What if the thing you’re trying to say is “I think the categorization scheme implied by your use of <word> is wrong, and will cause you to make wrong predictions?” This was the first thing that came to mind when I read your example about “chemicals”—I objected to my dad’s use of “chemicals” a few years ago, and it led to us discussing how that term conflates “has a scary-sounding name” with “has any evidence of being harmful at all”. My dad previously thought that willowbark extract might be healthier/less harmful than aspirin, despite them both having the same active ingredient (salicylic acid).
I agree that people don’t always want to debate about whether they’re making a category error; if someone says they want to avoid food with chemicals and I object to their categorization scheme and they say “I’m not interested in debating that, please respect my food preferences so we can finish this shopping trip”, then I should definitely drop the issue. But are your preferences that I shouldn’t even bring it up?
(I might be typical minding somewhat here; I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from various rationalist friends asking me to taboo certain words in discussion, which forces me to think more carefully and often causes me to notice distinctions that I was eliding. So I like the tool of striking words from my vocabulary!)
Re-reading your post, it looks like you’re mostly objecting to people feigning ignorance when a word they don’t like comes up, which I agree is an annoying thing to do. I’m curious about whether you also object to people saying things like:
“Incel is a horrible word; it conflates ‘men who are sad about not having any sex’ with ‘misogynistic and violent men’. I worry that its popularity will influence people to be more hostile towards any man who complains about romantic loneliness.”
“I dislike rationlists’ usage of ‘defect’, it’s seemed to have broadened to the point of meaning ‘any behavior I dislike or think is wrong’. I wish we’d all just agree to taboo that word and specify exactly what we’re objecting to instead.”
I think those examples are fine in many possible contexts. You can make a blog post with either instance as content just fine. My objection would come up if someone said “incel” and you said it was a horrible word instead of responding to their statement about incels—make that suggestion at another time. You could, if genuinely puzzled, ask if they mean incels as in lonely or incels as in violent misogynists, but I think context will tend to make that clear. And where it doesn’t they don’t in fact mean one of those things—they mean the conflation, and the word communicated that!
What if the thing you’re trying to say is “I think the categorization scheme implied by your use of <word> is wrong, and will cause you to make wrong predictions?” This was the first thing that came to mind when I read your example about “chemicals”—I objected to my dad’s use of “chemicals” a few years ago, and it led to us discussing how that term conflates “has a scary-sounding name” with “has any evidence of being harmful at all”. My dad previously thought that willowbark extract might be healthier/less harmful than aspirin, despite them both having the same active ingredient (salicylic acid).
I agree that people don’t always want to debate about whether they’re making a category error; if someone says they want to avoid food with chemicals and I object to their categorization scheme and they say “I’m not interested in debating that, please respect my food preferences so we can finish this shopping trip”, then I should definitely drop the issue. But are your preferences that I shouldn’t even bring it up?
(I might be typical minding somewhat here; I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from various rationalist friends asking me to taboo certain words in discussion, which forces me to think more carefully and often causes me to notice distinctions that I was eliding. So I like the tool of striking words from my vocabulary!)
Re-reading your post, it looks like you’re mostly objecting to people feigning ignorance when a word they don’t like comes up, which I agree is an annoying thing to do. I’m curious about whether you also object to people saying things like:
“Incel is a horrible word; it conflates ‘men who are sad about not having any sex’ with ‘misogynistic and violent men’. I worry that its popularity will influence people to be more hostile towards any man who complains about romantic loneliness.”
“I dislike rationlists’ usage of ‘defect’, it’s seemed to have broadened to the point of meaning ‘any behavior I dislike or think is wrong’. I wish we’d all just agree to taboo that word and specify exactly what we’re objecting to instead.”
I think those examples are fine in many possible contexts. You can make a blog post with either instance as content just fine. My objection would come up if someone said “incel” and you said it was a horrible word instead of responding to their statement about incels—make that suggestion at another time. You could, if genuinely puzzled, ask if they mean incels as in lonely or incels as in violent misogynists, but I think context will tend to make that clear. And where it doesn’t they don’t in fact mean one of those things—they mean the conflation, and the word communicated that!