From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Mar 29 2001 - 16:07:00 MST
Compare:
"Jimmy started it when he said that gender-neutral writing shouldn't be
difficult or confusing, and that, though it might represent a problem for
inexperienced writers, he was pretty sure that it wasn't that hard to
handle."
And:
"Jimmy started it when it said that gender-neutral writing shouldn't be
difficult or confusing, and that, though it might represent a problem for
inexperienced writers, it was pretty sure that it wasn't that hard to
handle."
Now, if Jimmy were an AI, I could rewrite that by saying...
"Jimmy started it when Jimmy said that gender-neutral writing shouldn't be
difficult or confusing, and that, though it might represent a problem for
inexperienced writers, Jimmy was pretty sure that it wasn't that hard to
handle."
Except that now it looks like Jimmy is talking about Jimmy in the third
person, which isn't the case. We expect an pronoun to be used here;
otherwise there's an actual semantic change.
I could rewrite it like this:
"Jimmy started this whole thing off by saying that gender-neutral writing
shouldn't be difficult or confusing, and that, though there might be a
problem for inexperienced writers, it was pretty sure the problem could be
handled."
I'm sure this is what Jimmy, John, and Peter have in mind. And in fact,
that's what I tried doing back when in CaTAI 1.0 when this whole thing
started. The problem is twofold. First, it started to grate on my
nerves. I'm not sure you realize how annoying it is to have to avoid
using the word "it" in every sentence for fear it might be confusing; and
then, even when you do get to use "it" as an AI pronoun, the readers still
need to stop and think for a few seconds to decide whether "it" is being
used as an anaphor or a pronoun. I know that ve, ver, and vis may throw
readers off their stride... but it's a problem that gets better with time,
not worse. Once the reader gets used to it, there's no longer any
ambiguity.
Second, the longer a sentence is, the harder it is to rewrite. Breaking
up the sentence into multiple subsentences does not help significantly;
sure, you can use proper names or "the AI" more often if you start a new
sentence each time, but sooner or later it still starts to grate on the
nerves. It's the structure of references that matter. Not how many
sentences are used to implement that structure. The number of anaphoric
references remains constant, and if you try to name your variables each
time, the reader has to take just a little bit more time on each occasion
to realize that when you say "the problem" you are referring to the
previous problem, and not a new problem. An anaphor or pronoun is a word
that does that automatically.
I can no longer recall which specific paragraph it was that finally broke
me, but there was one. I successfully rewrote it, but at the cost of
making the paragraph too hard to read. So I broke down and used "ve".
The problem can be solved, but not without actually affecting the mental
imagery built up by the reader. Comprehension suffers. That's not a
price I'm willing to pay. I'd rather use grammatically straightforward
sentences with a "off" words than use grammatically "off" sentences with
conventional words.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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