would they "chose" it? Taboo...

Good luck :-)

Eliezer Yudkowsky said: "Don't underestimate me so severely. You think I don't know how to define "Friendly" without using synonyms? Who do you think taught you the technique? Who do you think invented Friendly AI?"

I'm not trying to under/over/middle-estimate you, only theories which you publicly write about. Sometimes I'm a real meanie with theories, shoving hot pokers into to them and all sorts of other nasty things. To me theories have no rights.

"... I've covered some of the ladder I used to climb to Friendly AI. But not all of it. So I'm not going to try to explain FAI as yet; more territory left to go." So are you saying that if at present you played a taboo game to communicate what "FAI" means to you, the effort would fail? I am interested in the intricacies of the taboo game including it's failure modes.

"But you (PK) are currently applying the Taboo technique correctly, which is the preliminary path I followed at the analogous point in my own reasoning; and I'm interested in seeing you follow it as far as you can. Maybe you can invent the rest of the ladder on your own. You're doing well so far. Maybe you'll even reach a different but valid destination." I actually already have a meaning for FAI in my head. It seems different from the way other people try to describe it. It's more concrete but seems less virtuous. It's something along the lines of "obey me".

Who do you think invented Friendly AI?

You haven't invented Friendly AI. You've created a name for a concept you can only vaguely describe and cannot define operationally.

Who do you think taught you the technique?

Isn't just a bit presumptuous to conclude you're the first to teach the technique?

I'm not trying to under/over/middle-estimate you, only theories which you publicly write about. Sometimes I'm a real meanie with theories, shoving hot pokers into to them and all sorts of other nasty things. To me theories have no rights.

I know. But come on, you don't think the thought would ever have occurred to me, "I wonder if I can define Friendly AI without saying 'Friendly'?" It's not as if I invented the phrase first and only then thought to ask myself what it meant.

Moral, right, correct, wise, are all fine words for humans to use, but you have to break something down into ones and zeroes before it can be programmed. In a sense, the whole art of AGI is playing rationalist-Taboo with all words that refer to aspects of mind.

So are you saying that if at present you played a taboo game to communicate what "FAI" means to you, the effort would fail? I am interested in the intricacies of the taboo game including it's failure modes.

It has an obvious failure mode if you try to communicate something too difficult without requisite preliminaries, like calculus without algebra. Taboo isn't magic, it won't let you cross a gap of months in an hour.

I actually already have a meaning for FAI in my head. It seems different from the way other people try to describe it. It's more concrete but seems less virtuous. It's something along the lines of "obey me".

Really? That's your concept of how to steer the future of Earth-originating intelligent life? "Shut up and do what I say"? Would you want someone else to follow that strategy, say Archimedes of Syracuse, if the future fell into their hands?

So you play Taboo well, but you don't seem to see the difficulties that require a solution deeper than "obey me", and it's hard to explain an answer before explaining the question. Just like if you don't know about the game of Taboo, someone answers "Just build an AI to do the nice thing!"

You should consider looking for problems and failure modes in your own answer, rather than waiting for someone else to do it. What could go wrong if an AI obeyed you?

re PK's (b): if we're tabooïng choose, perhaps we should replace it with a description of subjective expected utility theory. Taboo utility--and I find myself clueless.

My precis of CEV is not very good. If I want to participate in the public discourse about it, I need to get better at writing descriptions of it that a backer of CEV would concede are full and fair. It is probably easier to do that to SimplifiedFAI than to do it to the CEV document, so I'll put that on my list of things to do when I have time.

Taboo utility--and I find myself clueless.

Consider the following optimization target: the future that would have come to pass if the optimization process did not come into existence -- which we will call the "naive future" -- modified in the following way.

The optimization process extrapolates the naive future until it can extrapolate no more or that future leads to the loss of Earth-originating civilization or a Republican presidential administration. In the latter case (loss of civilization or Republican win) rewind the extrapolation to the latest moment in which (according to the optimization process's best model of physical law) a binary event (such as for example an Everett branching) occurred such that if the event goes the other way, civilization will not be lost and the Republicans never win the White House, and take as the target the naive future with the revised binary event.

