What exactly does "predictable" mean here?
You can infer the toki pona word (phrase) to match a meaning by joining words (standard base concepts) according to meaning-clusters of the base words and rules for adjective order. That is, making a toki pona word-phrase, you only need to understand the intended meaning of the whole phrase and the small set of base words.
Likewise, understanding a word-phrase to a good approximation depends only on the words in it and their arrangement. Understanding it exactly depends on context and conventions that build up around common terms.
If the phrase for "phone" means "speech tool", how do I tell between phone and loudspeaker or cough drop?
You can add more adjectives ("phone" could be "tool of distant speech" and "loudspeaker", "tool of strong speech"), or cope via context.
If I want to say "apricot" do I need to say "small soft orange when ripe nonfuzzy stone deciduous tree fruit"? Or do I just say something shorter like 'orange fruit' and hope the other guy guesses which kind of orange fruit I mean?
The latter is exactly what you do. If context leaves ambiguity, you add as many adjectives as needed, changing "fruit" to "orange fruit" to "small soft orange stone tree fruit".
How would I say "feldspar"? "Rock type #309"? How would I say "acetaminophen"?
Toki pona is less opportune when you need great precision like that. I see three solutions
If you call a multi-word phrase a word, we can more appositely claim that the formation of words and their associations to meanings, in toki pona, is very systematic and predictable. However many words it truly has, toki pona remains very easy to learn. The definition of "word" is flexible/arbitrary, but that final observation is most obviously consistent with the few-words view.
The ability to quickly recall what I studied for its application.
I thought that was obvious. Why do you ask? What am I missing?
You almost always have some information to concentrate your priors. Between mutually-helpful speakers, implicit with an answer to a question is that the answer gives all the information you have on the question that could benefit the questioner. E.g.
What will the closing price of Apple be at the end of the year?
"Almost certainly somewhere between $150 and $250."
positive statements like "Stay away from the wires" are more effective than negative statements, like "Don't touch the wires," because your brain basically ignores the negative part of it. "*mumble mumble* touch the wires? Don't mind if I do!"
That's what I was going for with
When reading or hearing a negation used in language, you must first process the positive form it contains to understand the entire statement. For example, to understand "the sky is not green", you must first understand "the sky is green", then negate it. Usually, this happens quickly and subconsciously, but it can harmfully slow down or weaken understanding by making you first consider a false idea.
I predict that it mostly gets worked around, by using only a few extra words.
"The sky is something other than blue" and "I will be somewhere else tomorrow" are both semantically-equivalent to the forbidden forms. Even "I deny that the sky is blue" is a positive-form negation of the object-level statement.
I suspect all such workarounds depend on one of a relatively small set of negation-enabling words, such as "other", "else", and "deny", as you demonstrate. Prohibiting more words should eventually block all workarounds, while making writing more annoying.
An excellent alternative. I was going for something usable without any tools.
Your criticisms are mostly correct. I wrote the post to justify my actions rather than tell robust truth. Posting it as-is on LessWrong was my mistake.
"Entangled closer with physical reality" was a poor choice of words. I meant something closer to "experience my surroundings in more detail".
Reducing what you need implies broadening what you tolerate, in the same sense that a system with fewer axioms has more models. Interpreting it as twisted greed-avoidance is novel and odd to me. If you get used to walking barefoot, then you can better handle situations where you lack shoes. On further reflection, that broadening is small compared to other methods (as learning a language).