From mindlace@imeme.net Thu Oct 03 11:44:39 2002 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Thu, 03 Oct 2002 13:35:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from hydrogen.customer.frii.com ([216.17.138.219] helo=periodic.imeme.net) by digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.05) id 17xAxj-0003P4-00 for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Thu, 03 Oct 2002 11:44:39 -0700 Received: from admin2.baymountain.com (imeme.net) [12.155.116.77] by periodic.imeme.net with asmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 17xAuL-000Hf4-00; Thu, 03 Oct 2002 14:41:09 -0400 Message-ID: <3D9C8F7C.6090906@imeme.net> Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 14:42:04 -0400 From: emf User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: coi References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-archive-position: 3 X-Approved-By: jkominek@miranda.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: mindlace@imeme.net Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners Jordi Mas wrote: > >> My primary interest in lojban is as a "high" language (like liturgical >> latin) for a self-organized distributed community. >> My pragmatic initial goal is to translate the ideoms of the python >> programming language into lojban and make a substitute parser for >> python such that you can type lojban into it. >> These things are related, but I won't bore you with the torturous >> inference. > OK, I'll bite. Ug. Ok, the following is still hypercondensed but carries some flavour: My goal is to make software that subsumes the administrative functions of "management" or "governance" while retaining all the actual decision making authority on the human side. There are a bunch of things that can be done to make this work, but eventually the system needs to aquire the ability to just be "another person in the room" when decisions are made and so on and so forth. Lojban removes many of the nuances of traditional language that make it hard to parse lexically as well as semantically. I don't think, given the way humans can trivially state things in natural language that are very ambiguous, that increases in processor power will solve this problem. I have also come to the conclusion that humans anthropomorphise everything, and so if you're making machines to deal with people, you just have to "sketch them in" and people will fill in the rest. Will Wright talks about this when he discusses Simish. This is most trivial in ritualized contexts where the set of possible behaviours is somewhat restricted. In short, I believe that if decision making processes of a distributed community are slightly ritualized and spoken in lojban, machines can meaningfully participate in the process of governance/order. I do not know the precise mechanism by which I will effect this, and premature optimization is always a mistake. Therefore, I will translate an object oriented turing complete language, like python, into lojban, and then begin implementing the decision making tools in lojban/python, so that when I finally have a decent amount of the problem set addressed, the "speakability" will be "already there". I think I can get a decent amount of mileage without lojban, but I think lojban will be the tool that "bridges the gap" between machines and man and makes the interaction truly "seamless". ~mindlace