In the description of this target, although the humans have great influence on the future, the concept of the subjective utility of a human does not occur.

Eliezer Yudkowsky said: It has an obvious failure mode if you try to communicate something too difficult without requisite preliminaries, like calculus without algebra. Taboo isn't magic, it won't let you cross a gap of months in an hour.

Fair enough. I accept this reason for not having your explanation of FAI before me at this very moment. However I'm still in "Hmmmm...scratches chin" mode. I will need to see said explanation before I will be in "Whoa! This is really cool!" mode.

Really? That's your concept of how to steer the future of Earth-originating intelligent life? "Shut up and do what I say"? Would you want someone else to follow that strategy, say Archimedes of Syracuse, if the future fell into their hands?

First of all I would like to say that I don't spend a huge amount of time thinking of how to make an AGI "friendly" since I am busy with other things in my life. So forgive me if my reasoning has some obvious flaw(s) I overlooked. You would need to point out the flaws before I agree with you however.

If I was writing an AGI I would start with "obey me" as the meta instruction. Why? because "obey me" is very simple and allows for corrections. If the AGI acts in some unexpected way I could change it or halt it. Anything can be added as a subgoal to "obey me". On the other hand if I use some different algorithm and the AGI starts acting in some weird way because I overlooked something, well the situation is fubar. I'm locked out.

You should consider looking for problems and failure modes in your own answer, rather than waiting for someone else to do it. What could go wrong if an AI obeyed you? There are plenty of things that could go wrong. For instance if the AGI obeyed me but not in way I expected. Or if the consequences of my request were unexpected and irreversible. This can be mitigated by asking for forecasts before asking for actions.

As I'm writing this I keep thinking of a million possible objections and rebuttals but that would make my post very very long.

P.S. Caledonian's post disappeared. May a suggest a Youtube type system where posts that are considered bad are folded instead of deleted. This way you get free speech while keeping the signal to noise ratio in check.

If you want the obedient AGI to do what you actually want, you'll have to play Taboo anyway.

One of the more obvious associations of "Friendly AI" is the concept of "User Friendly", in which a process, set of instructions, or device is structured in such a way that most users will be able to get the results they want intuitively and easily. With the idea of "user friendly", we at least have real-life examples we can look at to better understand the concept.

When some people decided they wanted to identify the perfect voting method, they drew up a list of the desirable traits they wanted such a method to have in such a way that the traits were operationally defined. Then they were able to demonstrate that such a system wasn't possible: not all of the qualities we might desire in a polling method were compatible. They found that their goal was impossible - a very important and meaningful discovery.

At present, no one can say precisely, in technical language, what properties an AI would have to have in order to be "Friendly", and that is the first requirement towards finding out whether FAI is even possible.

I think comment moderation is clearly desirable on this blog (to keep busy smart thoughtful people reading the comments) and I have absolutely no reason to believe that the moderators of this blog have done a bad job in any way, but it would be better if there were a way for a sufficiently-motivated participant to review the decisions of the moderators. The fact that most blogs hosting serious public discourse do not provide a way is an example of how bad mainstream blogging software is.

The details of Youtube's way for a participant to review moderation decisions has already been described. Paul Graham's software for Hacker News (which will be released soon as open source) provides a elegant way: if a participant toggles a field ("showdead") on his profile page from No to Yes, then from then on, unpublished comments will appear in the participant's web browser at the position in the flow of comments at which they would have appeared if the comments had not been unpublished.

Now will the original poster please tell me whether in the future I should wait for an Open Thread to make a comment like this one? I do not believe that in this medium (namely, linear, non-threaded comment sections) keeping threads of conversation separate is worth the effort, but a lot of people disagree with me, and I will defer to the preference of the original poster and the editors of the blog.

