From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Mon Nov 26 2001 - 22:47:28 MST
Loglan (/Lojban) has some constructs akin to this, IIRC.
Ever hear of the humble "po"?
Edward de Bono coined it as a prefix for, roughly, "the following is a provocative
hypothetical and I am marking it as such; discuss, but let's not waste time falling
into troll responses." The latter is actually pretty much implied in much of de Bono's
work; I have no way of knowing how many list members are familiar with his "six thinking
hats" and other work.
Examples:
Po cars should have square wheels. (lateral thinking)
Po any AI without an L-box should be terminated with extreme prejudice. (blunt proposal)
I used "po" for about a month on this list, and a few other places. I made the style more
marked, adding a reference number and ":" to each use.
"Po (1): ..."
Nobody played along. Hmm, let's see if I can pull off the "hats" thing.
(Putting on red hat:)
Sadly(?), Anders is right.
Early adopters can sound like they're living in a wacky world of their own, inches away
from utter word salad. Especially in a totally open forum, onlookers will include people
who become disaffected and uncomfortable.
(White hat:)
In order to get this sort of thing to work well, one needs to be in a secure corner
among cooperative, disciplined (or at least properly habituated) people who evolve
and maintain a good protocol. Gee, flamebait for cult accusations. Oh well.
(Black hat:)
For better or worse, the extropians@extropy.org of today is not such a place.
(Green hat:)
For the best results, weird jargon talkers need to mark their mental/behavioral spaces so that
they can come back to earth when not talking to their fellows, and do so with grace, agility and
equanimity. Ralph Merkle did a pretty fine job on Art Bell recently.
Mike
Andrew Clough wrote:
>
> Some recent posts on communication and miscommunication on this list have
> got me thinking about language. Have there been any discussions about new
> languages for use by posthumans who aren't advanced enough to just drop
> audio communication? Some who can hold more than 7+/- 2 things in short
> term memory without chunking could use some pretty complex grammatical
> structures to convey their equally complex thoughts. As Anders mentioned
> in his recent post, having more tenses or modifiers for different types of
> knowledge would also be good. So I could say that "MIT nu is in Cambridge"
> for something that appears certain, or "chocolate mo is better than
> vanilla" for something that is really subjective, or "Jessica nal is going
> out with Billy" for something that my best friend's cousin's former
> roommate heard in a bar. Over-engineering a language might lead to a lack
> of flexibility, but I'm sure posthumans with suitably enhanced brains could
> easily invent and learn new ones if they happened to make that mistake.
-- My moronic mnemonic for smart behavior: "DICKS" == diplomacy, integrity, courage, kindness, skepticism.
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