I share jessicata’s feeling that the best set of concepts to work with may not be very sensitive to what’s easy to detect. [...] there doesn’t seem to be a general pattern of basing that refinement on the existence of convenient detectable features
Yeah, I might have been on the wrong track there. (Jessica’s comment is great! I need to study more!)
I am concerned that we are teetering on the brink of—if we have not already fallen into—exactly the sort of object-level political/ideological/personal argument that I was worried about
I think we’re a safe distance from the brink.
Words like “nefarious” and “terrorist” seem like a warning sign
“Nefarious” admittedly probably was a high-emotional-temperature warning sign (oops), but in this case, “I don’t negotiate with terrorists” is mostly functioning as the standard stock phrase to evoke the timeless-decision-theoretic “don’t be extortable” game-theory intuition, which I don’t think should count as a warning sign, because it would be harder to communicate if people had to avoid genuinely useful metaphors because they happened to use high-emotional-valence words.
Yeah, I might have been on the wrong track there. (Jessica’s comment is great! I need to study more!)
I think we’re a safe distance from the brink.
“Nefarious” admittedly probably was a high-emotional-temperature warning sign (oops), but in this case, “I don’t negotiate with terrorists” is mostly functioning as the standard stock phrase to evoke the timeless-decision-theoretic “don’t be extortable” game-theory intuition, which I don’t think should count as a warning sign, because it would be harder to communicate if people had to avoid genuinely useful metaphors because they happened to use high-emotional-valence words.