klank

I am reminded about the effort and patience it required to have long-form conversations on fidonet with people 2-3 states away due to the bbs hop delay. While the topics weren't necessarily particularly serious, the effort required to have any communication at all meant both sides spent time and effort.

I often think back to this early networked communication as stark contrast to the ease and rapidity we communicate today and how that same easy and rapidity has driven the quality into the ground.

In outdoor rock climbing smacking rocks is an integral part of ensuring the rock you're trusting your life with is in fact worth trusting your life with.

> any quarter could decide to payout investors through share buyback etc.

Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.

Analogies are always possible. I believe in the philosophical context though, understanding the meaning of something is not possible through analogy alone.

Reminds me of the quote:

“But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

No. I'm saying the areas you point out that you feel you could communicate, are ones in which you share a lived experience with the lion. You are both animals, you are both mammals. You get cold, hungry, thirsty, etc.

But lions, and us, are not just animals + mammals. Being a lion or a human means more. Ultimately, there is a uniquely human or lion element. Wittgenstein is saying we cannot communicate this.

I think the response is generally you are communicating with your cat as an animal, as a mammal. Yes, communication is possible because we too are mammals, animals, etc.

But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Something which I have no idea how we would communicate with.

> I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication?

I don't follow that line of reasoning. To me, in that example, you're still communicating with a human, who regardless of culture, or geographic location, still shares an immense amount of shared life experiences with you.

Or, they're not. For example, an intentionally extreme example, I bet we'd have a super hard time talking about homotopy type theory with a member of the amazon rain forest. Similarly, I'd bet they had their own abstract concepts that they would not be able to easily explain to us.

And even, assuming the existence of a Lion to English corpus, it would only give us Human word approximations. We experience how lossy that type of translation is already between Human->Human languages. Or sometimes between dialects within the same language.

Who knows, we don't really have good insight into how this information loss, or disparity grows. Is it linear? exponential? Presumably there is a threshold beyond which we simply have no ability to translate while retaining a meaningful amount of original meaning.

Would we know it when we tried to go over that threshold?

Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But it has always been regularly on my mind and it's easy for me to get on a roll. All this LLM stuff only kicked it all into overdrive.

That's fair. To me, the point of Wittgenstein's lion thought experiment though was not necessarily to say that _any_ communication would be impossible. But to understand what it truly meant to be a lion, not just what it meant to be an animal. But we have no shared lion experiences nor does a lion have human experiences. So would we be able to have a human to lion communication even if we could both speak human speech?

I think that's the core question being asked and that's the one I have a hard time seeing how it'd work.

I'm missing why that distinction matters given the thread of conversation.

Would you care to expound?

I was referencing Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we would not understand it." Wittgenstein believed (and I am strongly inclined to agree with him) that our ability to convey meaning through communication was intrinsically tied to (or, rather, sprang forth from) our physical, lived experiences.

Thus, to your point, assuming communication, because "there's nothing really special about speech", does that mean we would be able to understand a lion, if the lion could speak? Wittgenstein would say probably not. At least not initially and not until we had built shared lived experiences.

If a lion could speak, would we understand it?

Hehe, excellent point. Parenthood helped teach me the pleasure of the absence of stress.

> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.

From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.

Of course. But we already established that OP struck a nerve. OP themselves said that. And nobody was confused about why they struck a nerve with the carpenter.

But this isn't a conversation about whether or not it was possible to connect from what OP said to "loud noises". We all seem to agree on that. Specifically it's a question of whether OP was targeting the carpenters profession. I can't see how OP did that.

I'm kind of surprised I'm still here arguing this. But hey, it's a slow day and I guess it struck a nerve with me for some reason. Hope you're having a good day too!