What I’m talking about is not exactly the Conduit metaphor in which •language• is the idea-container during idea transit, but rather a related metaphor in which the mind is the idea-container for long-term storage (e.g. “Get it into your head,” “Tried to remember but I’d lost it,” “My brain is full,” etc etc).

It’s a handy way to talk, but it does mislead us.

(I’m sure somebody’s worked out the linguistics side of this, not to mention the psych + neuroscience sides, but that’s well beyond my knowledge.)

4/

@inthehands Craft your words carefully, to map out your ideas and thereby shape the thoughts of another and synchronized your perspectives.

Just playing with alternative metaphors. Really enjoyed the article you linked to!

I actually think of language as a serialization protocol. You take a complex structure and encode it using grammatical rules as a sequence. The listener then decodes (what we hope is) a similar structure using supposedly the same rules. The obvious source of communication failure is when the structural encoding rules, learned entirely by example, differ between two people. The less obvious one is when it come times to integrate that structure into the larger semantic model: The structure might integrate at the wrong place. And the most frustrating one is when the listener's mental model doesn't even have a similar enough shape for the new structure to be incorporated. This is when you find yourself staring at the person, trying to understand how the words they just uttered can possibly make sense (metaphor!) to them. Often in the last case, you don't even know how to ask clarifying questions (another metaphor!) to make any progress.

I built an NLU engine that worked on these principles, back before LLMs existed, and it could actually connect the dots (metaphor!) between things you said to it, integrating the information so that it could then answer questions that bridged (metaphor!) across them. If only I had had billions of dollars in investment, instead of being some autistic guy that nobody took seriously, we might have had language models today that didn't hallucinate.