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> Natural language is so ambiguous. As a former tech comms guy I will say: Natural language can be bent into arbitrary precision. Write something, then enter
by euroderf 11mo ago
> Natural language is so ambiguous.
As a former tech comms guy I will say:
Natural language can be bent into arbitrary precision. Write something, then enter a read-rewrite-reread loop as the devil's advocate (this is key) until it stops being ambiguous or having multiple conceivable interpretations.
Yes with English this process can be a pain in the butt, until you get the hang of it.
- stavros 11mo agoThe problem is that it's very hard to anticipate all possible edge cases. Programming languages force you to do a lot of that work up front, English doesn't. It's the difference between writing Javascript and writing Typescript, except orders of magnitude worse.
- thfuran 11mo agoYou’re never going to make a nontrivial statement in English that you couldn’t find two people who wouldn’t perfectly agree on its meaning. Or probably even a trivial one. Sure, at some point you can say “no, you’re clearly misinterpreting what I’ve said” or “you’re inferring something that wasn’t implied”, but English doesn’t have a formal spec or a reference implementation, so that’s kind of meaningless.
- didroe 11mo agoThe problem is, what's ambiguous or precise is subjective. Your devil's advocate needs to reflect all of the possible readers, and that isn't possible. There's a good reason we use jargon in professions, or more constrained and less ambiguous languages for maths/coding
- jgalt212 11mo agoLegalese? It can be both precise and ambiguous, depending on both its construction and the reader's aptitude and comprehension.
- n4pw01f 11mo agoThis process can be handled by a “turn server” Was a pain to set up, but you can score the context completion and then if the score is under 98% or something, “ask” clarifying questions of the requesting agent or person or system