The idea that rational inquiry requires clear and precise definitions is hardly a new one. And the idea that definitions of a word cannot simply reuse the word or its synonyms isn't new either - unless my elementary-school English teachers all spontaneously came up with it.

This is part of why people turn to dictionaries - sure, they only record usages, but they tend to have high-quality definitions that are difficult to match in quality without lots of effort.

We can only use this "technique" to convey concepts we already possess to people who lack them. We cannot use it to expand and analyze concepts we don't have yet. We cannot take PK's suggestion and use it to figure out FAI, because we have no idea what FAI really means and have no meaning to put into a different set of words.

Caledonian,

they tend to have high-quality definitions that are difficult to match in quality without lots of effort.

All well and good, and useful in their way. But still just a list of synonyms and definitions. You can describe 'tree' using other English words any which way you want, you're still only accounting for a miniscule fraction of the possible minds the universe could contain. You're still not really much closer to universal conveyance of the concept. Copy the OED out in a hundred languages; decent step in the right direction. To take the next big step though...well, that's the question, huh?

We cannot take PK's suggestion and use it to figure out FAI, because we have no idea what FAI really means.

Not quite accurate. I pretty much know what I want a Friendly AI to be - we probably all do. The problem is couching it in terms that said AI would grok, with no danger of a catastrophic misunderstanding (or getting told off by Eliezer).

I'd really like to taboo, "probability," and, "event," when discussing intelligence.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention one of the most important rules in Rationalist Taboo:

You can't Taboo math.

Stating an equation is always allowed.

But of course, you can still point to an element of a mathematical formula and ask "What does this term apply to? Answer without saying..."

Albert says that people have "free will". Barry says that people don't have "free will". Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by "free will", on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase "free will" at all. (If you want to try this at home, you should also avoid the words "choose", "act", "decide", "determined", "responsible", or any of their synonyms.)

Careful here. You may sometimes find that there was no coherent concept there to begin with, that the notion was simply semantic cotton candy whipped up out of the ambiguity of language.

The main restriction, of course, is time in live conversation. Of course, I'm sure time to process these thoughts decreases as you have more....

Consider a hypothetical debate between two decision theorists who happen to be Taboo fans:

A: It's rational to two-box in Newcomb's problem.
B: No, one-boxing is rational.
A: Let's taboo "rational" and replace it with math instead. What I meant was that two-boxing is what CDT recommends.
B: Oh, what I meant was that one-boxing is what EDT recommends.
A: Great, it looks like we don't disagree after all!

What did these two Taboo'ers do wrong, exactly?

This is one of the nonstandard tools in my toolbox, and in my humble opinion, it works way way better than the standard one.

Yudkowsky, 2008.

To bring out the role of pointlessness, it is worth noting that when faced with a potentially verbal dispute we often ask: what turns on this?

...

Typically, a broadly verbal dispute is one that can be resolved by attending to language and resolving metalinguistic differences over meaning. For example, these disputes can sometimes be resolved by settling the facts about the meaning of key terms in our community...[which] may take substantive empirical investigation.

Distinguishing senses of a key term is particularly dicult when these senses do not correspond to clear explicit definitions. More generally, we are not always able to give a good articulation of what our terms mean, and it is often far from obvious whether or not two speakers disagree about meaning. So it is useful to have a method that does not directly depend on the analysis of meaning in this way.

An alternative heuristic for detecting and dealing with verbal disputes is what we might call the method of elimination. Here, the key idea is that one eliminates use of the key term, and one attempts to determine whether any substantive dispute remains.

...

The method of elimination can be applied to many disputes in philosophy. To illustrate a possible use, I will start with an issue that has often been accused of giving rise to verbal disputes, and in which proponents are relatively sophisticated about these issues: the question of free will and determinism.

Suppose that a compatibilist says ‘Free will is compatible with determinism’, and an incompatibilist says ‘No, free will is not compatible with determinism’. A challenger may suggest that the dispute is verbal, and that the dispute arises only because the parties mean different things by ‘free will’.

