One problem I’ve noticed with common jargon is that jargon that starts off with a single, precise meaning often evolves to have a broader and less useful meaning. Since I tend to do a lot of arguing about social justice, the examples that occur to me are “gaslighting,” “intersectionality” and “demisexual.” It seems like providing context clues might help: none of those words have particularly obvious meanings, and “demisexual” in particular sounds like it means “somewhat sexually attracted to people” rather than “only sexually attracted to close friends.” But it seems to me that that’s not 100% of the problem. When jargon is used by a 101-level audience, their misunderstandings can build on each other to the point where even experts cannot use the term without being misunderstood.
It feels like for political concepts, they are more likely to drift because people have an incentive to make them shift. For instance, once it gets established that “gaslighting” is something bad, then people have an incentive to shift the definition of “gaslightning” so that it covers things-that-they-do-not-like. That way they can avoid the need to *actually* establish those things that bad: it’s already been established that gaslightning is bad, and it’s easier to shift an existing concept than it is to create an entirely new concept and establish why it is a bad thing. (It’s kind of a free riding on the work of the people who paid the initial cost of establishing the badness.) I would guess that less loaded terms would be less susceptible to it.
Huh, yeah. In retrospect this is obvious but putting it that clearly makes it easier to incorporate into broader plans or strategies.
Musing over Ozy’s three examples:
- gaslighting is a negative-affect term. Now that it’s pointed out, I expect affect-loaded terms (positive or negative) to be particularly vulnerable to people fitting onto things they like or don’t like.
- “intersectional” isn’t precisely affect-loaded, but it carves social reality into pieces that are then intended to be politicized, which makes it easy for second order distortions to happen. (I guess it’s valence-loaded insofar as it says “intersectionality is a good way to think about things”, but I think at least half of the issue is that it’s referring to a complicated subject and there are other vaguely-similar-seeming subjects one could reasonably have also named “intersectionality”)
- “demisexual” is less loaded, and I think is a more straightforward example of “a confusing term.”
My current vague takeaway is something like “when you’re forming plans that involve changing the social world via terminology, pause to reflect on the fact that your terminology is going to get distorted to benefit people.”
“intersectional” strikes me as an example of an intentionally confusing term, at least I’ve never been able to figure out a meaning beyond “a word people throw into arguments to make it a norm violation to notice that said arguments make no sense”.
Perhaps one thing you could do is just accept this drift is going to happen, and in the first usage of a jargon term in a document provide some kind of identifier which points to a clear definition somewhere. This would be a bit like citations and provide exactly the meaning the author intends. Punish people who do this without actually meaning it that way, or doing the citation and then using the word contrary to the cited definition.
If SJ people did this as standard and accepted that some people are old and going to use terms like “transexual” because that is what was standard when they learned it that would alleviate a lot of my issues with that particular corner of discourse.
Yeah—I think there’s multiple posts-worth of “how to think about jargon” (some of which I feel qualified to write, and some of which are more of “open problems”), and the problem of “how to avoid dilution” is important.
A useful first-step (when writing a blogpost attempting to coin a jargon term, or popularize it) might be to check “does the term I’m creating seem similar to another concept that people will want to use” (in particular, a concept they’ll want to use more often than the the one I’m pointing at), and then specifically highlight those similar concepts (perhaps giving them a name people can use so they don’t accidentally use mine)
There are definitely domains where this isn’t a problem at all- for example, geology terms like ‘tufa’ or ‘shale’ seem basically static on the relevant timescales. So it’s probably possible to completely solve the dilution problem, it at least some cases.
There are at least a few relevant structural differences between social justice and geology, but I’m not sure which ones are the most important. The main three advantages for geology’s stability that I can think of are A) Rocks are boring, and not emotionally charged by tribes and sex and so forth. People are rarely motivated to stretch definitions to cover their preferred cases B) There’s a structured process of learning and most of the jargon occurs within similarly structured professional environments, without a whole lot of self-educated geologists talking about rocks on the internet. C) Rocks are well-understood down to the level of thermodynamics, so every term of art can in principle be dissolved down to some precisely defined configuration of atoms, rather than bottoming out in human psychology.
Some of those are more hopeful for rationalist jargon than others, I guess.
Hypothesis: The problem with your proposal is that, as a practical matter, no one ever clicks on the damn links and reads the definition. It makes sense from the reader’s perspective—they assume they know what you mean, why would they bother reading a link? Even if you define the word in the post, many people will skim over the definition. I also think definitions are sort of ‘sticky’: for example, if someone wrote a post where ‘chair’ was defined to mean ‘table’, you would probably end up confused when they suggest putting food on the chair, even if they’d put in a sentence explaining that they mean a chair to be a flat thing with four legs.
I also dislike calls to punish people for things. It seems like figuring out how to use jargon well is hard, and I think rewarding people who get it right is going to be a better course.
Do you know if the issue is that the ‘reply’ button is not easy-to-read enough (or more generally, does this seem like a place where the UI should be different, or just a place where you were in a rush or whatever?)
I think I am used to commenting in places where the comments are a single line and not ranked by upvotes/downvotes, so if you want to respond to someone you go to the “reply” button in the original comment. It seems hard to come up with a UI that would direct me away from this default behavior (other than having my comments be misthreaded until I get it, I guess :) ).
