When people try to discuss philosophy, math, or science, especially pre-paradigmatic fields such as ai safety, they use a lot of metaphorical thinking to extend from familiar concepts to new concepts. It would be very helpful and people would stop talking past each other so much if they practiced being explicitly aware of these mental representations and directly shared them rather than pretending that something more rigorous is happening. This is part of Alfred Korzybski’s original rationality project, something he called ‘consciousness of abstraction.’
When people try to discuss philosophy, math, or science, especially pre-paradigmatic fields such as ai safety, they use a lot of metaphorical thinking to extend from familiar concepts to new concepts. It would be very helpful and people would stop talking past each other so much if they practiced being explicitly aware of these mental representations and directly shared them rather than pretending that something more rigorous is happening. This is part of Alfred Korzybski’s original rationality project, something he called ‘consciousness of abstraction.’