I tried to reason through the riddles, before reading the rest and I made the same mistake as the jester did. It is really obvious in hindsight; I thought about this concept earlier and I really thought I had understood it. Did not expect to make this mistake at all, damn.
I even invented some examples on my own, like in the programming language Python a statement like print(“Hello, World!”) is an instruction to print “Hello, World!” on the screen, but “print(\”Hello, World!\”)” is merely a string, that represents the first string, it’s completely inert. (in an interactive environment it would display “print(“Hello, World!”)” on the screen, but still not “Hello, World!”).
Edit: I think I understand what went wrong with my reasoning. Usually, distinguishing a statement from a representation of a statement is not difficult. To get a statement from a representation of a statement you must interpret the representation once. And this is rather easy, for example, when I’m reading these essays, I am well aware that the universe doesn’t just place these statements of truth into my mind, but instead, I’m reading what Eliezer wrote down and I must interpret it. It is always “Eliezer writes ‘X’”, and not just “X”.
But in this example, there were 2 different levels of representation. To get to the jester and the king I need to interpret the words once. But to get to the inscriptions, I must interpret the words twice. This is what went wrong. If I correctly understood the root of my mistake, then, if I was in jester’s shoes, I wouldn’t have made this mistake. Therefore, I think, my mistake is not the same as jester’s. Simultaneous interpretation of different levels of representation is something to be vigilant about.
C’est ne pas un pipe. This is not a picture of a pipe either, this is a picture of a picture of a pipe. Or is this a piece text, saying “this is a picture of a picture of a pipe”? Or is this a piece of text, saying “This is a piece of text, saying \”this is a picture… \”″… :-)
I tried to reason through the riddles, before reading the rest and I made the same mistake as the jester did. It is really obvious in hindsight; I thought about this concept earlier and I really thought I had understood it. Did not expect to make this mistake at all, damn.
I even invented some examples on my own, like in the programming language Python a statement like print(“Hello, World!”) is an instruction to print “Hello, World!” on the screen, but “print(\”Hello, World!\”)” is merely a string, that represents the first string, it’s completely inert. (in an interactive environment it would display “print(“Hello, World!”)” on the screen, but still not “Hello, World!”).
Edit: I think I understand what went wrong with my reasoning. Usually, distinguishing a statement from a representation of a statement is not difficult. To get a statement from a representation of a statement you must interpret the representation once. And this is rather easy, for example, when I’m reading these essays, I am well aware that the universe doesn’t just place these statements of truth into my mind, but instead, I’m reading what Eliezer wrote down and I must interpret it. It is always “Eliezer writes ‘X’”, and not just “X”.
But in this example, there were 2 different levels of representation. To get to the jester and the king I need to interpret the words once. But to get to the inscriptions, I must interpret the words twice. This is what went wrong. If I correctly understood the root of my mistake, then, if I was in jester’s shoes, I wouldn’t have made this mistake. Therefore, I think, my mistake is not the same as jester’s. Simultaneous interpretation of different levels of representation is something to be vigilant about.
C’est ne pas un pipe. This is not a picture of a pipe either, this is a picture of a picture of a pipe. Or is this a piece text, saying “this is a picture of a picture of a pipe”? Or is this a piece of text, saying “This is a piece of text, saying \”this is a picture… \”″… :-)