Thank you.
I suspect that I may have missed some point, though. As far as I know, the primary language on this website is English, and the secondary language would be the language of mathematics (if I may call it a language); and so I don’t quite grasp the relevance of being competent enough in any language but English to the matter in hand.
On a side note, I think that for many linguistic perfectionists the main source of intimidation would be the very process of writing a comment or article (as opposed to being aware of the likelihood of having committed a number of grammatical or semantic mistakes). It is true for me personally. In writing a text in any language but Russian—my native language—I don’t feel confident enough to proceed without consulting various corpora and dictionaries. Then I end up with a comment composed almost entirely of expressions which I saw in dictionary samples and liked better than my own expressions. This is a rather strange experience in its own. Besides, after spending a time on a simple comment, thoughts begin to race in my head that maybe, perhaps, it wouldn't really be something that the other people couldn't conclude or know on their own: “you know that I know that you know that I know et cetera ad infinitum”, this sort of thing; and so the amount of information would be exactly zero. Why increase the entropy? :-)
Hi!
Delurking from Russia here. I’ve been reading LessWrong (and, consequently, OB, since it is often linked to on here) for about 3 months. I have to confess to falling in love with this website for the mind-stretching articles and comments in the threads. However, like many other lurkers have already said, I feel I cannot contribute anything due to lack of linguistic proficiency on my part and due to the fact that someone would already post something I would want to say. I decided to de-lurk and say ‘hi’ because you created the impression of talking to each lurker (including myself) personally. I couldn’t but overcome my usual reluctance to engage in commenting.
Thank you for such an excellent source of thoughts, by the way!
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