[ExI] addiction

[Mike Dougherty]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2022, 6:27 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Mike I did not give up because I was right (did I have willpower?).  See
> my latest post of a few minutes ago.  If you cannot objectively measure
> willpower or any other concept, you cannot do valid studies.
>
> Many people would be happy with 'gut feelings' as a definition of
> 'intuition'.  Do you see how that fails in every aspect to give us a way to
> measure it?  bill w
>

Yeah.  I see that words fail in almost every attempt I make to convey an
idea.  I now believe words are not finite and tangible mental objects...
they're clouds of probabilty that we agree (more or less) have good-enough
central tendency to be usable to direct each other's attention. In a social
context "conversational" use of words does not require the type of
definition you are trying to apply.  I suspect even if you did pursue this
five nines precision of "willpower" we could as easily reject your starting
premise and that completely undermines the expressive power of your model.
I am often challenged for how I react to meaning I have for words that
weren't actually being sent/intended by the speaker. Ex: people say "mad"
when they mean "angry" - do I respond to what is said or what was meant?
tl;dr "words are hard"

And this oldie but goodie:
https://i.redd.it/f9vdbp4pl3721.jpg

>
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