I really don’t like the term jumbled as some people would likely object much more to being labelled as jumbled than as a contextualiser. The rest of this comment makes some good points, but sometimes less is more. I do want to edit this article, but I think I’ll mostly engage with Zack’s points and reread the article.
The OP comment was optimizing for “improving my understanding of the domain” more than direct advice of how to change the post.
(I’m not necessarily expecting the points and confusions there to resolve within the next month – it’s possible that you’ll reflect on it a bit and then figure out a slightly different orientation to the post, that distills the various concepts into a new form. Another possible outcome is that you leave the post as-is for now, and then in another year or two after mulling things over someone writers a new post doing a somewhat different thing, that becomes the new referent. Or, it might just turn out that my current epistemic state wasn’t that useful. Or other things)
Re: “Jumbled”
I think there’s sort of a two-step process that goes into naming things (ironically, or appropriate, which map directly onto the post) – first figuring out “okay what actually is this phenomenon, and what name most accurately describes it?” and then, separately, “okay, what sort of names are going to reliably going to make people angry and distract from the original topic if you apply it to people, and are there alternative names that cleave closely to the truth?”
(my process for generating names in that risk offending is something like a multi-step Babble and Prune, where I generate names aiming to satisfice on “a good explanation of the true phenomenon” and “not likely to be unnecessarily distracting”, until I have a name that satisfies both criteria)
I haven’t tried generating a maximally good name for Jumbled yet since I wasn’t sure this was even carving reality the right way.
But, like, it’s not an accident that ‘jumbled’ is more likely to offend people than ‘contextualized’. I do, in fact, think worse of people who have jumbled communication than deliberately contextualized communication. (compare “Virtue Signalling”, which is an important term but is basically an insult except among people who have some kind of principled understanding that “Yup, it turns out some of the things I do had unflattering motives and I’ve come to endorse that, or endorse my current [low] degree of prioritizing changing it.”)
I am a conversation consequentialist and think it’s best to find ways of politely pointing out unflattering things about people in ways that don’t make them defensive. But, it might be that the correct carving of reality includes some unflattering descriptions of people and maybe the best you can do is minimize distraction-damage.
I really don’t like the term jumbled as some people would likely object much more to being labelled as jumbled than as a contextualiser. The rest of this comment makes some good points, but sometimes less is more. I do want to edit this article, but I think I’ll mostly engage with Zack’s points and reread the article.
The OP comment was optimizing for “improving my understanding of the domain” more than direct advice of how to change the post.
(I’m not necessarily expecting the points and confusions there to resolve within the next month – it’s possible that you’ll reflect on it a bit and then figure out a slightly different orientation to the post, that distills the various concepts into a new form. Another possible outcome is that you leave the post as-is for now, and then in another year or two after mulling things over someone writers a new post doing a somewhat different thing, that becomes the new referent. Or, it might just turn out that my current epistemic state wasn’t that useful. Or other things)
Re: “Jumbled”
I think there’s sort of a two-step process that goes into naming things (ironically, or appropriate, which map directly onto the post) – first figuring out “okay what actually is this phenomenon, and what name most accurately describes it?” and then, separately, “okay, what sort of names are going to reliably going to make people angry and distract from the original topic if you apply it to people, and are there alternative names that cleave closely to the truth?”
(my process for generating names in that risk offending is something like a multi-step Babble and Prune, where I generate names aiming to satisfice on “a good explanation of the true phenomenon” and “not likely to be unnecessarily distracting”, until I have a name that satisfies both criteria)
I haven’t tried generating a maximally good name for Jumbled yet since I wasn’t sure this was even carving reality the right way.
But, like, it’s not an accident that ‘jumbled’ is more likely to offend people than ‘contextualized’. I do, in fact, think worse of people who have jumbled communication than deliberately contextualized communication. (compare “Virtue Signalling”, which is an important term but is basically an insult except among people who have some kind of principled understanding that “Yup, it turns out some of the things I do had unflattering motives and I’ve come to endorse that, or endorse my current [low] degree of prioritizing changing it.”)
I am a conversation consequentialist and think it’s best to find ways of politely pointing out unflattering things about people in ways that don’t make them defensive. But, it might be that the correct carving of reality includes some unflattering descriptions of people and maybe the best you can do is minimize distraction-damage.