We can then apply the method of elimination: bar the term ‘free will’, and see whether there are residual disputes. There are various possible outcomes, depending on the compatibilist and the incompatibilist in question. One possible outcome is that the parties will disagree over a sentence such as ‘Moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism’ as part of the original dispute. If so, this is a prima facie indication that the dispute is non-verbal—though one may want to reapply the method to ‘moral responsibility’ to be sure. Another possible outcome is that there will be no such residual disagreement. For example, the parties might agree on “Determinism is compatible with degree D of moral responsibility”, “Determinism is not compatible with a higher degree D’ of moral responsibility” (for example, a degree involving desert that warrants retributive punishment), and other relevant sentences. This outcome is a prima facie indication that the dispute is verbal, resting on a disagreement about whether the meaning of “free will” requires more than degree D of moral responsibility.

...

In the Socratic tradition, the paradigmatic philosophical questions take the form “What is X?”. These questions are the focus of many philosophical debates today: What is free will? What is knowledge? What is justification? What is justice? What is law? What is confirmation? What is causation? What is color? What is a concept? What is meaning? What is action? What is life? What is logic? What is self-deception? What is group selection? What is science? What is art? What is consciousness? And indeed: What is a verbal dispute? Despite their traditional centrality, disputes over questions like this are particularly liable to involve verbal disputes. So these disputes are particularly good candidates for the method of elimination. For disputes of this form, we can apply a special case of the method, which we can call the subscript gambit.

For example, in the dispute over free will, one party might say “Freedom is the ability to do what one wants”, while the other says “Freedom is the ability to ultimately originate one’s choices”. We can then introduce “freedom1” and “freedom2” for the two right-hand-sides here, and ask: do the parties dier over freedom1 and freedom2? Perhaps they will disagree over “Freedom2 is required for moral responsibility”, or over “Freedom1 is what we truly value”. If so, this clarifies the debate...

...

The method of elimination can be useful even when a debate is not verbal. If two philosophers have conceptual mastery of exactly the same concept of physicalism, but one asserts ‘Physicalism is true’ and the other rejects it, then asking them to state relevant disagreements without using the term ‘physicalism’ is nevertheless likely to clarify what is at issue. Likewise, the method of elimination can usefully be applied even to philosophical assertions made by a single party, not in the context of a dispute. If a compatibilist is asked to state their thesis, or relevant aspects of their thesis, without using the term ‘free will’, this may well clarify that thesis for an audience and may help boil the thesis down to the key underlying issues.

Of course the parties might disagree on whether physicalism1 or physicalism2 best fits the use of “physicalism” in a certain community, or over whether semantics1 or semantics2 best fits the use of “semantics” in a given community. To resolve these issues of usage, one can do sociology, anthropology, linguistics, or experimental philosophy. Once one has agreed on the first-order properties of physicalism1 and physicalism2, it is hard to see that anything else in the first-order domain will rest on these questions of usage.

This picture leads to a certain deflationism about the role of conceptual analysis (whether a priori or a posteriori), and about the interest of questions such as “What is X?” or “What is it to be X?” Some component of these questions is inevitably terminological, and the non-terminological residue can be found without using ‘X’.

...

The model is not completely deflationary about conceptual analysis. On this model, the analysis of words and the associated concepts is relatively unimportant in understanding a first-order domain. But it is still interesting and important to analyze conceptual spaces: the spaces of concepts (and of the entities they pick out) that are relevant to a domain, determining which concepts can play which roles, what the relevant dimensions of variation are, and so on.

...there are important normative questions about what expressions ought to mean. These questions comprise what Peirce called “the ethics of terminology”. Ideal agents might be unaffected by which terms are used for which concepts, but for nonideal agents such as ourselves, the accepted meaning for a key term will make a difference to which concepts are highlighted, which questions can easily be raised, and which associations and inferences are naturally made. Following the “ameliorative” project of Haslanger (2005), one might argue that expressions such as ‘gender’ and ‘race’ play a certain practical role for us, and that role is played better by some conceptions than others, so ‘race’ and ‘gender’ ought to have certain meanings. The manifestly verbal dispute among astronomers about whether Pluto is a planet is best understood as a debate in the ethics of terminology: given the scientific and cultural roles that ‘planet’ plays, should ‘planet’ be used to include Pluto or exclude it? In philosophy, ‘meaning’ functions as something of an honorific (it attracts people to its study), so if one thinks that meaning1 is more important that meaning2, one might hold that ‘meaning’ ought to be used for meaning1.

