Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model

- I noticed one day that I was absent mindedly staring into the refrigerator. This has happened before of course, many times actually, but at the time I was trying to learn a bit about mindfulness and I thought this was an opportunity to try to decompose how I got there. Working my way backwards, I realized that I had experienced this little pang of a sensation that I 'chunked' as 'hunger'. But then, instead of responding to the sensation and all its subtlety, I responded to the word and went to the refrigerator. It then occurred to me that I probably do that a lot and don't even realize it. The subjective experience is full of these incredibly rich and nuanced sensations, and yet I compartmentalize them with my relatively coarse and dull vocabulary, and then act on that chunk.

I'd be curious if people that have a native tongue that is more expressive in a specific domain tends to cause them to operate differently within it.

- Second thought is that language, or specifically the ability for one mind to inject an idea into another without the second having to experience it AND the ability for the second mind to retain that information almost as if they have experienced it, is an evolutionary shortcut that our biological evolution has enabled. Essentially an evolution of evolution. (I then see technology as the third type of evolution, in which our language allows us to develop capabilities that exceed our biology, and ultimately AI will likely be the fourth, in which technology enables a mind that exceeds our own).

"So what you need to do, if you really want to broaden your horizons as a listener, is to get exposed to new things. Pick somebody. [...] Find somebody who you trust as a guide, and let them open your ears to these new experiences."

So what's the best way to find new guides?

Ref: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-ted-...

Not good!

Edit: he does link to it in the post. But if you read his post then read the CFAR "Eat Dirt" chapter it'll leave you unsettled.

Of course, if you have proper words to identify such things, it’s even better.

When I was really young, around 8, I didn't have books, TV, and the internet wasn't around. I spent much of my time thinking about computers because I saw them once and was fascinated by them. One of the thoughts I had was about multi-socket computers. How did the two CPUs communicate and run in the same system.

I eventually came up with the concept of race conditions, but I had no word for this concept, but I could see it in my mind's eye. I eventually thought of different ways to work around race conditions by making certain assumptions.

Nearly 2 decades later I was in my first job when a CPU bound problem showed up and I quickly slapped together some multithreaded code that worked the first time and was not only the first time I ever wrote multithreaded code, but was also my first real world programming project. I hand rolled a lockless queue. It was messy, it had some redundancies, but what I wrote was based on the concepts that I thought about when I was 8 years old.

It was at this point that I decided to look into my concerns about "data access ordering multithreading" and learned about the term "race conditions".

Of course learning this term opened up my mind, furthering my understanding of the concept both in communications and in more concrete concepts than the abstract blurs in my mind.

I actually deal with unknown unknowns all of the time. When I envision a problem in my head, I tend to focus on guarantees. I enumerate assumptions that my designs require, and if I can't prove to myself that I can guarantee that assumption, then it is now a known unknown.

I have a track record at my work of finding corner cases. I do this entirely by my "guarantee" approach. If I can't guarantee something, can I think of a proof of concept that could cause the assumption to be violated. This also works well for multi-threading. I don't need to worry about thinking about a problem in a serial fashion, I only have to think about "in order for this to work, what assumptions do I have to make and can I prove those assumptions."

It's quite often that I learn about new concepts by describing an assumption that I can't guarantee, and I will find an existing answer or solution.

I've reflected on my obsession with correctness. I've found my issue is my ADD. If I can't prove something can't happen, my mind will wander uncontrollably thinking of what might go wrong. In order to cull these distracting rabbit trail thoughts, I have to prove to myself that no issue can occur.

This approach works well enough that I've had large complex mulithreaded projects where the process deadlocked several times. When the problem got priority and my team lead asked me if I had any ideas, I told him "I read thought my code, it must be .Net framework". He thought I was joking at first. Three times in a row, non-reproducible deadlocks that rarely occurred, I diagnosed as "not my code", and 3 times I was correct.

Not only does this process seem to work well for me, but I've also used it with other's who were stuck pair programming a bug that they couldn't figure out. I can generally just start asking questions and eventually the programmers figure it out on their own.

I think if more people focused on guarantees, there would be fewer issues.

Where was I? Oh yeah. If you can't guarantee something and you can't figure out why, then there must exist an unknown. You don't need to know what this is in order to know it exists. Having a word for it helps tremendously, but it is not required in order to reason about it.