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”.
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”.