[FRIAM] ordinary language
steve smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Thu Apr 10 13:53:50 EDT 2025
The oft-maligned Chinese Language Simplification
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Character_Simplification_Scheme>
of the Cultural Revolution seemed on it's face to be an attempt to prune
back out-of-control language bushiness? When seen as an attempt at
social control it seems unconscionable but to curb verbosity and
/circumloquacity/, well motivated?
Trump's verbal tic of fixating on a word (e.g. "Gro-cer-ies" or
"Ta-r-iff") seems to be his nod to the under-literate who feel the same
way when THEY learn a new word?
I'm guiltier than most for (tyring to) add context to the context to the
context of words I don't fully trust to be exactly what I meant:
"/I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I
think what you heard was not what I meant" ?/
glen wrote:
> [⛧] It also results in a bit of a verbosity explosion, where every
> polysemic word or phrase needs more phrases to disambiguate it, each
> of those phrases then needing more phrases, etc.
I do believe it is possible to recognize when someone is trying to
communicate vs when someone is trying to obfuscate? I think our
discussions here of late about LLMs touches on this. Can I tell if an
LLM is "trying" to help me research/understand/think-about something" or
is it just trying to "tell me what I want to hear"? There are probably
terms-of-art (a term of art in itself?) for this distinction/spectrum?
While my abstraction of LLMs as a manifold of sub-manifolds with linear
narratives tracing various sub-manifolds might be misbegotten, it is
where my head goes often. The question (for me) is whether there are
families of sub-manifold (said family a manifold in it's own right?)
which can be labeled as "righteous" or "good faith" vs "duplicitous" or
"bad faith".... but to Glen's point, nothing is context free? A
narrative arc on a story-world manifold within a story-multiverse (e.g.
DC vs Marvel, vs ???) represents nested context?
When I worked with lawyers I felt I could tell the difference in the
legalese I occasionally read if they were trying to be clear or
obfuscating... but not sure I could write an algorithm to detect which?
FWIW in the spirit of linguistic hair splitting, one of my favorite
lines from a fantasy short-story was "the glint of the spark of the
light of the fire in the eye of the dragon". Though I'm not sure quite
why... maybe just a verbosity fetish?
mumble,
- Steve
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