Crossposted from Twitter, might not engage much with comments on LW and I may or may not moderate replies
Hypothesis: English is harmed by conventions against making up new plausible-sounding words, as this contributes to conventions like pretending numbers are names (System 1 deliberation; Type II errors) and naming things after people (Bayesian reasoning, Cartesian products).
I used to think naming great concepts after people was a bad idea (eg, “frequency decomposition” is more informative & less scary than “Fourier transformation”). I now suspect that names are more-or-less the only socially accepted way to get new words for new technical concepts.
I’d love a way to talk about how a change in perspective feels Fourier-ish without the jargon ‘Fourier’, but given that current social conventions forbid adding ‘freqshift’ (or w/e) to our language, perhaps I’ll instead celebrate that we don’t call them “Type IV transformations”
tbc, I still think that naming great concepts after people is silly, but now I suspect that if the math & science communities halted that practice we’d be worse off, at least until it stopped being lame to invent new words for new concepts.
Funny story is “Unscented Kalman Filter”. The guy (Uhlmann) needed a technical term for the new Kalman Filter he had just invented, and it would be pretentious for he himself to call it an Uhlmann filter, so he looked around the room and saw an unscented deodorant on someone’s desk, and went with that. Source
Both “transistor” (transconductance and varistor) and “bit” (binary digit) come to mind as new technical words.
Quoting from Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory.
The new thing needed a new name, too. A notice was circulated to thirty-one people on the Bell Labs staff, executives as well as members of the solid-state team. “On the subject of a generic name to be applied to this class of devices,” the memo explained, “the committee is unable to make [a] unanimous recommendation.” So a ballot was attached with some possible names. [...] The recipients were asked to number, in order of preference, the possibilities:
Hypothesis: English is harmed by conventions against making up new plausible-sounding words, as this contributes to conventions like pretending numbers are names (System 1 deliberation; Type II errors) and naming things after people (Bayesian reasoning, Cartesian products).
I used to think that names like “System 1 deliberation” have to be bad. When writing the Living People policy for Wikidata I had to name two types of classes of privacy protection and wanted to avoid called them protection class I and protection class II. Looking back I think that was a mistake because people seem to misunderstand the terms in ways I didn’t expect.
Crossposted from Twitter, might not engage much with comments on LW and I may or may not moderate replies
Hypothesis: English is harmed by conventions against making up new plausible-sounding words, as this contributes to conventions like pretending numbers are names (System 1 deliberation; Type II errors) and naming things after people (Bayesian reasoning, Cartesian products).
I used to think naming great concepts after people was a bad idea (eg, “frequency decomposition” is more informative & less scary than “Fourier transformation”). I now suspect that names are more-or-less the only socially accepted way to get new words for new technical concepts.
I’d love a way to talk about how a change in perspective feels Fourier-ish without the jargon ‘Fourier’, but given that current social conventions forbid adding ‘freqshift’ (or w/e) to our language, perhaps I’ll instead celebrate that we don’t call them “Type IV transformations”
tbc, I still think that naming great concepts after people is silly, but now I suspect that if the math & science communities halted that practice we’d be worse off, at least until it stopped being lame to invent new words for new concepts.
Funny story is “Unscented Kalman Filter”. The guy (Uhlmann) needed a technical term for the new Kalman Filter he had just invented, and it would be pretentious for he himself to call it an Uhlmann filter, so he looked around the room and saw an unscented deodorant on someone’s desk, and went with that. Source
Hoping, I guess, that the name was bad enough that others would call it an Uhlmann Filter
Both “transistor” (transconductance and varistor) and “bit” (binary digit) come to mind as new technical words.
Quoting from Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory.
(Further examples of bad naming conventions: https://willcrichton.net/notes/naming-conventions-that-need-to-die/)
I used to think that names like “System 1 deliberation” have to be bad. When writing the Living People policy for Wikidata I had to name two types of classes of privacy protection and wanted to avoid called them protection class I and protection class II. Looking back I think that was a mistake because people seem to misunderstand the terms in ways I didn’t expect.