English is a viciously ambiguous language.
1) The preceding is not a quote, really, it's just a sentence I made up and want to analyze.
2) I think the sentence has more than an element of truth to it. While also being self-referential. This can be amusing in poetry, I guess, but I'm getting pretty sick of it right now.
3) I do not know what to do about this. I do not know how we even manage to talk to each other at all some times (!). Shades of meaning. Tones of voice running all out of sync to spoken words in order to hint at things that are better left unsaid.
4) I mean it's not like ambiguity isn't useful. Consider this delightfully clever piece of rhetoric due to Eliezer that I bumbled into while trying to find this OpenThreadGuy thing. [Meta: Where's the FAQ on things like this? (edit: I mean the OpenThread. Damn ambiguity! Although a FAQ of FAQs could be handy too.) ]
Just because research shows that human beings are insane, does not mean that turning power over to a government composed of human beings will cause it to fix the problem.
5) Help.
Edit: PS: No. I haven't read the sequences yet. Yes, English is my native language, I just don't feel like it is.
! Edit: I think that we communicate by something cognitive that resembles Bayesian updating. Something effectively like a particle system. I have no evidence for this. When I want to be especially clear, I run a "simulation" in my head of someone else reading my writing, and think of all the places their particles might go wrong.
Edit: Braces added as an experiment below. At first I interspersed them above, but this way you can tell me if you understood me accurately the first time.
English is a viciously ambiguous language.
1) The preceding is not a quote, really, it's just a sentence I made up and want to analyze.
2) I think the sentence has more than an element of truth to it {understatement}. While also being self-referential {deliberate fragment; sometimes extra periods are helpful, I think}. This can be amusing in poetry, I guess, but I'm getting pretty sick of it right now. {garden variety ambiguous; "this" refers to self-referential and ambiguity itself, with intended emphasis on the latter, though here, I think the ambiguity was a subconscious resonance than any deliberate poetry}
3) I do not know what to do about this. {plain honest truth, but plenty of elliptical bits and a dangling this pointer left to the reader as an excercise} I do not know how we even manage to talk to each other at all some times {deliberate exaggeration, !}. Shades of meaning. {ellipsis} Tones of voice running all out of sync to spoken words in order to hint at things that are better left unsaid. {imprecise; deal with it.}
4) I mean it's not like ambiguity isn't useful. Consider this delightfully clever piece of rhetoric due to Eliezer that I bumbled into while trying to find this OpenThreadGuy thing. [Meta: Where's the FAQ on things like this? {accidentally ambiguous pronoun} (edit: I mean the OpenThread. Damn ambiguity! Although a FAQ of FAQs could be handy too.) ]
Just because research shows that human beings are insane, does not mean that turning power over to a government composed of human beings will cause it to fix the problem.
5) Help.
Edit^2: I notice that I never really analyzed the lead sentence. Briefly:
Edit^3: I shouldn't have to run a huge simulation just to speak or to listen! {motivated thinking} expletive!
I'm sure this has been discussed before. Thanks in advance.
What sort of help do you want?
Or, put a different way: how would you recognize something as helpful, if such help were provided?
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.