Chalmers, 2009. (Emphasis added.)

Broken Link: And see also Shane Legg's compilation of 71 definitions of "intelligence".

In fiction writing, this is known as Show Don't Tell. Instead of using all-encompassing, succing abstractions, to present the reader with predigested conclusion (Character X is a jerk, Place Y is scary, Character Z is afraid), it is encouraged to show the reader evidence of X's jerkiness, Y's scariness, or Z's fear, and leave it to them to infer from said evidence what is going on. Effectively, what one is doing is tabooing judgments and subjective perceptions such as "jerky", "scary" or "afraid", and replace them with a list of jerky actions, scary traits, and symptoms of fear.

I've first read this about two years ago and it has been an invaluable tool. I'm sure it has saved countless hours of pointless arguments around the world.

When I realise that an inconsistency in how we interpret a specific word is a problem in a certain argument and apply this tool, it instantly transforms arguments which actually are about the meaning of the word to make them a lot more productive (it turns out it can be unobvious that the actual disagreement is about what a specific word means). In other cases it just helps get back on the right track instead of getting distracted by what we mean when we say a certain word that is actually beside the point.

It does occasionally take a while to convince the other party to the argument that I'm not trying to fool or trick them when I ask for us to apply this method. Another observation is that the article on Empty Labels has transformed my attitude towards the meaning of words, so when it turns out we disagree about meanings, I instantly lose interest and this can confuse the other party.

I think one word that needs to be taboo-ed, especially in the context of being a victim to media advertising, is the word "FREE!!!" (Exclamation marks may or may not be present).

Replacing a word with a long definition is, in a way, like programming a computer and writing code inline instead of using a subroutine.

Do it too much and your program becomes impossible to understand.

If I were to say "I'll be out of work tomorrow because I'm going to an artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions", people will look at me as though I'm nuts. And not just because people don't talk like that--but because there's a reason why people don't talk like that. For one thing, to understand that sentence someone must understand the subclause and then discard some of the information--the fact that baseball has four safe positions has nothing to do with why I'm mentioning it. For another, human beings have a small stack size. We can't easily comprehend sentences with many nested subclauses.

This method of elimination can be useful to both verbal disagreements (where the real debate is only over terminology) non-verbal disagreements (where parties fundamentally disagree about things themselves, and not just labels). Besides separating the two to clarify the real disagreement, it can also be usefully applied to one’s own internal dialogue.

However, how do we know when to apply this technique? With external debates, it is easy enough to suspect when a disagreement is only verbal, or when the terms argued over have constituent parts. These might be of limited help if one’s internal logic differs notably from a similar line of reasoning in a book or other non-verbal source of information. However, when one is considering completely new ideas, what cues might cause us to use this method? As Yudkowsky points out, this method is much more cognitively intensive than simply defining terms, so it is necessary to use it sparingly rather than all the time.

One cue might be that a large portion of one’s argument hinges around one particular word or term. Another might simply be noticing that one is using a term in slightly different contexts, such as using the word “rational” with regard to both economics and morality. A morally rational being might be a philanthropist economically rather than an investor trying to make money. Similarly, an economically rational being might never tip waiters, or might favor Enron-style economics.

A key term or concept such as these should be examined with all available tools in one’s toolbox. These include defining the term formally, explaining things without using the term and its synonyms, identifying the constituent components of the term, and asking if there are measureable differences between various definitions. The goal is to find any inconsistencies in the way one is using the term.

ds

1. entity that regularly makes the acts of changing the owner of object of value from the other entities to self without providing any signal according to that the given other entity could have any reason to hypothesize such change in short term time horizon of its perceptual and cognitive activity.

