Why you suck at ordinary conversation, teaching kids, and building AIs

Phenomenology. Most people suck at it. As a result, they don't understand other people, and they don't have good communication skills. When they are thinking about building machine intelligences, they get stuck because they don't have a good grasp on what their own thought process is. Such is the plight of man(kind).

Typical example : today I'm reading about how linguists make a distinction between the 'reference' of a sign and the 'denotation' of that sign. This is just sloppy language which reflects sloppy thinking, over a century.

Try this instead :

• 0. Any semantic expressions in empirical space ( signs, words ), are only dereferenceable in the context of a cognitive system ( mind ).
• 1. The first mind to consider, is the mind of the observer of the expression ( reader ), not the mind of the expression's expressor ( writer ).
• 2. The second mind to consider, is the mind of the writer.
• 3. The bare minimum requirement for a mature reader, therefore, is to be able to form cogent internal models of [ readers' mental models ], and [ writers' mental models ]. ( While this is sometimes referred to as 'empathy', that terms is loaded and may or may not be a good inclusion at this point. )

The PROBLEM : 

Many people engage in daily reading ( and listening ), and writing ( and speech ), therefore conversation in general, and even the business of constructing minds in children of various media ( both meat and machinery ), without paying due consideration to 0-1-2-3.

This is why you suck at ordinary conversation, teaching kids, and building AIs.

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