[extropy-chat] like definition

[spike]

I have posted before here on the notion that someday
we may develop AI that wants to learn about humans in
order to serve us better, etc.  While admitting this is
a rosy view, it puts great importance upon understanding
one of humanity's earliest and most important technologies,
that of spoken communications.  We need to be able to 
define our language if machines are ever to understand us.

At a gathering last night I had an insight while studying
the universal term "like".  I am not cutting up here,
I had a cool idea about like.  I had always assumed 
that the term "like" was just a filler, used to give 
the speaker more time to develop sentences, but by
studying like-sayers, I realized that in a sense, just
the opposite is true.  Follow me:

While like is *sometimes* used as a speech filler, I
found plenty of examples where the like-sayer was using
no other speech fillers.  Secondly, the like-sayer turned
it on and off, depending on the circumstances.  By listening
carefully, I realized that like has a real definition, even
if it is a very general one.  By listening to when a like-
sayer stops liking, it is when the sentence does not need
de-exactifying.  Even a hard core like-sayer does not
say: "force equals like mass times like acceleration."
But the same speaker, if describing the term "entropy"
might bury the listener in likes.

So perhaps like is a de-exactifyer, or serves the 
purpose of generalizing, perhaps fuzzifying statements. 
I listened to sentences with speech fillers, subtracted
the low-meaning phrases, and found that the sentences
stood fine without the fillers.  But if I subtracted
all the likes, the remaining sentences were often too 
exact or would be overstatements!  That led to the notion 
that like is not just a speech filler, but in a sense is the 
opposite of a filler.  Like takes the place of a number of 
more pedantic or clumsy filler phrases, thus actually were
speech concisifyers.  (Please pardon all the synthetic
words in this post.  I have not formally studied the field,
so I don't know the terminology.)  Like replaces these
terms and phrases:  figuratively, sort of, in a manner of 
speaking, rather more toward, if you will, not literally,
is somewhat analogous to, may be thought of as, is more 
toward, in a sense, and perhaps many that you can think 
of yourself (please suggest some).

If one were to attempt a formula that means like,
perhaps it would be an L factor where L = (0.9 + .2*rand()).

The technology of speech is about defining common concepts
and finding words for them.  More common or important
memes should have shorter words.  Like is a good short
word that expresses an important meme.

Please listen to your favorite like-sayer and see 
if this theory works for you, or suggest an alternative.

spike