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I think you're conflating the two. Take, for example, the word "election". If the word "election" can mean both an election, and a not-election – of the sort ex

I think you're conflating the two. Take, for example, the word "election". If the word "election" can mean both an election, and a not-election – of the sort experienced in the USSR – then how do you describe the election you want to have? The word is meaningless, and thus it throws the very concept into doubt. This has nothing to do with Sapir-Whorf, which isn't really a strong proposition anyway. You have a concept, but when I use the word that describes the concept, I could be describing the concept or the not-concept.

pizza 9y ago
Yeah, this makes sense to me according to my experience of people's perceptions of loaded words. When a word may seem like it has e.g. five or six meanings - it conveys more bits of information - plausible deniability -> capacity to retroactively compress the word's meaning - people 'analyze'/recognize simpler words (only one meaning, i.e. GitHub) differently than they do loaded words (multiple meanings, i.e. dream) - people take their own personal uncertainty (over which meaning is the correct one that they need to interpret the word as) as a sign that if they share their recognition, it's more likely to make them look like a fool in public Observers realize that the original speaker's (e.g. Trump or Stalin) plausible deniability is a kind of insurance policy against audience members calling them out
- mannykannot 9y ago
  I am not sure that plausible deniability is much of an issue, because the people making such statements don't seem to care if they are caught in a contradiction or lie. Why don't they care? Because their supporters, and those who are close to being their supporters, don't care. It's not so much about deceiving the skeptics (who are not likely to be deceived anyway) as it is about giving those who incline to one's views an excuse for believing that their instincts were unquestionably right, and to get them worked up about it (this applies to Trump et. al. rather than Stalin, because the latter had other means of getting his way, and whatever you think of Trump, he is no Stalin.)
  - pizza 9y ago
    I agree, but what I'm saying is that perceived plausible deniability makes speaking out against quadruple-entendres seem more futile, as any supporter can say it meant something else
saulrh 9y ago
I find it more useful to think in terms of information theory and the related results in machine learning, signals, and computational theory. For example, I claim that 'linguistic relativity', AKA the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is an informal intuitive restatement of some of the consequences of Kolmogorov complexity and other parts of algorithmic information theory and machine learning. Put simply: Different languages are differently efficient for expressing and therefore working with a given piece of information. The hypothesis space you explore is defined by the language you use to express hypotheses and a hypothesis space that is smoother and cleaner in the region of the "true" or "target" function will give more correct results more easily. In this case, confusing the meaning of the words that describe hypotheses near a particular target concept can force the use of a language that lacks terms that efficiently represent that concept, which dramatically hinders computations involving that concept. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12110997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12110997
mannykannot 9y ago
The point I was trying to make is that 'election' means election and not non-election, and the problem is when people don't care about the ab-usage. My understanding (admittedly very second-hand) is that this sort of nonsense in the USSR was the subject of widely-circulated jokes, indicating that those who cared about the difference found a way to express themselves, and to create a shared culture of cryptic dissent (less cryptic dissent was suppressed with more than the abuse of language.)

pizza 9y ago

Yeah, this makes sense to me according to my experience of people's perceptions of loaded words. When a word may seem like it has e.g. five or six meanings - it conveys more bits of information - plausible deniability -> capacity to retroactively compress the word's meaning - people 'analyze'/recognize simpler words (only one meaning, i.e. GitHub) differently than they do loaded words (multiple meanings, i.e. dream) - people take their own personal uncertainty (over which meaning is the correct one that they need to interpret the word as) as a sign that if they share their recognition, it's more likely to make them look like a fool in public Observers realize that the original speaker's (e.g. Trump or Stalin) plausible deniability is a kind of insurance policy against audience members calling them out

mannykannot 9y ago
I am not sure that plausible deniability is much of an issue, because the people making such statements don't seem to care if they are caught in a contradiction or lie. Why don't they care? Because their supporters, and those who are close to being their supporters, don't care. It's not so much about deceiving the skeptics (who are not likely to be deceived anyway) as it is about giving those who incline to one's views an excuse for believing that their instincts were unquestionably right, and to get them worked up about it (this applies to Trump et. al. rather than Stalin, because the latter had other means of getting his way, and whatever you think of Trump, he is no Stalin.)
- pizza 9y ago
  I agree, but what I'm saying is that perceived plausible deniability makes speaking out against quadruple-entendres seem more futile, as any supporter can say it meant something else

saulrh 9y ago

I find it more useful to think in terms of information theory and the related results in machine learning, signals, and computational theory. For example, I claim that 'linguistic relativity', AKA the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is an informal intuitive restatement of some of the consequences of Kolmogorov complexity and other parts of algorithmic information theory and machine learning. Put simply: Different languages are differently efficient for expressing and therefore working with a given piece of information. The hypothesis space you explore is defined by the language you use to express hypotheses and a hypothesis space that is smoother and cleaner in the region of the "true" or "target" function will give more correct results more easily. In this case, confusing the meaning of the words that describe hypotheses near a particular target concept can force the use of a language that lacks terms that efficiently represent that concept, which dramatically hinders computations involving that concept. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12110997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12110997

mannykannot 9y ago

The point I was trying to make is that 'election' means election and not non-election, and the problem is when people don't care about the ab-usage. My understanding (admittedly very second-hand) is that this sort of nonsense in the USSR was the subject of widely-circulated jokes, indicating that those who cared about the difference found a way to express themselves, and to create a shared culture of cryptic dissent (less cryptic dissent was suppressed with more than the abuse of language.)