[matheist]

Agree. I think the approach in TFA is like trying to analyze, say, improv comedy via a context-free grammar for English. There might be something there, in the syntax, but it misses a huge amount of semantics and paralanguage.

[abernard1]

Yeah. While I'm sympathetic to the attempt to formalize the representation, there's a psychology to this that a lot of people in tech seem to miss when I see them dancing.

The reasoning goes: "if I understand and represent this choreography properly, I will be better at the activity of dance." Dancing, for them, is the end result of understanding a representation and then doing it.

But the psychological shift is "if I understand my emotions and body properly, I will be able to use the representation of dance to convey that." While dance obviously needs a backing vocabulary of basics and moves, great dancers accidentally come up with better dance moves because their body mechanics combined with the dance's structure, musicality, and emotion constrain what they do. They—and I'm going to use this word intentionally—literally think and communicate through dancing. To use your phrasing, the "semantic" meaning of the dance is their emotions: the actual activity of dance is simply the representational outlet for that.

When you're with a good dancer, your brain shuts off but you're still stuck within the aforementioned set of constraints. And that's when the magic happens. That's when you actually start speaking. That's when your improvised move is the only way you could have possibly said what you wanted to say.