{"id":188,"date":"2007-09-18T11:13:52","date_gmt":"2007-09-18T06:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/blogging\/rationality-and-the-english-language"},"modified":"2007-09-18T11:13:52","modified_gmt":"2007-09-18T06:13:52","slug":"rationality-and-the-english-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/blogging\/rationality-and-the-english-language","title":{"rendered":"Rationality and the English Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eliezer Yudkowsky over at Overcoming Bias<\/a> has a great article<\/a> on the difference between the meaning of some text and the impact it has. Excerpts:<\/p>\n

Some rationalists will try to analyze a misleading phrase, try to see if there might possibly be anything meaningful to it, try to construct a logical interpretation. They will be charitable, give the author the benefit of the doubt. Authors, on the other hand, are trained not to give themselves the benefit of the doubt. Whatever the audience thinks you said is what you said, whether you meant to say it or not; you can’t argue with the audience no matter how clever your justifications.<\/p>\n

A writer knows that readers will not stop for a minute to think. A fictional experience is a continuous stream of first impressions. A writer-rationalist pays attention to the experience words create. If you are evaluating the public rationality of a statement, and you analyze the words deliberatively, rephrasing propositions, trying out different meanings, searching for nuggets of truthiness, then you’re losing track of the first impression – what the audience sees, or rather feels.<\/p>\n

A novelist would notice the screaming wrongness of “The subjects were administered Progenitorivox.” What life is here for a reader to live? This sentence creates a distant feeling of authoritativeness, and that’s all – the only experience is the feeling of being told something reliable. A novelist would see nouns too abstract to show what actually happened – the postdoc with the bottle in his hand, trying to look stern; the student listening with a nervous grin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See full article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eliezer Yudkowsky over at Overcoming Bias has a great article on the difference between the meaning of some text and the impact it has. Excerpts: Some rationalists will try to analyze a misleading phrase, try to see if there might possibly be anything meaningful to it, try to construct a logical interpretation. They will be … Continue reading Rationality and the English Language<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-general","category-writing"],"yoast_head":"\nRationality and the English Language - Navin Kabra's Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/smritiweb.com\/navin\/blogging\/rationality-and-the-english-language\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rationality and the English Language - Navin Kabra's Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Eliezer Yudkowsky over at Overcoming Bias has a great article on the difference between the meaning of some text and the impact it has. 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