Language, intelligence, rationality

It really bothers me when I see proposals to 'fix' language because as far as I'm concerned, natural languages are well-adapted to their environment.

• The purpose of language, insofar as it has a specific purpose, is to get other people to do things. To get you to think of a concept the same way I do, to make you feel a specific emotion, to induce you to make me a sandwich, or whatever.

• People's brains don't operate using strict logic. We're extremely good at pattern matching from noisy and ambiguous data, in a way that programs have yet to approach. eg. Google's probabilistic search correction does well at guessing what you meant to type when you produce an ambiguous or malformed string, but it can't infer that since all your searches in the last few minutes were all clustered around the topic of clinical psychology, your current search term of "hysterical" is probably meant to refer to the old psychiatric concept and not the modern usage of hysterical = funny. A human would have much less trouble working that out because they have a mental model of the current conversation that indicates that the technical definition of the word is relevant.

• This is why it's not only ok, but in fact good for language to have a lot of built-in ambiguity - given the hardware that it runs on, it's much more efficient for me to rattle off an ambiguous sentence whose meaning is made clear through context, than it is for me to construct a sentence which is redundantly unambiguous due to our shared environment. Furthermore, my communicating in a sentence which is redundantly unambiguous carries the connotation that I have a low opinion of your ability to understand me, otherwise why would I put myself out so much to encode my meaning?

• Lojban isn't nearly as unambiguous and logical as its creators wanted it to be. While it's true that its syntax is computer-readable, there is little to no improvement on the semantic level. And the pragmatic level of language is completely language-independent - there is always going to be a way to be unnecessarily vague, to be sarcastic, to misdirect, and so on, because those devices allow us to communicate nuances about our attitudes towards the subject of conversation and signal various personal traits in a way that straightforward communication doesn't support. So despite Lojban having the capacity to be clearer than most natural language, that's not how it will be used conversationally by any fluent speakers. And the same goes for any future constructed languages.

• Taboos and neologisms don't work in the long-term, because human language evolves over time. Consider a few topics that we currently have taboos about: sex and defecation, and how many euphemisms we have to talk about them. The reason we have so many is that as each euphemism reaches peak usage, its meaning becomes too closely connected to the concept it was meant to stand in for. It's then replaced by a new untainted euphemism and the process repeats. Similarly, neologisms, once released into the wild, will take on new connotations or change meaning altogether.

It's pretty ridiculous that SIAI thinks it's a good idea to use Lojban to teach programs about ethics. The distinctive feature of Lojban is that it's easy to parse; but nowadays we have kinda decent natural language parsers. I used a constructed language to communicate with my class project in college, but only because I didn't want to bother with figuring out how to use an English parser, and because I knew no one but me would ever talk to it.

The lowest hanging fruit in this regard is probably vocabulary that divides thingspace into more natural categories. See the whole Human's Guide to Words Sequence for more details.

Interesting question. My thought is that the 'compression mode' model of language - that it doesn't actually communicate very much, but relies on the recipient having a similar enough understanding of the world to the sender to decode it - is relevant here. I'm not sure, but it seems at least plausible to me that English and other similar languages are compressed in such a way that while an AI could decode them, it wouldn't be very efficient and wouldn't necessarily be something that we would want.

ETA: If this is the case, conversational Lojban probably has the same problem, but Lojban appears to be extensible in ways that English is not, so it may do a better job of rising to the challenge by way of something like a specialized grammar.

The idea of an artificial language is fine, but learning an entire new vocabulary for a language almost no one speaks is obviously a waste of time; with the time and cognitive resources it would take to learn Lojban, I could learn something far more valuable.

But there's no particular reason for artificial languages to have their own vocabulary. An artificial language which provided an improved set of function words, grammar, and conjugations, but retained compatibility with English adjectives, nouns and verbs - that I would be willing to learn. It's too bad those in the intersection of linguists and novelty seekers is stuck on Lojban, because their effort there is wasted.

So how many people reading have actually learnt Lojban?

(I think there's one person actually interested in Lojban on RW ...)

Standardising on communication protocol superior to natural ape language: Good
Choosing Lojban for this purpose: Bad

If you're going to relearn an entirely new communications protocol, you should a more comprehensive, unified approach that solves other difficult problems at the same time.

I'm speaking, of course, of CLIP (Clippy Language Interface Protocol). It merges language (including machine language), epistemology, and meta-ethics into one protocol.

Other than the obvious aid it provides in interacting with clippys and making paperclips, it enforces traceability of all knowledge and inferences so that any correction of reasoning error or belief update can be quickly and seamlessly implemented and the implications thereof identified.

I'm still willing to teach for around 30 000 USD, which can simply be transferred to User:Kevin in my name as payment.

Have there been any reports from people who can think in Lojban, and whether it's helped them to think more clearly?

I've been a fan of constructed languages, especially Lojban, for a while, though I've never had the time and initiative to learn one. English is packed with mind projection fallacies and similar, and a "rational" language could be an improvement. However, if it was used broadly instead of just to talk to a FAI, it might develop some of the irrationalities common to English.

For a few years now, I've been working on a project to build an artificial language. I strongly suspect that the future of the kind of communication that goes on here will belong to an artificial language. English didn't evolve for people like us. For our purpose, it's a cumbersome piece of shit, rife with a bunch of fallacies built directly into its engine. And I assume it's the same way with all the other ones. For us, they're sick to the core.

But I should stress that I don't think the future will belong to any kind of word language. English is a word language, Lojban is a word language, etc. Or at least I don't think the whole future will belong to one. We must free ourselves from the word paradigm. When somebody says "language", most people think words. But why? Why not think pictures? Why not diagrams? I think there's a lot of potential in the idea of building a visual language. An artificial visual language. That's one thing I'm working on.

Anyway, for the sake of your rationality, there's a lot at stake here. A bad language doesn't just fail to properly communicate to other people; it systematically corrupts its user. How often do you pick up where you left off in a thought process by remembering a bunch of words? All day every day? Maybe your motto is to work to "improve your rationality"? Perhaps you write down your thoughts so you can remember them later? And so on. It's not just other people who can misinterpret what you say; it's also your future self who can misinterpret what you present self says. That's how everybody comes to believe such crazy stuff. Their later selves systematically misinterpret their sooner selves. They believe what they hear, but they hear not what they meant to say.

Presumably the AI wouldn't work in Lojban on the inside, and presumably it would also be clever enough to understand what we mean when we talk to it in English. It wouldn't automatically have human cultural knowledge, but it would know that this was required to understand us, so it would go and acquire some.

For a few years now, I've been working on a project to build an artificial language. I strongly suspect that the future of the kind of communication that goes on here, will belong to an artificial language. English didn't evolve for people like us. For our purpose, it's a cumbersome piece of shit, rife with a bunch of fallacies built directly into its engine. And I assume it's the same way with all the other ones. For us, they're sick to the core.

But I should stress that I don't think the future will belong to any kind of word language (whether natural or artificial). English is a word language, Lojban is a word language, etc. Or at least I don't think the whole future will belong to one. We must free ourselves from the word paradigm. When somebody says "language", most people think words. But why? Why not think pictures? Why not diagrams?