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RE: The power of ambiguity and of ambiguity minimization in communication
Ambiguity has ended a lot of marriage on a funny note though, but I think it's been great especially I've seen them used by bodies like CIA to communicate beyond the ordinary or simple language, where an outsider may not even understand the code really.
Like you said, it's great for using smaller sentences to hold more meaning
That is fine for the CIA but how does it benefit ordinary people in daily life? I'm aware also some industries deliberately use ambiguity to confuse people who are trying to learn a certain topic. We see it in math, we see it in programming, we see certain fields of study which have a lot of buzzwords which have pretty much similar meanings or synonyms in another field of study.
Ambiguity is used to lock people out but it is also used for "inside jokes". It's not always bad but when it's time to have a formal discussion or to make formal rules then it is bad. If we cannot agree on what words in a sentence mean and do not agree on how to interpret that sentence then how can we agree or disagree with it? In rulemaking scenarios this can be disastrous.
If you're communicating for example that you want to update a community standard or rule but none of us can interpret you exactly then this could potentially give you totalitarian like power to create a tome of hard to decipher yet cleverly written ambiguous rules which you can reinterpret over and over to stay in power.
I tend to agree too, in totality sir, however I think public use to lock people out is bad yes, but sometimes it may be good for security, I mean my opinion, I do however embracevthe jokes aspect of it.
Ambiguity minimization makes sense when you are following a principle of computational kindness. That is if Alice would like to reduce the computational burden on Bob then she can reduce or minimize the ambiguity of her sentence. This is because in order for Bob to interpret an ambiguous sentence Bob must in essence sort all possible interpretations of that sentence from most likely interpretation to least likely interpretation, and before he can even sort he must first search in order to find all possible or at least plausible interpretations.
This is very computationally expensive for Bob but very cheap for Alice. Alice knows exactly what she means but Bob has no clue what Alice REALLY means.