2. relatively common state of a natural system of currently detecting an internal insufficiency of specific sources interpreting it as the threat to its existence or proper functioning and causing it to perform an attempt to compensate for it and deflect such threat.

3. the natural object which is usually keeping its shape and is making an impression of having a value much greater than other kinds of natural shape-keeping objects probably due to the easily recognizable hue and also due to the relatively low amount of it in reachable universe.

Following the suggestion here invokes such a pronounced and immediate effect on my mental state. In the free-will example, it’s as if my mind is stunned into silence.  If I cannot rephrase what I’m thinking, can I really know I’m thinking it? Or disturbingly, have I done any thinking at all?  

In either case, removing these words forces the thought process to be redone.  It is easy to speak in the way we’ve always spoke, and to think like we’ve always thought.  This is the path of least resistance, becoming increasingly frictionless each time it is mentally rehearsed.  Moreover, it seems like these thoughts are also the first to arise. 

I posed the same question about free-will, with the same restrictions, to three friends. 

One answered with a clever argument against free will, reasoning along the same lines of Sam Harris. He began by saying “We don’t choose a lot of things in life.” At the end, he cited that since he relied on only one restricted word, it was a win. 

The two others sought assistance from ChatGPT with a one-shot prompt. Intriguingly, the generated response erred in a similar manner on both occasions. One cited free will as  “the ability to make independent and unconstrained selections...”  and the other claimed it was  “the capacity of individuals to make independent expression of their inner nature, unaffected by external influences or predetermined factors.” In both cases, the output contains a synonym.  

I am curious how its error relates to our own tendencies of thinking.  Are these first thoughts, or these first outputs, the most probable? Are they the most probable because they are the easiest?  More importantly, I am curious as to how this restricting of words can be used outside of philosophy.  If you can clarify your thinking about a problem, you should in turn clarify your ability to solve it.  If so, this then has utility in science and engineering. 

But how could this be done in practice? How do you know what words to restrict? 

I came to lesswrong because of a The Noncentral Fallacy, and have been reading eagerly. I had similar thoughts, maybe from different angles, for 20 years or so, but I never managed to write them clearly and eloquently.

My take was that words have connotations, i.e. some emotional baggage that comes whenever they are uttered. E.g. "Democracy" is Good, and when arguing about changes to some policies, each side says their suggestion is more democratic, and in order to prove it they go at length to define what democracy is, and the argument turns to be about the definition of a word rather than whether the suggested policy is good.

And I therwfore challange people I argue with to make their point without using the word "democracy". They usually fail. 

POV: Definition of intelligence 

“. . . in its lowest terms intelligence is present where the individual animal, or human being, is aware, however dimly, of the relevance of his behaviour to an objective. Many definitions of what is indefinable have been attempted by psychologists, of which the least unsatisfactory are 1. the capacity to meet novel situations, or to learn to do so, by new adaptive responses and 2. the ability to perform tests or tasks, involving the grasping of relationships, the degree of intelligence being proportional to the complexity, or the abstractness, or both, of the relationship.” J. Drever

Have you heard of the language Toki Pona? It forces you to taboo your words by virtue of the language only containing 120-ish words. It was invented by a linguist named Sonja Lang who was depressed and wanted a language that would force her to break her thoughts into manageable pieces. I'm fluent in it and can confirm that speaking it can get rid of certain confusions like this, but it also creates other, different confusions. [mortal, not-feathers, biped] has 3 confusions in it while [human] only has 1. Tabooing a word splits the confusion into 3 pieces. If we said [mortal, not-feathers, biped] instead of human, that could result in ambiguities related to bipedal-ness (what about creatures that are observed to sometimes walk on 2 legs and sometimes 4), lack of feathers (do porcupine quills count) and mortal (i forgot where i read this or if it's true but apparently there are some microorganisms that can be reanimated by other microorganisms)