One of my issues with LessWrong is the naming system. There’s by now quite a bit of terminology to understand; the LessWrong wiki seems useful here. But there’s no strong process from what I understand. People suggest names in their posts, these either become popular or don’t. There’s rarely any refactoring.
One of the issues with this in both an academic and LW context is that changing the name of something in a single source of truth codebase is much cheaper than changing the name of something in a community. The more popular an idea, the more cost goes up to change the name. Similarly, when you’re working with a single organization, creating a process that everyone follows is relatively cheap compared to a loosely tied together community with various blogs, individuals, and organizations coining their own terms.
Yep, I’d definitely agree that it’s harder. That said, this doesn’t mean that it’s not high-ev to improve on. One outcome could be that we should be more careful introducing names, as it is difficult to change them. Another would be to work to attempt to have formal ways of changing them after, even though it is difficult (It would be worthwhile in some cases, I assume).
In a recent thread about changing the name of Solstice to Solstice Advent, Oliver Habryka estimated it would cost at least $100,000 to make that happen. This seems like a reasonable estimate to me, and a good lower bound for how much value you could get from a name change to make it worth it
The idea of lowering this cost is quite appealing, but I’m not sure how to make a significant difference there.
I think it’s also worth thinking about the counterfactual cost of discouraging naming things.
One of the issues with this in both an academic and LW context is that changing the name of something in a single source of truth codebase is much cheaper than changing the name of something in a community. The more popular an idea, the more cost goes up to change the name. Similarly, when you’re working with a single organization, creating a process that everyone follows is relatively cheap compared to a loosely tied together community with various blogs, individuals, and organizations coining their own terms.
Yep, I’d definitely agree that it’s harder. That said, this doesn’t mean that it’s not high-ev to improve on. One outcome could be that we should be more careful introducing names, as it is difficult to change them. Another would be to work to attempt to have formal ways of changing them after, even though it is difficult (It would be worthwhile in some cases, I assume).
In a recent thread about changing the name of Solstice to Solstice Advent, Oliver Habryka estimated it would cost at least $100,000 to make that happen. This seems like a reasonable estimate to me, and a good lower bound for how much value you could get from a name change to make it worth it
The idea of lowering this cost is quite appealing, but I’m not sure how to make a significant difference there.
I think it’s also worth thinking about the counterfactual cost of discouraging naming things.
As an example, here’s a post with an important concept that hasn’t really spread because it doesn’t have a snappy name: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-social-metacognition-three-levels-of-meta-are-not