One problem I’ve noticed with common jargon is that jargon that starts off with a single, precise meaning often evolves to have a broader and less useful meaning. Since I tend to do a lot of arguing about social justice, the examples that occur to me are “gaslighting,” “intersectionality” and “demisexual.” It seems like providing context clues might help: none of those words have particularly obvious meanings, and “demisexual” in particular sounds like it means “somewhat sexually attracted to people” rather than “only sexually attracted to close friends.” But it seems to me that that’s not 100% of the problem. When jargon is used by a 101-level audience, their misunderstandings can build on each other to the point where even experts cannot use the term without being misunderstood.
It feels like for political concepts, they are more likely to drift because people have an incentive to make them shift. For instance, once it gets established that “gaslighting” is something bad, then people have an incentive to shift the definition of “gaslightning” so that it covers things-that-they-do-not-like. That way they can avoid the need to *actually* establish those things that bad: it’s already been established that gaslightning is bad, and it’s easier to shift an existing concept than it is to create an entirely new concept and establish why it is a bad thing. (It’s kind of a free riding on the work of the people who paid the initial cost of establishing the badness.) I would guess that less loaded terms would be less susceptible to it.
Huh, yeah. In retrospect this is obvious but putting it that clearly makes it easier to incorporate into broader plans or strategies.
Musing over Ozy’s three examples:
- gaslighting is a negative-affect term. Now that it’s pointed out, I expect affect-loaded terms (positive or negative) to be particularly vulnerable to people fitting onto things they like or don’t like.
- “intersectional” isn’t precisely affect-loaded, but it carves social reality into pieces that are then intended to be politicized, which makes it easy for second order distortions to happen. (I guess it’s valence-loaded insofar as it says “intersectionality is a good way to think about things”, but I think at least half of the issue is that it’s referring to a complicated subject and there are other vaguely-similar-seeming subjects one could reasonably have also named “intersectionality”)
- “demisexual” is less loaded, and I think is a more straightforward example of “a confusing term.”
My current vague takeaway is something like “when you’re forming plans that involve changing the social world via terminology, pause to reflect on the fact that your terminology is going to get distorted to benefit people.”
“intersectional” strikes me as an example of an intentionally confusing term, at least I’ve never been able to figure out a meaning beyond “a word people throw into arguments to make it a norm violation to notice that said arguments make no sense”.
Perhaps one thing you could do is just accept this drift is going to happen, and in the first usage of a jargon term in a document provide some kind of identifier which points to a clear definition somewhere. This would be a bit like citations and provide exactly the meaning the author intends. Punish people who do this without actually meaning it that way, or doing the citation and then using the word contrary to the cited definition.
If SJ people did this as standard and accepted that some people are old and going to use terms like “transexual” because that is what was standard when they learned it that would alleviate a lot of my issues with that particular corner of discourse.
Um, the whole point of SJ usage is to win arguments through intimidation, thus this would be conterproductive.
Yeah—I think there’s multiple posts-worth of “how to think about jargon” (some of which I feel qualified to write, and some of which are more of “open problems”), and the problem of “how to avoid dilution” is important.
A useful first-step (when writing a blogpost attempting to coin a jargon term, or popularize it) might be to check “does the term I’m creating seem similar to another concept that people will want to use” (in particular, a concept they’ll want to use more often than the the one I’m pointing at), and then specifically highlight those similar concepts (perhaps giving them a name people can use so they don’t accidentally use mine)
There are definitely domains where this isn’t a problem at all- for example, geology terms like ‘tufa’ or ‘shale’ seem basically static on the relevant timescales. So it’s probably possible to completely solve the dilution problem, it at least some cases.
There are at least a few relevant structural differences between social justice and geology, but I’m not sure which ones are the most important. The main three advantages for geology’s stability that I can think of are A) Rocks are boring, and not emotionally charged by tribes and sex and so forth. People are rarely motivated to stretch definitions to cover their preferred cases B) There’s a structured process of learning and most of the jargon occurs within similarly structured professional environments, without a whole lot of self-educated geologists talking about rocks on the internet. C) Rocks are well-understood down to the level of thermodynamics, so every term of art can in principle be dissolved down to some precisely defined configuration of atoms, rather than bottoming out in human psychology.
Some of those are more hopeful for rationalist jargon than others, I guess.
Hypothesis: The problem with your proposal is that, as a practical matter, no one ever clicks on the damn links and reads the definition. It makes sense from the reader’s perspective—they assume they know what you mean, why would they bother reading a link? Even if you define the word in the post, many people will skim over the definition. I also think definitions are sort of ‘sticky’: for example, if someone wrote a post where ‘chair’ was defined to mean ‘table’, you would probably end up confused when they suggest putting food on the chair, even if they’d put in a sentence explaining that they mean a chair to be a flat thing with four legs.
I also dislike calls to punish people for things. It seems like figuring out how to use jargon well is hard, and I think rewarding people who get it right is going to be a better course.
Meta—is there a reason this isn’t a reply to Hypothesis? (it shows up earlier than his comment in my default-sorting)
Because I am confused about how to use the website, I think. :)
Coolio. :)
Do you know if the issue is that the ‘reply’ button is not easy-to-read enough (or more generally, does this seem like a place where the UI should be different, or just a place where you were in a rush or whatever?)
I think I am used to commenting in places where the comments are a single line and not ranked by upvotes/downvotes, so if you want to respond to someone you go to the “reply” button in the original comment. It seems hard to come up with a UI that would direct me away from this default behavior (other than having my comments be misthreaded until I get it, I guess :) ).
Gotcha.