-The main problem with this is, in dicussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Arguing that the cultural evolution of English involved Shenanigans, doesn't itself make the Shenangians go away. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language.
+More importantly, however, in dicussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the cultural evolution of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system that we can reason about using our standard tools of probability and game theory, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
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+To be clear, when I say that the proposal doesn't work, I'm not even saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, _factually_ doesn't work! Let me explain.
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+Think of language as being like software that's been deployed to some network of computers that send messages to each other. The "meaning" of the messages isn't some [epiphenominal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies) extraphysical fact; it depends on the machines' behavior surrounding the sending and receiving of messages.
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+If the software is written so that each computer broadcasts a `{"object_type": "BLEGG"}` JSON message when it detects a [blue egg-shaped object](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) in front of its webcam, then we can can say that the `{"object_type": "BLEGG"}` message "means" that a blue egg-shaped object was seen; [the meaning "lives" in the systematic correspondence between the broadcasted message and the camera observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution).
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+Maybe this was a design mistake!