Alan Crowe has a thoughtful discussion of how we use words to avoid confronting our doubts: When we desire the psychological benefits of a false belief how may we obtain them? … use a clever, obfuscating phrase to push the doubts down into the subconscious. … Saying "I believe in God" muddles all the different religions together, dodging the question of what one actually believes. …
The first criterion there reminds me of Norbert Weiner's humble suggestion(1) that the amount of information carried by a message can be evaluated by finding the probability of that message's occurring in the space of all possible messages (pretty loosely defined), and then taking the negative logarithm of that quantity, which reminds me in the vaguest sense to the log-barrier function from ...econometrics? (I might really be stretching that reference there).
"The unexamined life is not worth living" is another beautiful one, alluring and painful to deconstruct.
A few slogan tests: can you see the slogan being chanted as a mantra? Can you see it being used as an answer to many different questions? Do you see it as a literally true statement rather than a simplification of vast amounts of complex ideas? And, very importantly: do you get angry or contrary if people attack the slogan itself?
The first criterion there reminds me of Norbert Weiner's humble suggestion(1) that the amount of information carried by a message can be evaluated by finding the probability of that message's occurring in the space of all possible messages (pretty loosely defined), and then taking the negative logarithm of that quantity, which reminds me in the vaguest sense to the log-barrier function from ...econometrics? (I might really be stretching that reference there).
(1)http://open-site.org/Scienc...
Stuart, those do seem like promising tests.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" is another beautiful one, alluring and painful to deconstruct.
A few slogan tests: can you see the slogan being chanted as a mantra? Can you see it being used as an answer to many different questions? Do you see it as a literally true statement rather than a simplification of vast amounts of complex ideas? And, very importantly: do you get angry or contrary if people attack the slogan itself?