🤔 useless words

some words are "useless", in that, they fail at their purpose
- a word's purpose is to clearly communicate a concept
- some words have so many different common meanings or ambiguous meanings that users end up "speaking past each other"
a large part of philosophy is semantics (clearly defining words)
- and in the theoretical extreme, is impossible, because it's "words all the way down"
  - but in practise, it does work
  - (imagine trying to find a way to communicate with aliens, but only over text)
    - the movie Arrival includes this challenge as part of its plot
      - (but they do make use of visual and physical referents)
        ex. they show a dog, they say "dog" and write "DOG"
        (but even aliens with dogs could still confuse the lesson for trying to teach "mammal", "pet", "husky"...)
some languages / cultures may be more prone to "term depreciation"
inventory of useless words:
- "is"
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- "love"
- "value"
- "good" and "bad"

2025-01-21

2023-08-16	🤔 trolley problems, infinities, morality	#ethics #economics #psychology
2023-02-18	🤔 biased perception of success and failure	#marketing #psychology #productivity
2024-11-28	📓 unbound
2023-03-18	🤔 language model limitations	#artificial-intelligence #research-summary #modeling
2021-06-16	🤔 religion - memetic desire	#ethics #psychology #history

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